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Photo by Karolina Grabowska

A sculptor of wind explains how to make fiber dance far above city streets

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Janet Echelman says she never set out to be a sculptor of wind. But if you have ever explored Porto, Portugal, walked the streets of Gwanggyo, South Korea, or passed through West Hollywood, you might have seen her massive iridescent sculptures of fiber floating above cities and the millions of people in them. Working closely with engineers, Echelman has spent the past 26 years of her career producing sculptures that rival the size of skyscrapers.

In March, Echelman spoke at the 2023 Imagine Solutions Conference in Naples, Florida, about her journey to becoming a sculptor, her creative process and how her sculptures have forever changed the landscapes of the cities where they ripple, dance and billow in the wind.

What inspired you to create this type of art?

I began my career as a painter. In 1997, I traveled to India as a Fulbright scholar and planned to give exhibitions around the country. I had my paints and brushes shipped to India from the U.S., but they never arrived. As the deadline for the show loomed, I had to come up with something fast. In Mahabalipuram, the Indian fishing village where I was staying, I would watch the fishermen work and reel in their mounds of netting on the beach at the end of each day. One day, it occurred to me that those nets would make excellent material for sculptures. By the end of my Fulbright year, I had created an entire series of these netted sculptures with the fishermen, called the Bellbottom Series, named after the popular bell-bottom pants.

I’ve been working to develop and refine this visual language ever since. It’s an ever-evolving challenge to go from making handmade nets on the beach with fishermen in India to creating works the scale of one or two city blocks attached to skyscrapers.

How do you approach the engineering side of your art? How are these pieces constructed, especially given their large scale?

Every piece is planned out digitally first. The first sketches are very simple – it’s just me with a pencil.

But the final design in our studio is a complete digital color 3D model. We can see how the sculpture sits in space and how it attaches to everything around it. We’re able to move around the three-dimensional site to see the work from all sides.

My team and I have engaged in a decade of development of original computer software to do soft-body modeling of our sculptures, which allows us to design our 3D netted forms while understanding the constraints of our craft, showing response to the forces of gravity and wind.

Every element – every line of twine, and every knot – is modeled in terms of its thickness, stiffness, weight and density. So it’s actually quite an endeavor to analyze such unusual structures that are both porous and fluidly moving. This is not the standard – building departments typically analyze solid buildings made of things they know, like steel and concrete – so this is really pushing everyone to work in new ways.

In terms of the physical construction, my sculptures appear delicate yet are incredibly strong. They have to be able to withstand winds of a Category 5 hurricane. We achieve that by using highly engineered materials, including a fiber that NASA used for the Mars Rover called ultrahigh-molecular-weight polyethylene, which is custom-braided into structural ropes. We use a variety of other fibers to create the braided twine for the soft layers of each sculpture.

The ropes are then all hand-spliced together with methods that have been used for hundreds of years to construct boats in the maritime industry. These are old human technologies passed down from generation to generation.

Once we have these knotted net panels, we incorporate different colors to create patterns within the work. These panels are then attached to rope structures and usually lifted into space using cranes. My team pulls them into tension so that they can withstand immense forces of nature.

What was the hardest sculpture to create from a technical standpoint, and why?

My commission for the St. Petersburg pier in Florida titled “Bending Arc” was challenging, because it needed to withstand a Category 5 hurricane – and yet we did it. There’s footage of it during Hurricane Ian, and it was just dancing beautifully.

Hurricane testing starts in the design stages. Our detailed digital models are tested and analyzed for their capacity to withstand certain forces of wind, which, for public safety reasons, is required in order to obtain a building permit. My sculptures have to satisfy the same requirements as a skyscraper, and they can withstand the same forces as any major building.

What are you currently working on that you’re excited about?

I am excited to continue to explore the relationship between dance and art. In 2014, I collaborated with the Stuttgart Ballet in Germany to create sculptures that dancers could interact with in their performances.

Since then I have worked with a choreographer and engineer at Princeton University to create a sculpture that the dancers actually enter into and interact with. Their movements cause the sculpture to move and appear as if it were a dancer itself at a larger scale. I see it as an exploration of our planet and its climate. It illustrates how the Earth and human beings are always mutually influencing one another – and yet we are not equals.

