Sometimes I romanticize the idea of having a weak imagination, that the things that I make are true glimpses into what was in my head. I picture the idea of something cool happening, maybe I even picture a pen stroke before I make it, but if I could see the finished product in my head I wouldn't be nearly as excited to make the thing. I probably wouldn't bother to make much of anything at all if I'll be honest. Some things would only have existed because of things you might find disagreeable. One day there's going to be a masterpiece film debut that otherwise wouldn't have been made if the script wasn't rough drafted using ChatGPT or some other LLM. I could see a great dream sequence being made using A.I. generated video, like it would look like it could only be dated as being made post 2020 and beyond. Isn't that crazy? People kill for that kind of currency.
Maybe I sympathize with A.I. generator people because my whole process is like entering a prompt and seeing what comes out. In this case the prompt is in some kind of preconsciousness lingua ignota inspired by English but not quite, and it roughly translates to "Write in pairs of four lines of HTML about not having an imagination being a great thing for making art. Make it really sarcastic and easy to pearl clutch over." So here I am, basically a slave to the whims of my past self, fulfilling that prompt to (hopefully) exact specifications and being excited to see what I spit out. I'm imagining the lines people take out of context, the narratives others might make that only showcase that they can't read, and that idea makes me smile. As long as there's hope of that becoming reality through this post being made, then I get to smile the whole way through.
Is any of that "not having an imagination" though? Well, I just thought it was funny to call it that. There basically was no other way I was going to get off my butt and talk about it, I had to call it something stupid. When people talk about someone who "has an imagination" they often mean someone who can picture a lot of things. I barely picture anything. I do just enough to get the gist, and then whatever abstract stuff I picture I just semantically know what it is. For me it's the exact same as if I was looking at the thing, it's just that I'm using a synonymous symbol in my head. I might get fascinated by what my lingua ignota would look like if it got translated, how stupid or cool it would sound, but all my symbols don't start out immediately translated. I still know exactly what they mean though. I'm more fluent in it than any other language.
I like drawing what I call 'page fillers' because I can't imagine them. I know that, semantically, they will be finished at some point if I keep up the hard work, but I can't picture them. It's all a big blob of ink in my head. If I could picture it then I wouldn't bother drawing it. A lot of the time when I draw a face it's a little bit tinged by my reaction to the drawing as it's coming together. In a way it's a little bit like a diary, a really non-linear one. I can't imagine the drawing until I look at it, so every time it's like a brand new first impression. This kind of stuff is why I think that separating art from artist is a little goofy sometimes, because that little minor detail is what I love a lot about my drawings and there's pretty much no other way to know about it than hearing it from me. There's no way to get that from just the works alone.
If you were ever wondering why almost all my songs feel like experiments or the product of a formula, there's no other way they'd exist. I experiment once, I hear something I like, I maybe remember the formula, and then I repeat it until I have a few more things that I like. I've got a lot of things in the vault that I still like but I have no idea how I made, plus I can only imagine it within a formula.