It seemed like I was in a bad Hollywood romcom the other day, as rain poured from the sky and the guy I thought was the love of my life, sat across from me in my car and told me we were never actually going out. Two and a half months later, countless dates, and late-night drives only to learn that we had been what? Buddies? I was obviously devastated, and as much as I enjoyed sitting in my pyjamas, eating cake and watching reruns of Law & Order: SVU, I knew I needed to be proactive in my healing or face spiralling into a dark hole and always wondering where I had gone wrong.
There is nothing that films sell short like heartbreak, I mean, Elle Woods ( Legally Blonde, 2001) got her heart broken and applied to Harvard Law, yeah right. More realistically, heartbreak feels like an endless sea of grief that seems to go on forever. Even the smallest of things, like seeing his name on your car Bluetooth, can be a reminder of what you lost. There is no magical, cure-all way to fix a broken heart, however, these tips, courtesy of an Instagram poll can make the heartbreak feel a little less like the world is ending.
Grieve the Relationship
To use Elsa’s words, “Feel, don’t conceal.” Allow yourself to sit in your feelings, it’s okay to feel sad, angry, and even devastated. Travel through the stages of grief, from denial to anger, until you settle at home base in acceptance. It may take years or days, and running away from your feelings will only prolong the healing process. Allow yourself to feel sad about the love you lost, and grieve the former relationship.
Exercise!
Recovering from a breakup is a lot of work, and getting yourself out of bed and active is even more work. Although it may seem to all be in your head(or heart), a breakup can take a physical toll on our bodies too. Research has found that people who have recently gone through a breakup experience similar brain activity when shown pictures of their ex as they do when they are in physical pain. So those chest pains we are suffering through are not a figment of our imaginations. The best way to counteract the physical discomfort you may be feeling is to exercise. A morning stroll, lifting weights, or cardio, allows your brain to release endorphins and the other yummy hormones that reduce anxiety or depression. And what’s better than a revenge body on the gram?
Stay Away From Social Media
Trust me, your algorithm knows what is happening in your life- it always knows. When was the last time you didn’t tune into TikTok? Use this time to take a bit of a social media sabbatical, otherwise, your algorithm will be feeding you “Here’s how to know if he really loves you” videos or worst yet “How to know if a woman is in her feminine energy”, you’ll find yourself spiralling down the social media rabbit hole and unlike Alice, you won’t find a wonderland. Save yourself the pain and frustration, and don’t stalk their new partner- it’s never going to bring you the closure you desire.
Put on Some Tunes
Lucky for you and me, heartbreak is a universal pandemic that spans BC (Before Christ), and so there is a song about every sort of heartbreak imaginable. If you don’t know where to start, my girl Adele has you covered. Taylor Swift just released 1989 ( Taylor’s Version) which has a few heartbreak tear jerkers. If you’re keeping it local, what is better than the Amapiano beat of Abalele to still your broken heart? Music will always be there for us, allow it to soothe your wounds and remind you time and time again that you are not alone.
P.S. Stay away from the songs that remind you of them- we are moving onward not backwards.
Don’t Delete the Pictures – Yet
In all your anger and hurt you might block, delete, and try your best to forget, but don’t be so hasty. I tried it, only to find myself resaving the pictures. Healing is a journey, you don’t need to rush through anything. Whether it was a talking stage, a situationship, or even a long-term relationship, you allowed some form of love in and it did not turn out how you wanted. You don’t have to rip off the bandaid, slow and steady wins the race, and when you are ready, wipe the reminders of them from your life.
Lean On Your Community
My friend told me, “If you need to shout- shout at me, if you need to cry, cry to me.” And that’s what we all need through this process, a shoulder to lean on. As easy as it is to put yourself in isolation, talking about it helps, a hug goes a long way, and sharing a tub of ice cream with your mate sometimes feels better than eating it alone.
Dive Into Your Hobbies
Haven’t picked up your musical instrument since high school? Or baked bread since the pandemic ended? The less time you spend sitting and occupying your mind about the past relationship, the less it will get to you. Occupy your time with distractions, the more the merrier.
8. Pray It Away
This has been the most helpful tip for me, who better to heal my broken heart than the Creator of the universe? Even if you’re not religious, try talking to God about it.
