Category: Art

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Tailwinds off of a million bootstrapped hero sections. I’ve watched oversized type fade into hero sections. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

The Wrecking Crew

As with many art movements, Dada was a response to contemporary thought and practice. Many Dadaists believed that the reason, logic, and aestheticism of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They therefore embarked on a form of anti-art, elevating everyday objects, like urinals, as works of art. They repurposed existing works and spearheaded new mediums such as collage and photomontage. Live performances were used to create unique, one-off art pieces that existed only in time and space. They employed a range of mediums and everyday objects, transforming concepts of how art should be made.

In doing so, they created a new form of art—one that critiqued the system and ridiculed itself. And the art world embraced it, even though it was mocking the art world.

We need more Dadaism.

Enter the Dragon AI

Obviously, there are many concerns about AI generative art in general, particularly regarding the consumption of art and creative works without permission or remuneration, and using that training data on existing works to enable people to create new ones for free, leaving the original artist with precisely £0.00.

One artist quoted in The Octrane Render:

“I don’t have a problem using AI in art. The problem is, everyone who’s trying to make money on AI at the moment is a horrible tech bro who has no respect for anyone”.¹

The ethics of all this is out of scope for this post, however whatever one’s thoughts, AI is here. It’s eaten all the web and it’s regurgitating back out content in increasing volumes.

Web Design is also something that stands to suffer at the hands of AI (Does AI have hands? Do androids dream of electric sheep?). And let’s be frank, we are partly to blame, given its ability to easily create web designs. Web Design, in my humble opinion, has become predictable, and as such, is ripe for the imitation machine to imitate. Bootstrap and Tailwind, to name a couple of the biggest UI trends of the last decade or so, have created a kind of “house style” for Web Design. We can almost recite it in our sleep:

Navigation: Home, Who We Are, Contact, Blog —— Call to Action (CTA)

Layout: Header | Hero section 70% height with background image and 60% semi-opaque layer and chunky mission statement | Text block with right-aligned (or left!) image | Pricing table | Text block with left-aligned (or right!) image | Logos grid | Testimonial | Mega footer

Rinse, repeat, clone.

In fact whilst proof reading this post, I decided to see what ChatGPT would output for a fictional website called Dogwonder’s Blooms — a marketing site for a florist. I also got Dall-E to provide a few images as well (had to prompt it a little to get the right vibe I was looking for). Here is what it came up with:

These patterns are so ubiquitous we barely think of it as unusual, but it is. Why does a website need to be like this? In the early days, we had a Cambrian explosion of design styles—Geocities, Flash sites, CSS Zen Garden. What happened? (cough…Taylorism of tech production…cough.) Now, don’t get me wrong, there are many thousands of lovely websites, but where is the weird, the different, the unusual (or more to the point why is there not more)?

Yes, there is a side argument that the UX innovations of the late 2000s and early 2010s created some excellent design patterns and usability flows. And user recognition for important tasks, such as filling out a government form, should not be underappreciated (thank you, Gov.uk). Furthermore, many accessibility improvements have also created a set of patterns and best practices for websites to follow. However, this does not have to come at the expense of experimentation. Consider an audio-only site with a text alternative, catering for 36 million blind people worldwide.

Beyond the ridicule, Dada was also playful. In Duchamp’s 1942 exhibition First Papers of Surrealism, visitors were faced with a ‘mile of string’ installation and the presence of a group of children who, at Duchamp’s instigation, bounced balls and played hopscotch among the viewers ². Now, this was more towards the Surrealist stage of Art History, but it was pure Dada to insert live performance into exhibitions.

There is a potential universe of websites that can and could be more experimental, delightful, playful, even irreverent.

Given the predictability of many modern Web Design techniques, is it any wonder that AI can spit this stuff out so easily? Why pay an agency a ton of cash to come up with something that’s been done a million times? Sure, we didn’t give it permission to do so, but that appears somewhat like the horse has bolted and is now puking up rainbows.

Fist of Unicorn

How to fight, predictability — be unpredictable. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.

Embracing the themes that Dadaism eschewed, could Web Design do likewise? What would that even look like? First of all, what inspired me to write this blog post is that I recently resurrected one of my favourite sites: the Donnie Darko movie website from 2001. What struck me about that site is just how different it is and wonderfully so. Sure, being built with Flash lent it a more game-like interface, but given the very powerful tools we have at our disposal in CSS and HTML today, we can do a hell of a lot more than we could in 2001.

The navigation on the Donnie Darko website is something the user has to explore, much like gallery visitors did for one Dadaist exhibition ³ , where they were handed flashlights to explore the works. The user is not led; they lead. They discover—and it’s delightful.

We have the tools, the talent, and the opportunity to be truly innovative in how we design and build websites.

Be unpredictable, favour chance, spontaneity, and irreverence.

The journey begins by letting go of control, and becoming flexible.⁴

1. Art Fights Back ↩︎
2. Duchamp, Childhood, Work and Play ↩︎
3. Exposition internationale du surréalisme of 1938 ↩︎
4. A Dao of Web Design ↩︎

Update

Great long read over at the Guardian (Hidden traces of humanity: what AI images reveal about our world) that details the history of generative AI art. Something I did not deal with directly in this piece, artists will and are using AI as part of their process and humans are already deeply embedded in the process and outputs. As the Dadaists used photography, itself originally criticised in earlier art circles, many modern artists will use AI likewise. As the article ends:

“Each prompter sets off a huge chain of networked collaboration with artists and academics, clickworkers and random internet users, across time and space, engaging in one massive, multicentury, ongoing game of Eat Poop You Cat. Like it or not, all of us – whether pre-algorithmic image makers or self-described AI artists – will have to learn to play“

Update – Part Deux

Another great post on AI, LLMs and mundanity: https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/after-software-eats-the-world-what

“On average, they (LMS) create representations that tug in the direction of the dense masses at the center of culture, rather than towards the sparse fringe of weirdness and surprise scattered around the periphery.”

“This reflects a general problem with large models. They are much better at representing patterns that are common than patterns that are rare.”

“…a cluster of cultural strong attractors that increase conformity, and makes it much harder to find new directions and get them to stick”

Although I guess my argument is not just the output is centered but the input as well, but I digress.