What do you hope your art evokes in people?

It’s important to me that each person can create their own meaning from art. They are the expert in their own experience.

If my work offers a moment of contemplation and allows you to feel a sense of calm and your own interconnection with the wind, sun, people and city, then that’s all I could hope for. I like how complete strangers often start talking to each other underneath the sculptures. Our cities are made up of straight lines and hard edges and my sculptures offer something completely different – they are soft and adaptable, yet they’re the same scale as skyscrapers.

If my art prompts people to contemplate that the world can be built in a completely different way than it always has been, if it opens up questions, then that is the most an artist could ever hope to do.

^^^

Janet Echelmanm, Mellon Distinguished Visiting Artist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

This article originally appeared in The Conversation under a Creative Commons License.

Feature Image by Karolina Grabowska via Pexels.

Photo by Tara Winstead

The folly of making art with text-to-image generative AI

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Making art using artificial intelligence isn’t new. It’s as old as AI itself.

What’s new is that a wave of tools now let most people generate images by entering a text prompt. All you need to do is write “a landscape in the style of van Gogh” into a text box, and the AI can create a beautiful image as instructed.

The power of this technology lies in its capacity to use human language to control art generation. But do these systems accurately translate an artist’s vision? Can bringing language into art-making truly lead to artistic breakthroughs?

Engineering outputs

I’ve worked with generative AI as an artist and computer scientist for years, and I would argue that this new type of tool constrains the creative process.

When you write a text prompt to generate an image with AI, there are infinite possibilities. If you’re a casual user, you might be happy with what AI generates for you. And startups and investors have poured billions into this technology, seeing it as an easy way to generate graphics for articles, video game characters and advertisements.

Grid of many images of cartoon women in various costumes.
Benlisquare/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

In contrast, an artist might need to write an essaylike prompt to generate a high-quality image that reflects their vision – with the right composition, the right lighting and the correct shading. That long prompt is not necessarily descriptive of the image but typically uses lots of keywords to invoke the system of what’s in the artist’s mind. There’s a relatively new term for this: prompt engineering.

Basically, the role of an artist using these tools is reduced to reverse-engineering the system to find the right keywords to compel the system to generate the desired output. It takes a lot of effort, and much trial and error, to find the right words.

AI isn’t as intelligent as it seems

To learn how to better control the outputs, it’s important to recognize that most of these systems are trained on images and captions from the internet.

Think about what a typical image caption tells about an image. Captions are typically written to complement the visual experience in web browsing.

For example, the caption might describe the name of the photographer and the copyright holder. On some websites, like Flickr, a caption typically describes the type of camera and the lens used. On other sites, the caption describes the graphic engine and hardware used to render an image.

So to write a useful text prompt, users need to insert many nondescriptive keywords for the AI system to create a corresponding image.

Today’s AI systems are not as intelligent as they seem; they are essentially smart retrieval systems that have a huge memory and work by association.

Artists frustrated by a lack of control

Is this really the sort of tool that can help artists create great work?

At Playform AI, a generative AI art platform that I founded, we conducted a survey to better understand artists’ experiences with generative AI. We collected responses from over 500 digital artists, traditional painters, photographers, illustrators and graphic designers who had used platforms such as DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, among others.

Only 46% of the respondents found such tools to be “very useful,” while 32% found them somewhat useful but couldn’t integrate them to their workflow. The rest of the users – 22% – didn’t find them useful at all.

The main limitation artists and designers highlighted was a lack of control. On a scale 0 to 10, with 10 being most control, respondents described their ability to control the outcome to be between 4 and 5. Half the respondents found the outputs interesting, but not of a high enough quality to be used in their practice.

When it came to beliefs about whether generative AI would influence their practice, 90% of the artists surveyed thought that it would; 46% believed that the effect would be a positive one, with 7% predicting that it would have a negative effect. And 37% thought their practice would be affected but weren’t sure in what way.

The best visual art transcends language

Are these limitations fundamental, or will they just go away as the technology improves?

