3 minute read. Content warning: Mention of synaesthesia, discussion of personal and artistic identity.
chatGPT Summary: Kay reflects on the importance of naming their summer project with colleagues KM and SC, using colors to represent each member’s personality, and ultimately deciding on “Summer Nexus 2024” as a working title for their collaborative prompt-based challenge.
Vancouver, on stolen MST territory – In thinking about my prompt and possible responses for this summer project, I kept fumbling in referring to the project itself. I like having titles for things. It’s less about needing to contain things or for titles to remain constant but more about storytelling. When I do take the time to chat with others, I want to tell people about what I am working on. I like to name things because it becomes easier for others to talk to me about things I am working on. It makes it easier for me to sort and file all the things that are going on within the beehive of my brain. I acknowledge that labelling and naming have power – both good and bad.
A colourful name exercise:
One of the bees in my brain (the one with synaesthesia) tells me that KM is uncut sage or olive green without the slimy waxiness of an oily olive. Sage is a lower contrast on white screens, so for this project, I lean more olive and chose the web-safe colour #666633, which the website Colorhexa describes as very dark, saturated yellow.
A strip of colour showing how I perceive KM’s name and personality.
SC, on the other hand, is the pale blue of cotton candy and clear skies in summer looking north towards the horizon, viewed from inside with the sun past noon. It is low contrast to white, and instead, I use the websafe colour #3399FF when I refer to her in text, which the website Colorhexa describes as vivid blue. This doesn’t match how I see SC‘s name, but rather what I push her to be when we work together. Here are the colours in contrast.
A strip of colour showing how I perceive SC’s name and personality.
A strip of colour showing the high contrast colour alternative I’ve selected for SC for accessibility.
When I think about myself, I get too in my way. The colours change and blend and feel more like patterns and tastes than something I could present as representing me. I enjoy the Pantone orange 021 as a colour to pick when I need a mug or a desktop background or if I am asked my favourite colour. It’s both loud and stable. But if I were to think about my name and personality, it’s a shifting set of dots that skip about like fleas; however, the capital letters K A Y are solid and feel right in dusty black. Kay is my chosen and legal name and I know some of the stability I get when I meditate on these letters is from the control and agency I feel when using this name.
A strip of colour showing a simplified version of how I perceive the letters K-A-Y.
These colours do not blend easily, which satisfies me immensely. I also acknowledge that I took a simple, lazy, and reductive approach to my name, ordering myself so that I would not be messy or disruptive to my collaborators – also very me. I don’t seek harmony, but the instinct to make things easier for others, especially my peers, through my own erasure or control is common for me.
KM
Kay
SC
With these thoughts scribbled down, here are some automatic thoughts on names for this collective:
- KAY, KM, SC, SKISM
- Summer Collective 2024
- Prompts and Shorts
- The three prompts
- Summer prompts
- Unblended
- Olive, Black, and Blue
- Self-directed together
- Three paths, same park
Getting some AI suggestions:
Following this, I asked chatGPT for some suggestions:
Kay: I’m trying to come up with a short title for a summer prompt project that me and 2 of my colleagues are doing. Each of us is coming up with a single prompt per month (me in June, SC in July, and KM in August. Here is the prompt I provided for June: ( Kay copy-pastes their prompt).
The goal is for us each to explore our own practices independently, although collectively through these shared prompts, and then to come back in September to see if there are intersections or overlaps in our practices and whether we can tease out an idea for a future collaboration or exhibition.
Here are some title ideas, but none resonate with me (Kay copy-pastes their list from above). Do you have any suggestions?chatGPT 3.5: How about “TechTempo: A Summer Prompt Project”? This title combines the theme of technology (Tech) with the idea of exploring the pace or tempo (Tempo) of each artist’s practice during the summer months. It’s concise and captures the essence of your project.
Kay: I like it, but the other two prompts may not be associated with tech or technology. Only my prompt is connected with that theme, and the other two artists are printmakers, and one is a weaver and textile maker. SC is thinking of making her prompt on material or memory senses exploration. I have no ideas from KM yet.
chatGPT 3.5: In that case, how about “Summer Nexus: Art Prompts 2024”? This title suggests a coming together (Nexus) of different artistic practices during the summer, with each artist contributing their unique prompt. It doesn’t specify a theme, allowing for flexibility in each artist’s prompts.
Kay: I dig it. Thank you.
chatGPT 3.5: You’re welcome! If you need any more help or have any other questions, feel free to ask.
Internal working name
I do like the term nexus. The full suggestion, “Summer Nexus: Art Prompts 2024”, is a little wordy, but Summer Nexus 2024 works for me. When we check in with each other, I’ll run it past my Nexus partners. For now, I’ll use it as a unifying tag for my blog posts.
Technology note:
I continue to test the use of AI within my writing and artistic practice. I used chatGPT to create a summary for this blog and to ask for suggestions for a title following my own creative experiment, and Grammarly to assist me in spelling and grammar.