hemmert

Ah, I wasn't aware of that parallel – thank you!

Thank you – it's formulated too bold indeed. It's one approach to art, and I get the feeling that exploring this might be really interesting. It's also funny to see how the stamp on the backside gets all the attention. I thought I was a painter, but I'm chasing meaninglessness.

Oh, I wasn't aware of that! I thought that Show HN was for anything that I had made. I also wanted to invite people to discuss this with me (as the artist), but I could have disclosed that in the first comment, too, of course.

That's very nice, from the office curtain to the damaged poster board! :-)

'Effort' is an interesting factor – I won't neglect that I'm putting effort into the paintings. How do you decide when to press the camera's shutter? (This is a bit like a Libet experiment, in case you don't know it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Libe...)

Thanks also for the technical remark regarding the image sizes, I'll do that, good point.

(Presentation-wise, my website is based on a template called 'ZeroOne' (https://www.thezero.club/demo/one/) for the Kirby CMS (https://getkirby.com/). Really nice to work with, especially if you want to create something gallery-like!)

I'd describe it as follows: The paintings are the side effect of me having an evening painting. For me, it's all about enjoying a nice evening, seeing the art come into being – with nothing I want to depict, express or evoke – and trying not to ruin the car with wet paint afterward. (As you can see from the paintings, I'm not the most tidy/cleanly person.)

BUT then comes the meaninglessness stamp, and this really gives the entire thing meaning – the meaning of meaninglessness.

I'm a huge fan of Douglas Hofstaedter's work (if you haven't read it, I can highly recommend his book 'I am a strange loop') and self-referential statements and things.

And this is somehow what happened here: I only wanted to get out of the way, people should interpret the works as they like, it's about them feeling something. But HN, as HN is what we love it for, escalated this into a logic discussion.

Thank you, for the appreciation and your comment. I was getting the feeling that the stamp on the backside gets more attention than the pictures themselves.

Ah, nice! I'll compile a page of related projects on the website (with all the interesting links from this discussion), and that will go on it, too, of course! Thanks!

I once read that art gets our brain hemispheres into a discussion. This could be it? ;)

Thank you for your comment and the appreciation of that definition - and the paintings!

I also don't know what to think about AI-generated art yet, either. All of my paintings, I just keep painting until I have the feeling that they're finished. But: in my head, don't I simply remix previous things I saw and found beautiful, pigment and scratch movements that worked well, and all these things? Where's the difference? :-)

(I enjoy the act of smearing paint on canvasses, which makes a lot of difference for me – and there is no prompt.)

No offense taken!

I agree, not all art is semiotically vacant. At the same time, we'll never get (as the viewers of a piece) get to fully understand what the artist wanted to express – and that's the situation I wanted to evade as the artist here.

There are actually some nice robot arms painting pictures and doing calligraphy:

https://www.pinterest.de/pin/brobot-desktop-robot-arm-is-pra...

Thank you, I wasn't aware of the Ideomotor phenomenon. Very interesting!

Then especially, thank you! (If you haven't, check out the links to related artworks in this discussion – many of them I hadn't come across yet, but they have a similar vibe!)

That wasn't my intention (as the artist), and perhaps we're lacking a good discussion of what art is.

But I remember Scott McCloud defining it as 'everything that doesn't serve the preservance of the species'. So making people reflect about what they think what art is for them (and if it's by finding out that this isn't), would be.

Thank you for the appreciation, and the interesting links! I heard about the CIA story, and how they sought to quantify creativity as a person's 'ability'.

That's an interesting point that I didn't have in mind, but it's a very good question. From the discussion here I have the feeling that the mere statement 'I didn't have anything in mind while painting this' makes up for a lot of the discussion (and meaning?) here.

Thank you for summarizing! It's also really interesting (I'm the artist) to see that almost ALL comments refer to the stamp on the backsides of the paintings, not to the content of the pictures. :-)

I‘ll add that- yes, it’s only on Telegram!

Oh, thank you for the heads-up!

I put in that bottom line up front, and I also updated the privacy policy's link.

That's an interesting idea! I'm also trying to paint something nice, so when painting, I do look at the picture and say: "Ahh, this doesn't look right.", and then I go about and change something. I do enjoy painting, and I guess I wouldn't if I, say, blindfolded my eyes. But I probably should try that ;-)

I guess it was the rather large statements about art, but I'd love to learn more, too.

Hello, and thank you for the excellent comment! I love the conclusion that I successfully fooled myself into thinking I wasn't thinking anything. That would also make a nice stamp ;-)

Yes, exactly!

(But I do appreciate the feedback loop as in Gödel's theorem 'This statement is wrong.')

It's great to see that the idea causes some controversy – thank you for sharing your thoughts!

Yes, perhaps the statement about 'Art is ...' and 'Art is not ...' is too big. It's what I try to achieve here, but this is, of course, not true for all art. Thank you!

Thank you for the very thoughtful comment!

I'm indeed not an English native speaker, so I wasn't fully aware of the different possible meanings of 'nothing in mind', but you're right. The German stamp has exactly the same ambiguity, which I thankfully took as a way out of the impossible situation of 'thinking nothing.

It's also very notable that the back of the paintings receives way more attention than the paintings themselves – but I guess that's what HN is all about (and what I like about it!), pondering the intellectual and philosophical problems of not thinking ;-)

Oh interesting! I hadn't come across that one. Will check it out! Thank you!

Thank you!

Actually, the longest part of building this was finding the right wording. Here are some previous attempts:

- When painting this, I had no artistic intent

- When painting this, there was nothing I wanted to express with the picture

- When painting this, I wanted to express nothing

In German, there's a nice ambiguity: "Bei diesem Bild habe ich mir nichts gedacht" is somewhere between 'I was not thinking' and 'I wanted to express nothing.'. It's also the reason why I went with a German stamp (which is my mother tongue) and not an English one.

It is SO complicated to say that I wasn't up to anything with these pictures.