How I felt

 

As you’ll have seen, I’ve been creating muppets out of all my co-workers here in Clerk Manifesto. These have been delightful, and strangely insightful, capturing elements of human personality in muppet form. It’s been an intriguing demonstration of the powers of my AI experiments.

These are original pictures that I’ve put through a process, persuasively asking a friendly, fake super-intelligence to have them turned into muppet characters. But once I started turning people into muppets with such joy, it was inevitable that I’d start turning everything into muppets.

The results were thrilling.

I was so captivated that I began taking pictures of everything I possibly could, and also going back through my vast library of photographs. There are thousands, literally tens of thousands, that I’ve taken over the years, and I've been applying this felted, yarn-based, fur-and-felt interpretation to as many of them as I can.

It worked best, I thought, in my nature photographs. But I have a lot of nature photographs. And soon, I was pouring all my efforts into creating more and more felt versions of them.

I think it’s historically true here on Clerk Manifesto that I’m prone to obsessions, to creative discoveries that I find deeply involving. I rush headlong into them, produce a lot, and then move on. This is no exception.

I think I’ve done hundreds of these felt pictures in the past three days. The temptation to show you tons of them is always there. But I also understand they’re more impressive in smaller doses. Even for me, I know it will eventually be hard to recapture that original sense of excitement or delight I had when I looked at the first really great ones that inspired the process, once I am surrounded by a deluge of variations and versions.

But when I’m excited about the felt process like I am now, I find pretty much everything delightful. Sitting in a little break room at the library at this moment, I could easily take a picture of my foot and some random corner of cinder blocks and a door, feed it through the felt process, and probably be delighted by it. 

(Yes, I am delighted by this)

But there’s really nothing like the local little waterfalls or Mississippi River scenes to show just how expressive and enchanting I find these images.

So, with that, I’ll start off by showing you a very small selection of some of my favorite felted images today. I don’t know how many I’ll keep it to. I’ll try for a smaller number, tiny even, if I can. We’ll see. You’ll see.

And as you view these pictures today, and in the days to come, I’m sure there will be more, and their impact may lessen. 

But… what can I do? I ride the wave. And if in the end that thundering wave trickles in spent to the shore, so it must be. 

We can always comb the wet sand to see what washed up.