Ongoing is all about curiosity. Since I’m going down such a massive artistic rabbit-hole at the moment, it’s safe to say quite a few of my posts to come will lean heavily into documenting the process and the progress.
Does that fill you with joy or dread?
For now, some art-heavy discussion!
[Listen along (or instead) with my voice recording of the piece at the top of the article.]
My first post on Substack was all about trying to bridge gaps and find a way to better work with both art and generative AI. But there was only so far I could go with talk of how gen-AI is more about curation than creation.
So I was thankful when I shifted to creating collages. That move seemed to come out of nowhere a couple of months ago. But the truth stretches back much further.
While I’ve been curating stuff with AI, I’ve also been finding my way to more visual creativity. It’s what I’ve wanted to do from an early age, but the scope was limited. Fun, expressive, useful, and wonderful—but still limited compared to my vision.
It’s why I moved to other forms of creativity. Prose, poetry, podcasting. And stuff that doesn’t begin with the letter P. Hey, I’ve even been on TV.
If anything, I felt spoilt for choice with all this, making visual art unnecessary.
Until visual art became the missing link.
I now found myself limited, despite so much fruitful opportunity.
Thankfully, a throwaway joke turned into a serious pivot. I made a ridiculous collage for my 11-year-old, called it an ‘avatar’ and we had a giggle about it he made fun of me.
Yeah, my other kids weighed in on telling me what they thought too. 😭😆
Shortly after our amusement, I stumbled into more serious placement of unlikely imagery. The main artistic drive started with a bear. A bear that’s even found it’s way to being hung up on a wall in a house in Berlin (hello,
!).It’s two months since I started my journey.
And yet, it’s been so much longer in the making. What started as a joke didn’t start there at all. The curiosity goes wayyyyy back!
Stupid Stuff as the Good Stuff
Mike Sowden identifies two types of curiosity—diversive and epistemic. The first is about narrow novelty and newness (a place of clickbait and doomscrolling), while the second is about focused and deep interest (a place of meaningful learning and building skills).
The speed and the sheer amount of stuff on the internet means diversive curiosity is easily served, even though there’s massive possibility for driving epistemic curiosity. Diversive wins out because it's algorithmically pushed and quickly consumed. Sowden explains how the situation means people are exploring loads of stuff on a superficial level, yet limit the deeper learning to a very limited scope of interest.
Sowden's suggested solution? "You just have to try lots of different stuff for no damn reason."
The joke with my son was actually an important piece in my epistemic curiosity, in finding new ways to explore within realms I already understood. A bit of play turned out to be trying different stuff for no reason.
And, in turn, for massive reason! I was working with stuff I knew, but in strange ways I didn't know.
Sowden mentions that too: “…you need to add a little chaos to the proceedings…Maybe even something stupid."
Jokes are clearly a valid path to wonderous things. And you may not even notice.
I certainly didn’t notice what was going on until a few days later, with some actual full-on collage pieces under my belt.
Pivots and shifts aren’t always deliberate. It’s only in retrospect that everything fits in place and the backstory becomes clear. I didn’t mark 25 August on my calendar as a special date, and it’s only because I posted a Note on Substack that I can look back at the specific act that took me down a curious path.
On top of that, the moment only occurred because I’d been doing some digital design before that. And if you go back in time far enough, you get back to my being a 2-year-old boy with my first computer. In between all this, I drew comics for friends and studied designs and logos—not with any outstanding ability, but with a curious mind clear for all to see. That bit’s always been there!
Even though we can be taken by surprise, our run-up to new discovery is subtle.
Stuff was brewing. Stuff brews in all of us. Some stuff may not appear, some stuff may slowly emerge, and some stuff may explode—like magic—as if it hadn’t been brewing at all.
The journey isn't a clearly defined route to a destination—it's every step, every stop, and every situation. The journey is ongoing.
A Bit About My Process
Back to art being the missing link…
In a previous post, I spoke about art within art. Why start a new artwork when your current piece has other magic to reveal? In many ways, I consider each collage I create as a potential exhibition that works across a theme, or a colour palette, or an exploration of some sort.
The bank of 9 images above is a collection based off a single artwork, which itself is inspired from this collage, Chance Encounter:
Chance Encounter happens to contain elements from many AI generations. I cut parts out to make elements, then I manipulate them to get the right tone and opacity and colour and so on, then I place them and tweak as I see fit.
