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@ Farran
2025-04-22 15:45:55A story of art and inspiration
This image was generated by AI
That is...
I am artificial. I was created by two other humans (hi mum and dad 👋)
I am intelligent. I can perceive the world, experience it, learn to understand cause & effect, and make decisions.
To go perhaps deeper, cells, DNA and life itself are artifices of the fabric of reality.
I sat, in a pub in Bristol, a place where I rarely frequent. I sat with one housemate, who I rarely spent time with. I met his friends that day, only once, never we met again.
I got chatting with a lady there. I had some paper and pencils with me. My intention, for a couple of weeks, was to come up with a symbol to represent Deep Sea Frequencies, at that time still known as Psychedelic Jelly. We were a new collaboration.
She and I got chatting about art. About symbolic representation of concepts, feelings, ideas. We chatted about flow, about how there are different types of flow, different elemental conditions of flow. I doodled some shapes, and we noticed how fire, water and air all look similar due to their fluid natures. So we considered how to differentiate, distinguish them from one another.
I doodled some more, and we came up with swooshes, curls, crests and bubbles. These seemed to be distinguishing enough such that they were no longer reminiscent of fire or air. I doodled fire and air too, just in case, just to check.
Then we chatted about symmetry types, reflective, axes, rotational. About geometry, geometric containers. We both enjoy triangles and hexagons. (It's always hexagons!)
I doodled some more shapes and put them in hexagonal shapes. Then I tried bending them into triangular forms instead, and overlaid two triangles.
Each triangle looked like a triskelion. Perfect.
Overlaid, they looked just like the flow of water, coming up, spiralling down.
The logo was born in this moment, in this serendipitous meeting, in this unlikely chat with a total stranger. We met for the first time that day, and I'm not sure if we ever met again. This interaction was, is, precious, and it led to a particular creation that is now a core part of my life and is a highlight for many people around the UK and the world, as we put on events and released musicians' music.
This is inspiration. This is expression. This is flow, through the fluid nature of the cosmos.
This is what you miss out on when you talk into your AI LLM black hole prompt.
This is what you steal from when you demand your AI LLM to generate you something according to your whim.
Art and expression is the very foundation of human community. Join in! Try new things! Learn from each other! Bring us all closer together by interacting and creating through shared ideas, shared visions, shared wisdom!
After that, I drew it up cleanly, geometrically.
I photographed it like scanning it, carefully aligning the camera because I didn't have a scanner.
I redrew it more than twice.
I digitised it, colourised it, split it into two layers so I could apply colour & lighting effects to it.
I painstakingly traced the photograph into a vector format, to enlarge it and use it for various media.
I even more painstakingly (do we have a more extreme adverb??) divided all the vector shapes into new objects so that the layers became "real". And cleaned up the vector nodes, shaping them to my imagination.
The vector form is used all over our record label & events branding.
And then I imported the vector form into Blender, a 3D rendering application, free and open source.
I learnt Blender, day by day developing my understanding and my skills. Day by day my GPU crashing on raytracing and cutting the laptop's power out!
And finally, I learnt to make some simple renders that look like being underwater, like surreal glassy objects floating in the deep. I even learnt to animate it, although I haven't released that into the wild.
I imagined all of this stuff, and then I spent months over years developing my skills in my spare time in order to bring these imaginations to life.
You can do the same.
You have to sacrifice things.
Sacrifice your time.
Sacrifice your energy.
Sacrifice your distractions and enter yourself into the learning process and the creative process.
To you, amazing lady who helped me draw this symbol from the fabric of the Realm of Forms, thank you! I'm sorry that I don't recall your name, although actually I think I do remember but I would be embarrassed if I tagged the wrong person. Please reach out if you recognise this story! It was about 7, maybe 8 years ago, in the painted pub in St. Werburgh's.