9. Rebrand
As cliche as Hollywood movies have made it seem, “reinventing” yourself after a breakup can be empowering. According to psychology professor ReneeEngeln, “Making a radical change in your appearance can be a way of sending the message that you’re also making a radical change to your life- or that you’d like to.” Pushing yourself to do something radical like adopting a cat (Lupita Nyong’o you did that girl!)facing your fear of heights by going bungee jumping, or moving to another country allows you the freedom to do something without needing anyone’s opinion about it first. A drastic life change is an obvious and somewhat easy way to tell the world that you are ready to start over and reclaim your newly found freedom.
In the difficult moments, remind yourself that you will recover from this. Healing is not linear, and it is absolutely okay to do everything on this list and still feel devastated. For me, missing him comes and goes in waves, but it’s in those breathless painful moments that I remind myself that human resilience is something to be marveled at and that my heart will be whole once more. Most importantly, whatever you do, do not give up on yourself. We must still go on to believe that fairytales exist, and that love will come to stay next time around.
Ghanaian photographer Prince Gyasi likes to describe himself as an artistic vessel who uses imagery to express how he feels, and to share what he cares about. Primarily producing portraits and documentary photography, his work creates a collage of his city and the people who live in it. Playing with colour, shadow and composition, he has developed a style that beautifully captures planned and candid moments. With Instagram operating as an online gallery and portfolio for his work, he is able to curate the collective visual narrative for his photography, pushing against the fetishized and problematic representations of African cities by outside photographers.
Reflecting on his portraiture, Prince expressed in an interview with Sukeban Magazine that, “Portraits are part of human history…Portraits go way back; it helped people keep track of growth, express creativity and record memories. I believe portraits are important in our generation; it helps you communicate your emotions to others just by the way you look. As a photographer when you’re taking portraits you’ve got to be the mirror! People have to look at their portraits and say I feel dull today, I’m happy today, or I feel I’m really pretty or fine. It helps people grow and tackle their day to day issues with hope.”
His most recent project continues with the idea of instilling hope in people. Prince co-founded Boxed Kids with his partner Kuukua. This nonprofit project aims to help creative children in Jamestown with getting access to education. The name “Boxed Kids” refers to the fact that many of the children Prince came across in the small fishing district were in places and situations that are difficult to come out of without any assistance. Inspired by an event that his mother organised to help underprivileged children, his aim was to go further by helping them to develop their creative talents through education.
The initial plan was to launch a campaign that offered direct access to school, but with this own limited means this was not an option. Working within his own creative practice, Prince took photographs of the city, some of the children and the conditions in which some people live, and shared this on Instagram. Titled ‘Boxed Kids: Accra, Ghana’, this work received an increasing number of likes and shares, and this response encouraged him to set up a gofundme page for some of the children he has gotten to know, with the hope that this will assist with the initial goal.
The 21st century self-portrait by SA young artists
It is more than likely they are on the My Friend Ned database, have been at every hip party thrown in Jeppestown in the past 6 months, have produced a zine, and embrace that Norm-core 90s kid aesthetic (even thought they were still in nappies when spiral chockers, and Fila platforms hit the scene).
What defines this new aesthetic? There seems to be a move towards mixed media artistry, and a return to the body as a site of art. I would argue that these artists are exploring the intersection between photography, film, fashion, the body, music, and the role of technology in their daily lives. This transition back to the body as site could potentially be because Gen Z (born between 1995 and 2012) feel alienated by the elitist gallery spaces – the white cube perhaps cannot contain the lived reality of the tech-savvy teen and young adult.
These young artists are beginning to dismantle the ‘inaccessibility’ of art – taking it to the streets, to the ‘gram, and to your local watering hole.
Psychedelic filters, hip kicks, ironic selfies, no capital letters and techy-glitch collages. If you’ve stalked/follow these cooler than school young artists on Instagram this is an aesthetic you probably recognise. So, then you may ask, “what makes them artists?” and not just teens on Instagram, sharing their life.
It is the curated lifestyle, the carefully considered profile, the meticulous representation of self – that in many ways is the 21st century self-portrait. The three-square format of Instagram begins to become a canvas, a space to develop a narrative of aesthetic. The ‘story’ feature becomes a space where young artists delve into video art and perform their profile.
There is a possibility many of these artists would read this and think, “No, Rosa you don’t get it at all.” And maybe I don’t, since I just missed the cusp – born in 1994.
But what’s not to love about young people taking over the streets, redefining art, and using the platform of Instagram to express themselves and to subtly invoke the importance of the queer.femme.intersectional youth of tomorrow.
