October 2023

4 minute read.

chatGPT Summary: Kay, on their 6th consecutive day of a streak, challenges themselves to expand their knowledge of Braille letters while also discovering new video editing tools in Adobe Premiere Pro that can assist with their unique needs.

This year, I begin another year of my self-hosted (and funded) daily practice residency.

In previous years, daily prompts have helped me stay on track to produce something daily and to keep me accountable for the challenge I posted on Instagram. I delighted in flexing my ability to come up with new ideas and respond to them through an automatic practice using word prompts similar to the now infamous Inktober. I would choose materials I had been exposed to during the past year and work to explore them within my creative practice. In 2021, I stepped up my production to ensure that every post included captions and visual descriptions in both voice and text. At the end of 2021, I was fiercely proud of my work.

In the past two years, that practice waned. Mental illness and losing my home in 2022 kept me from wanting to connect with other artists beyond those associated with my career work. Then, I was let go of my long-time position with ArtStarts this past summer when the new management decided to close down the gallery and, with it, our gallery team. As October approached this year, I dreaded repeating my 2022 October, where I abandoned myself to depression and grieved my home of 14 years after a forced eviction. While I am and was so aware of my privilege in finding a new home before losing my old one and to be able to stay in this unreasonably costly city (albeit at a close to 100% increase in rent), I was unable to much more than unpack a few boxes and weep into my cat. In November, I emerged better for it. I was upset and disappointed that I had “wasted” the month and broken the 6-year streak where my annual residency would produce 31 new projects or drafts. I occasionally spun more positively when I said I had spent the month investing in self-care and rest – which I regularly encourage others to do. But in my mind, I was upset with myself, and my pride was bruised. As this year’s Fall approached, I was tentatively excited, mixed with fear and dread that I would be unable to pick up where I had previously left off.

During those months, I started to make a list. It began as an attempt to make another prompt list I had followed in the past, but it felt forced. Eventually, I flirted with the idea that my days of daily prompts were over and that I was unnecessarily clinging to a format that I had successfully explored. I won’t say it was exhaustive, but I produced more than 150 objects and explored enough materials and methods that I stumped a few creative, prompt-limited AIs when I asked them to suggest a material for me to explore.

When I allowed myself some space and flexibility in my list, I wrote down projects and research that excited me. I didn’t want to fail and was itching to try some of these things. After a bit, I noticed there was a definite theme that emerged. I was interested in professional development in programs I was using and was otherwise familiar with – but I hadn’t updated for a while. I knew that limited AI wasn’t new, but how it was becoming visibly integrated with tools I had been using for more than a decade led me to believe that I had some reading to do. As such, I have dedicated this year’s October residency to professional development. I was tempted to call it a month of limited AI learning – but that is only a piece of the puzzle. I am investing my creative practice as I have done in previous years, and while I’m keen to dig in and build upon my shallow knowledge of AI (and my repulsion towards anyone who proclaims its unlimited benefits to the creative and arts industry), what I want to do is grow this year. That was the original goal of my daily practice back in October 2017. I am relieved to find a way to continue that thread of an idea without tying myself down to something that no longer serves who I am and where I want to go seven years later.