But because this was from AI assets, I wanted to use stock photos for the next. I’m building up a personal style that works for me, and interested to work out how that style can look with a range of assets.
Unsplash+ has a daily update of premium images, so I grabbed a selection from there as a base to work with. To get an idea:
By Daniel J. Schwarz / By Point Normal / By Polina Kuzovkova / By Natalia Blauth
I somewhat randomly cut elements out and had many laid out in front of me for placement. Not my usual way of working, but another bit of curious fun for me. [Yes, I do impose limits, but that doesn’t always stop me from swerving around in other directions!]
Using the stock elements and a couple of other assets I already had, I created it’s just my way of relaxing:
This piece served as the main artwork, with which I would create other pieces from in post-processing.
A collection takes shape, with a bit of narrative flow. Each work can be appreciated as a standalone and as part of the wider collection. They can be exhibited together for added story and consideration.
Some limits were important, given how much freedom there was here. For instance, I wanted to keep the collection to no more than 10 images. And I already had a rough narrative structure in place. These limits offered a barebones structure to work within, helping not to narrow down the possibilities, but to keep the messiness of discovery manageable.
If you’re interested, here’s an audio interlude of me explaining more about the links between the images. Feel free to skip if it’s TMI.
The final piece in the collection, Admiring the New Pair of Curtains, forms a closure to the collection, but also speaks of superficial matters and a move away from other connections. Think bittersweet, think less satisfactory than expectations, think friction.
In other words, there’s been a desire to bridge gaps and find connections, but there’s still work to be done. There always is.
Everything Has Come Together With Curiosity
It’s clear that I’ve been seeking to bridge gaps all along. These digital artworks still come from a place of curation, just like I’ve been doing with the work on generative AI. I’m still finding things, making links, bringing stuff together.
Finally, the AI imagery stops jutting out, even though it’s still clearly and deliberately visible. A lot of this art has been a purposeful effort toward a balanced and healthy past, present, and future. All part of my plan for Ongoing in the first place.
To think I missed this point almost as much as I mysteriously found it!
Well-worn ideas of journeys in life often sound twee or simplistic. They don't really work with easy beginnings and middles and endings. The past/present/future won’t align in a perfect pattern with neon guides and massive arrows pointing the way.
Without curiosity, matters can get even muddier. That’s why the Ongoing Network celebrates curiosity as a superpower, especially when viewed through a lens of a balanced past, present, and future. That’s also why none of it is easy, despite it being practically essential.
Substack is filled with “hero’s journey” articles that outline the history, background, and intentions of the writer. In a weird way, I sense that the greater clarity in what I’m doing makes for an increasingly disjointed journey. There’s a nagging contradiction and confusion to it all. Which makes sense. After all, two of my favourite things are contradiction and words beginning with the letter C.
You’ll soon find this out when I introduce my two frameworks for curiosity. In a nutshell, these frameworks allow for different types of discovery. One acts as a hierarchy with curiosity as the main starting point to encompass everything else. The other has curiosity as a central node, with all other nodes working off it. Between the two frameworks, a lot of useful ground is covered, with room to tweak as needed for anything that’s left.
All of which leaves me with a rather rambling post. Kind of fitting really.
As with my sudden/eventual/slow move into art, the journey is more of a ramble across different terrains, at various speeds, with many side-quests along the way.
The Chance Encounter collage above led to another collage, which led to an entire collection of work. Where did that side-quest begin and end? For me, that part of the adventure has come to a satisfactory conclusion, ready for the next step of my ongoing journey.
I also know I’m probably wrong. Chance Encounter wasn’t necessarily a beginning, while my conclusion isn’t necessarily the end.
Put another way, I step back from each artwork to consider what it is now, what it harks back to, and what comes next. Each collage serves as a beginning, an end, a loop, a step, a moment, a thought, an invitation, a provocation, and an urge.
It’s enough to make my head spin. And I love it. I get to be a hero, an anti-hero, and all the other heroes. But I’m not at the centre of the story. I’m simply a bunch of heroes in the same way you’re a bunch of heroes too. We’re loads of things—multitudes—winding our way on a journey that’s got everything and nothing to do with us.
The next step is usually filled with curiosity or fear… or both. Either way, it’s ongoing.
What will your next step be?