In a rapidly changing digitized world many careers have already seen a death in human occupation, such as quality control checkers in factories that have been replaced by machine generated algorithms. This bring about the question of what this digitization and the soon to be, if not already, redundant nature of certain career paths means for the arts. The art space has seen a sweep of digitization, and today there are algorithms creating art. Does this art reach a perfection and appeal that human made art cannot? And what does this mean for human artists? Will they be replaced by machines? What does this mean for art history? Are these new “innovations” changing the face of our history?
What has been coined the biggest artistic achievement of 2017 took place in an Art and Artificial Intelligence Lab (AAIL) on the main campus of Rutgers University, New Brunswick in New Jersey, USA. Professor Ahmed Elgammal put a new art writing algorithm through a computer on the 14th of February and witnessed how it created a number of images which left him awestruck. In response to his sighting the professor conducted a unique Turing test (developed by Alan Turing in1950 and tests a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human) in order to establish how his AI’s digital art ranked against museum-graded canvases (Chun 2017).
His test took the form of a randomized-controlled double-blind study in which participants were not able to differentiate between the computer’s art and that of human artists. His findings indicated that the computer-made images were in fact preferred by the participants, who referred to them as “aesthetically pleasing”. The paper based on his Turing test ignited an unnerving rumour within the art world – the AI was able to paint like Picasso (Chun 2017).
Following the Turing test Elgammal wanted to move the AI away from fabricating existing artworks and instead create new artworks entirely. The training involved feeding the algorithm over 80,000 digital images of Western paintings from the 15th to the 20th century. Utilizing his own image-generating system – Creative Adversarial Networks (CANs) the machine developed an aesthetic sense and learnt how to paint. The algorithm had one main purpose for Elgammal; to create art that had the appearance of being created by a human brush (Chun 2017).
Finally, a time came where the machine’s art met the bar of museum worthy imagery. The machine was creating abstract work however and strayed away from portraits and still lifes. Elgammal emphases the revolutionary nature of CAN in an interview with Artsy “If you feed the machine art history from the Renaissance to the present and ask it to generate something that fits into a style, the natural progression would be something along abstract aesthetic lines. Since the algorithm works by trying to deviate from style norms, it seems that it found the answer in more and more abstraction. That’s quite interesting, because that tells us that the algorithm successfully catches the progression in art history and chose to generate more abstract works as the solution. Abstraction is the natural progress in art history.” (Chun 2017)
What Elgammal is saying then is that the algorithm did that which many human artists would do in the same situation and produced the same sort of striking images that would catch the eye of curators and/or art critics. Creating art that fell under the classification of ‘Dutch Masters’ would simply not be exciting enough to a viewer and lead to habituation or fail to arouse a response to repeats of this stimulus. Plainly put, to make an artwork appealing to its consumers the visual stimuli of an artwork must have arousal potential in order to create a trigger – referred to by psychologists as a “hedonic response” (Chun 2017).
In his text, ‘The Clockwork Muse: The Predictability of Artistic Change’ (1990), psychologist Colin Martindale implies that the successful artist integrates novelty in their art. His hypothesis is that the increase in arousal potentiality neutralises the observer’s certain habituation retort. This escalation in creative novelty, nevertheless, needs to be decreased to hinder negative viewer response. Furthermore, he believed that “style breaks” are embraced by artists as a means of securing unpredictability and more attractiveness for their audience over an extended period of time. Could this concept be used to base an art algorithm on? Elgammal states “Among theories that try to explain progress in art, we find Martindale’s theory to be computationally feasible.” (Chun 2017)
In 1966 Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T) was founded by Bell’s engineers, Fred Waldhauer and Billy Klüver including artists Robert Whitman and Robert Rauschenberg. The pioneering Bell Labs project set the foundation that all computer-created art is based on today. The introduction of new computer technology meant that new machine-generated art followed soon after. This included: dot matrix printer art (1970s), video game art (2000s), 3D-printed art (2010s). The exceptionality of Elgammal’s computer images can be found in the happening of these images marking the first time in history that an A.I. has created work without any human assistance or interference (Chun 2017).
The Greek artist Panos Tsagaris’ ‘Untitled’ 2015 work – a mixed media canvas tinged with gold leaf – was displayed at Art Basel 2016 in Hong Kong and utilized as a sample image for Elgammal’s AAIL tests. The artist expresses that A.I. art is fascinating and regards the algorithm as a peer and not a disturbing threat. (Chun 2017)
“I’m curious to see how this project will progress as the technology develops further. How human-made paintings generated by a machine look is one thing; bringing the A.I. artist to the level where it can create a concept, a series of emotions upon which it will base the painting that it will create is a whole other level.” I want to see art that was generated in the mind and heart of the A.I. artist.” he expresses (Chun 2017).