Of course, newer versions of generative AI will give users more control over outputs, along with higher resolutions and better image quality.

But to me, the main limitation, as far as art is concerned, is foundational: it’s the process of using language as the main driver in generating the image.

Visual artists, by definition, are visual thinkers. When they imagine their work, they usually draw from visual references, not words – a memory, a collection of photographs or other art they’ve encountered.

When language is in the driver’s seat of image generation, I see an extra barrier between the artist and the digital canvas. Pixels will be rendered only through the lens of language. Artists lose the freedom of manipulating pixels outside the boundaries of semantics.

If two artists enter the exact same prompt, it’s very unlikely that the system will generate the same image. That’s not due to anything the artist did; the different outcomes are simply due the AI’s starting from different random initial images.

In other words, the artist’s output is boiled down to chance.

Nearly two-thirds of the artists we surveyed had concerns that their AI generations might be similar to other artists’ works and that the technology does not reflect their identity – or even replaces it altogether.

The issue of artist identity is crucial when it comes to making and recognizing art. In the 19th century, when photography started to become popular, there was a debate about whether photography was a form of art. It came down to a court case in France in 1861 to decide whether photography could be copyrighted as an art form. The decision hinged on whether an artist’s unique identity could be expressed through photographs.

Those same questions emerge when considering AI systems that are taught with the internet’s existing images.

Before the emergence of text-to-image prompting, creating art with AI was a more elaborate process: Artists usually trained their own AI models based on their own images. That allowed them to use their own work as visual references and retain more control over the outputs, which better reflected their unique style.

Text-to-image tools might be useful for certain creators and casual everyday users who want to create graphics for a work presentation or a social media post.

But when it comes to art, I can’t see how text-to-image software can adequately reflect the artist’s true intentions or capture the beauty and emotional resonance or works that grip viewers and makes them see the world anew.

^^^

Ahmed Elgammal, Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Art & AI Lab, Rutgers University.

This article originally appeared in The Conversation, under a Creatives Commons License.

Feature Image by Tara Winstead from Pexels.

Image by Memo Akten, CC BY-SA.

Generative AI is a minefield for copyright law

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In 2022, an AI-generated work of art won the Colorado State Fair’s art competition. The artist, Jason Allen, had used Midjourney – a generative AI system trained on art scraped from the internet – to create the piece. The process was far from fully automated: Allen went through some 900 iterations over 80 hours to create and refine his submission.

Yet his use of AI to win the art competition triggered a heated backlash online, with one Twitter user claiming, “We’re watching the death of artistry unfold right before our eyes.”

As generative AI art tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have been thrust into the limelight, so too have questions about ownership and authorship.

These tools’ generative ability is the result of training them with scores of prior artworks, from which the AI learns how to create artistic outputs.

Should the artists whose art was scraped to train the models be compensated? Who owns the images that AI systems produce? Is the process of fine-tuning prompts for generative AI a form of authentic creative expression?

On one hand, technophiles rave over work like Allen’s. But on the other, many working artists consider the use of their art to train AI to be exploitative.

We’re part of a team of 14 experts across disciplines that just published a paper on generative AI in Science magazine. In it, we explore how advances in AI will affect creative work, aesthetics and the media. One of the key questions that emerged has to do with U.S. copyright laws, and whether they can adequately deal with the unique challenges of generative AI.

Copyright laws were created to promote the arts and creative thinking. But the rise of generative AI has complicated existing notions of authorship.

Photography serves as a helpful lens

Generative AI might seem unprecedented, but history can act as a guide.

Take the emergence of photography in the 1800s. Before its invention, artists could only try to portray the world through drawing, painting or sculpture. Suddenly, reality could be captured in a flash using a camera and chemicals.

As with generative AI, many argued that photography lacked artistic merit. In 1884, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on the issue and found that cameras served as tools that an artist could use to give an idea visible form; the “masterminds” behind the cameras, the court ruled, should own the photographs they create.

From then on, photography evolved into its own art form and even sparked new abstract artistic movements.

AI can’t own outputs

Unlike inanimate cameras, AI possesses capabilities – like the ability to convert basic instructions into impressive artistic works – that make it prone to anthropomorphization. Even the term “artificial intelligence” encourages people to think that these systems have humanlike intent or even self-awareness.

This led some people to wonder whether AI systems can be “owners.” But the U.S. Copyright Office has stated unequivocally that only humans can hold copyrights.

So who can claim ownership of images produced by AI? Is it the artists whose images were used to train the systems? The users who type in prompts to create images? Or the people who build the AI systems?

Infringement or fair use?

While artists draw obliquely from past works that have educated and inspired them in order to create, generative AI relies on training data to produce outputs.

This training data consists of prior artworks, many of which are protected by copyright law and which have been collected without artists’ knowledge or consent. Using art in this way might violate copyright law even before the AI generates a new work.

For Jason Allen to create his award-winning art, Midjourney was trained on 100 million prior works.

Was that a form of infringement? Or was it a new form of “fair use,” a legal doctrine that permits the unlicensed use of protected works if they’re sufficiently transformed into something new?

While AI systems do not contain literal copies of the training data, they do sometimes manage to recreate works from the training data, complicating this legal analysis.

Will contemporary copyright law favor end users and companies over the artists whose content is in the training data?

To mitigate this concern, some scholars propose new regulations to protect and compensate artists whose work is used for training. These proposals include a right for artists to opt out of their data’s being used for generative AI or a way to automatically compensate artists when their work is used to train an AI.

Muddled ownership

Training data, however, is only part of the process. Frequently, artists who use generative AI tools go through many rounds of revision to refine their prompts, which suggests a degree of originality.

Answering the question of who should own the outputs requires looking into the contributions of all those involved in the generative AI supply chain.

The legal analysis is easier when an output is different from works in the training data. In this case, whoever prompted the AI to produce the output appears to be the default owner.

However, copyright law requires meaningful creative input – a standard satisfied by clicking the shutter button on a camera. It remains unclear how courts will decide what this means for the use of generative AI. Is composing and refining a prompt enough?

Matters are more complicated when outputs resemble works in the training data. If the resemblance is based only on general style or content, it is unlikely to violate copyright, because style is not copyrightable.

The illustrator Hollie Mengert encountered this issue firsthand when her unique style was mimicked by generative AI engines in a way that did not capture what, in her eyes, made her work unique. Meanwhile, the singer Grimes embraced the tech, “open-sourcing” her voice and encouraging fans to create songs in her style using generative AI.

If an output contains major elements from a work in the training data, it might infringe on that work’s copyright. Recently, the Supreme Court ruled that Andy Warhol’s drawing of a photograph was not permitted by fair use. That means that using AI to just change the style of a work – say, from a photo to an illustration – is not enough to claim ownership over the modified output.

While copyright law tends to favor an all-or-nothing approach, scholars at Harvard Law School have proposed new models of joint ownership that allow artists to gain some rights in outputs that resemble their works.

In many ways, generative AI is yet another creative tool that allows a new group of people access to image-making, just like cameras, paintbrushes or Adobe Photoshop. But a key difference is this new set of tools relies explicitly on training data, and therefore creative contributions cannot easily be traced back to a single artist.

The ways in which existing laws are interpreted or reformed – and whether generative AI is appropriately treated as the tool it is – will have real consequences for the future of creative expression.

^^^

Robert Mahari, JD-PhD Student, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Jessica Fjeld, lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School, Ziv Epstein, PhD Student in Media Arts and Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

This article originally appeared in The Conversation under a Creatives Commons License.

Feature Image by  Memo Akten, CC BY-SA.

Image by Olga Karlovac

Solo exhibition of abstract photographs by renowned Croatian street photographer

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With Reflections, Olga Karlovac presents a visual journal of her inner worlds as a series of experimental self-portraits alongside timeless and nameless landscapes.

Karlovac’s work occupies a space in between: figuration and abstraction; shadow and light; recollection and the here and now. Using her camera as a painterly tool to create an atmospheric and grainy aesthetic, her intentionally blurred contemplations intuitively convey fluidity and emotion. Not intending to chronicle a specific circumstance or situation, the artist evokes memories and moods that are at once intimate and universal.