Art critic and historian James Elkins is more sceptical, “This is annoying because [algorithms] are made by people who think that styles are what matter in art as opposed to social contexts, meaning, and expressive purpose. “One consequence of that narrow sense of what’s interesting is that it implies that a painting’s style is sufficient to make it a masterpiece.” He argues that “If human artists were to stop making art, so would the computers.” (Chun 2017)
Images generated by CAN
Michael Connor, the artistic director of Rhizome (a platform for digital art), agrees with Elkins. “This kind of algorithm art is like a counterfeit. It’s a weird copy of the human culture that the machine is learning about.” He does nonetheless feel that this is not necessarily bad: “Like the Roman statues, which are copies of the original Greek figures, even copies can develop an intrinsic value over time.” (Chun 2017)
Elgammal’s algorithm conforms to the same development process as the human artist – “In the beginning of their careers artists like Picasso and Cézanne imitated or followed the style of painters they were exposed to, either consciously or unconsciously. Then, at some point, they broke out of this phase of imitations and explored new things and new ideas. They went from traditional portraits to Cubism and Fauvism. This is exactly what we tried to implement into the machine-learning algorithm.” (Chun 2017)
Having had its first solo-machine show in October of last year, ‘Unhuman: Art in the Age of A.I.’ in Los Angles the algorithm is steadily rising traction as an emerging artist. Elgammal’s algorithm has ample room to grow its career as the coders at the Rutgers lab are able to increase the “arousal potential” of its artworks (Chun 2017).
What is at stake or what human artists should fear is this; the algorithms’ founder predicts that its art will only get better over time. “By digging deep into art history, we will be able to write code that pushes the algorithm to explore new elements of art. We will refine the formulations and emphasize the most important arousal-raising properties for aesthetics: novelty, surprisingness, complexity, and puzzlingness.” (Chun 2017)
Elgammal is of the opinion that this technology will lead to an infrastructure development that supports his “arousing” art. This will include galleries, online auctions, agents and authenticators fronted by another AAIL algorithm (Chun 2017).
Before getting rid of our artworks crafted by humans it is important to consider the following historical occurrence. In 1964 an engineer and computer pioneer at Bell Labs, Michael Noll conducted his own Turing test. His test was conducted by programming a General Dynamics microfilm plotter and an IMB computer to spit out an algorithmic creation of the Piet Mondrian’s ‘Composition with Lines’ (1917). His digital image was projected onto a cathode ray tube and recorded with a 35mm film camera. A duplicate of the print, ‘Computer Composition with Lines’ was shown to 100 people curated next to an image of the 1917 artwork by Mondrian (Chun 2017).
What was observed from all this was a striking trajectory. 59% of the subjects in the test took preference to the computer-generated image as opposed to the Mondrian original. What was even more remarkable is what took place a year later when Noll’s digital art was exhibited at Howard Wise Gallery in New York, (the first-time computer created art was shown in an American art gallery) – public interaction was poor and not a single art work was sold (Chun 2017).
Nevertheless, Noll retained his optimism for the future of digital art production. He wrote in 1967: “The computer may be potentially as valuable a tool to the arts as it has already proven itself to be in the sciences.” And so,the mad scientist invents a machine that becomes more intelligent, more artistic – not a tool to aid artists but to replace them. What do we make of a machine that has the capability to become more human than the humans? (Chun 2017)
But what if I told you that since and even before the inception of digital curatorial spaces such as Instagram, humans have been impersonating algorithm art? From art schools to gallery circuits a prevailing style of abstract painting is coming afore. This style has been called “Zombie Formalism” (basically Neo-Modernism or Crapstraction) by critics. Its characteristics have been singled out as spinoff-ish and pretentious; making use of the vertical format for convenient Instagram hosting. These works that have been digitized and “filtered” in some cases is where the masquerade of human based art lies (Chun 2017). It does however go further than that, think of digital artists who work with gifs, text messages and screen recordings to produce work – all a game of mimicking technology.
This irony then acts as a catalyst for conversations about a near dystopian future and the possible end of culture. Will humans have to paint more like robots? (Chun 2017) The crapstractionists deviating from the norm are already paving the path towards work that is less human and are altering art history to an extent that they might not fathom at present.
Even deeper than all this is the fact that we have come to a moment in time where images have undergone a massive transformation. The vaster majority of images are made by machines for machines and humans are not involved in the process. As Trevor Paglen states, “We’ve traditionally thought about images and the role they play in society as being centered on a human observer—a human looking at an image. But we’re now at a point where most of the images in the world are invisible. What I’m talking about when I say, “invisible images” is the advent of autonomous seeing machines that don’t necessarily involve humans, and that’s the majority of the types of seeing that’s going on in the world now.” (Abrams 2017)
Can a machine fulfil the functions of being an artist when being an artist is so much more than creating art? Being an artist intrinsically means being a teacher, being an activist and commenting on and critiquing the times that they are situated in. There is also the philosophical and art historical question – what is an image/artwork if humans are not needed to create it? Not to mention the political and ethical questions linked to means of observing as they are also a means to forms of power (Abrams 2017). These factors must not be dismissed so easily and the divide is real and apparent whether humans choose to acknowledge it or not. Humans are slowly being replaced by machines but a machine could never be an artist and fill the scope connected to this classification. It fails to inhabit a human form; for now.
The Stevenson gallery, a contemporary art space in Johannesburg and Cape Town, focusing on both national and international artists, is once again pushing the boundaries of the exhibition format beyond the confines and limitations of the white cube. The first exhibition series within this vein was Ramp at the Gallery in Cape Town, where the old loading-dock ramp of the front entrance (the space had previously been a factory) was utilised by young artists to create site-specific installations. Ramp acted as both a literal and figurative transition space between the gallery and the street outside and saw an interesting and diverse body of work emerge fromNyakallo Maleke, Buhlebezwe Siwani, Mitchell Gilbert Messina and Lady Skollie.
The Instagram takeover series extends this spatial interrogation to the digital realm in a way that starts to unravel some of the gatekeeping distinctions between what constitutes ‘gallery-worthy’ art and what doesn’t. Not only does the Instagram format start to consider everyday social media articulations as potentially valuable artistic expressions, but it also raises questions around dissemination and access to art works, particularly important considering South Africa’s current socio-political landscape, where galleries could often be experienced as intimidating and inaccessible spaces.
A purely instrumental and commodifying logic is also undermined through the use of a format where the ‘art objects’ themselves can easily disperse, circulate and cross-pollinate. The rich body of work that has thus far emerged from the series speaks to the value of loosening some of the constraints and pressures of the traditional exhibition space where reputations and ‘cohesive’ physical bodies of work often need to be firmly established in advance of any opportunities. Importantly, the series sees the artists having direct access to the Stevenson’s account, uploading their content in a completely unmediated way- a turn that subverts some of the neuroses around artistic production where content is often heavily filtered through the eye of a predefined and often institutionally trained ‘expert’.
The series began with Fela Gucci’s evocative and intimately personal Tsohle, which is described in the statement as reflecting the diverse influential elements of a complex identity and artistic practice, with Tsohle “being a gospel song that signifies the hope of everything coming together.” The work that emerged from this takeover interrogates the complexities of black queer identity through a body-politics that radically reimagines the possibilities for expressions of honesty and truth, and articulates fluidity as a sacred digital force. This takeover has, in part, opened up room for the inclusion of FAKA (comprised of Fela Gucci and Desire Marea) in the Stevenson’s upcoming group exhibition titled SEX (curated by Lerato Bereng), highlighting the potentialities that are being created for interactions and dialogues between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ exhibition spaces.
The second body of work to emerge from the takeovers was Tiger Maremela’s F5 (alt.ZA) + other imaginings described by Maremela’s statement as including three murals, “which might provide answers as to what might lie at the end of the rainbow, F5 (alt. ZA) attempts to ‘refresh’ South Africa and provides alternatives to white supremacist capitalist heteronormative imperialist patriarchy in the context of South Africa… Alternatives to hypermasculine and heteronormative masculinity and racist beauty standards are provided.”
The third artist to have instigated a takeover is Jody Brand, aka Chomma, who’s Drying Tears relates to a politics of sisterhood and radical self-care. Brand states; “We realise the capabilities of our human potential amidst powers which denigrate our existence. We are femme, pro-black, pro-queer and pro-hoe. This work stands in opposition to forces that attempt to silence us and relegate us unworthy”.
Speaking to the Stevenson’s Stefanie Jason, she stated that something exciting about the series was the democratic way in which artists are selected for participation, as well as the way in which the Stevenson remains open for individuals to self-propose takeover residencies, potentially radically opening up space for innovative engagements which subvert some of the traditional restrictions of art practice in South Africa. Keep an eye on the Stevenson’s websitefor future Instagram takeovers, with the next participant being art-book designer and graphic artist, Gabrielle Guy.