The exhibition concludes a period of transition that spanned six years and three books.

Olga Karlovac will be in conversation with photographer and magazine journalist Tracy Calder on Saturday 17th June. They will expand on their recent interview for B+W Photography magazine. 

About the Artist

Olga Karlovac is a self-taught, abstract and street photographer from Croatia. She is renowned for her expressive style of photography and a trilogy of self-published photobooks. Her work has been widely exhibited internationally and is regularly featured in leading photography magazines.

Tracy Calder is a photographer, editor and writer whose work has appeared in more than 30 consumer magazines, countless books, and exhibitions at The Photographers’ Gallery and The National Portrait Gallery in London.

She co-founded Close-up Photographer of the Year for photographers who wish to slow down and savour the details.

^^^

Meike Brunkhorst, runs factor-m marketing consultancy, freelance writer, translator, event manager and curator.

This article originally appeared in FAD Magazine under a Creative Commons License.

Feature image by Olga Karlovac.

Butterflies, Henry Darger, Courtesy of Brooklyn Taxidermy/flickr

What is vernacular art? A visual artist explains

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Vernacular art is a genre of visual art made by artists who are usually self-taught. They tend to work outside of art academies and commercial galleries, which have traditionally been the purview of white, affluent artists and collectors.

In the U.S., vernacular art – which can also be called folk art or outsider art – is dominated by the works of African American, Appalachian and working-class people. In many cases these artists took up making paintings, sculptures, quilts or textiles outside of a day job, or later in life.

In early 2023, Christie’s held an auction of outsider and vernacular art. Featuring work by American artists such as Henry Darger, Bill Traylor, Thornton Dial, Nellie Mae Rowe, Minnie Evans and Joseph Yoakum, the sale grossed more than US$2 million.

Awareness and recognition of this genre has grown over the past few decades, with the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.; the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore; Atlanta’s High Museum; and the Milwaukee Art Museum building significant collections.

Art history as artist history

Adolf Wölfli’s ‘General view of the island Neveranger’ (1911). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Adolf Wölfli’s ‘General view of the island Neveranger’ (1911). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

In the 1940s, the French artist Jean Dubuffet came up with the term “art brut,” which translates as “raw art,” to describe art made by mental patients, prisoners or children. The drawings of Adolf Wölfli, who died in 1930, inspired Dubuffet’s term.

Wölfli was a patient with schizophrenia in a mental hospital in Bern, Switzerland, who was given pencils and paper as a form of therapy. Working mostly in pencil, Wölfli created elaborate drawings with decorative borders that included symbols, letters and his own system of musical notation.

In an effort to promote this genre, in 1972 the British art historian Roger Cardinal advanced the term “outsider art” to expand the canon and include more artists, such as Madge Gill, who died in 1961. Gill, a British self-taught artist who spent much of her childhood in an orphanage, started making highly patterned drawings at the age of 38, claiming to compose the works while communicating with spirits.

A detail from Madge Gill’s ‘The Transformation.’ Courtesy of Goggins World/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND
A detail from Madge Gill’s ‘The Transformation.’ Courtesy of Goggins World/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

In his 2004 book “Everyday Genius: Self-Taught Art and Culture of Authenticity,” sociologist Gary Allen Fine explains that a common facet of vernacular art is an emphasis on the artist’s biography: their personal, family and employment history. Fine observed that to collectors and dealers, these stories seemed to imbue the art with more meaning – and value. Some curators have argued that vernacular art should be included in exhibitions of contemporary art and not merely exist in its own siloed category.

But the relationship between vernacular artists and their promoters can be complicated.

In her 1998 book “The Temptation: Edgar Tolson and the Genesis of Twentieth-Century Folk Art,” sociologist Julia Ardery explored the ways that Tolson, a self-taught woodcarver from rural Kentucky, interacted with faculty and students from the University of Kentucky, and she analyzed their influence on his art.

Much of Tolson’s work was acquired by Michael Hall, who taught at the University of Kentucky at the time. Hall helped Tolson receive a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship in 1981, but he also ended up selling a portion of his collection to the Milwaukee Art Museum in 1989 for $1.5 million.

As the sale of Tolson’s work shows, when huge sums of money enter the picture, the line between appreciation and exploitation gets blurred.

Why vernacular art matters

Vernacular art extends the artistic canon in the same way that folk music reflects broader traditions of expression. It reminds everyone that art is a universal human pursuit.

As the late Chris Strachwitz, the founder of Arhoulie Records, has pointed out, Black traditions of blues and roots music were not formally taught but were passed down from one generation to the next in local communities.

Similarly, the architect Robert Venturi promoted vernacular architecture in his 1972 book “Learning from Las Vegas.” In it, he highlighted the ways that Las Vegas casinos and hotels were designed to accommodate the automobile and were meant to be seen as symbols, with massive, outlandish signs – an approach that most schools of architecture would have scoffed at. In doing so, Venturi ushered in more playful forms of architecture.

Concepts of authenticity are central to the appeal of vernacular art. Fine art and culture can sometimes be esoteric and exclusionary, and in a time when artificial intelligence has put authorship in question, vernacular art has even more resonance. It is made by the artists’ hands, using common materials, in ways that reflect their own unique life and artistic visions.

This work represents a pre-digital form of expression, accessible to anyone, that showcases what it means to be resourceful, creative and human.

^^^

Courtesy of Beauvais Lyons, Chancellor’s Professor of Art, University of Tennessee.

Feature Image by Henry Darger, Courtesy of Brooklyn Taxidermy’s flickr.

The original article appeared in The Conversation under a creative commons license.

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Where Did They Go?: Four Artists Who Disappeared

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We all know the experience. You’re sitting around wondering whatever happened to so-and-so, your true love from 8th grade, or whatever, so you pick up your iPhone and google, only to discover that an entire human being has vanished into thin air.

We have all had the same fantasy: to disappear and take on a new identity and a new life, to just vanish from our current situation. You may think that starting over somewhere else will give you a chance to be happier, freer or more fulfilled. Maybe that’s what happened to your true love from 8th grade.

Sometimes the person who disappeared is a public figure, an artist, writer, singer. They yearned for the spotlight, they wanted everyone to know their work. Then, suddenly, they didn’t anymore.

They may not vanish from their life (although sometimes they do), but they vanish from their online “presence.” Their public, even if it is very small, may never know what happened to them.  

Here are a few, well-known and less well-known, all mysterious.

Michèle Breton

Her face is downright iconic, it graced posters for the 1968 cult film, Performance. Michèle Breton was the fourth-listed star in this weird and influential midnight movie, which was  co-directed by Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg, and which millions of people have seen on the screen, television, video, DVD, Blu-Ray. The movie has always been available. It is not unreasonable to argue that Michèle Breton is a movie star.

Yet today, no one knows where she is, or whether she is even alive.

In Performance, Mick Jagger starred as a reclusive, Jagger-esque rock star, with James Fox as the mobster who infiltrates his lair. Anita Pallenberg and Breton were the groupies who hung around the pad. I don’t think the movie is good at all, but it’s mostly, today, acclaimed and influential.

Despite the movie’s flaws, Breton’s performance was charming and vulnerable, and when the world learned about the very authentic conditions under which the film was shot — real drugs, and that was just the tip of the iceberg — it made us worry about her. She was either fifteen or seventeen when Performance was made, depending on whom you believe. The making of Performance was a documented case of child abuse.

She made a few minor appearances in the ‘seventies, including a one-minute, uncredited role in Godard’s Weekend, but her career stalled. Stories abound about the dissolution that followed.

Still, she was alive as recently as 1995, when she gave an interview in which she stated, “I’ve done nothing with my life. Where did it start going wrong? I can’t remember. It’s something like destiny.”

Nine years later, a 2004 article in The Guardian reported that “Pallenberg and Breton succumbed to heroin, Breton fatally so.”

This article, though amended in 2022, has been quoted and requoted for years, most recently without attribution in an Australian website, which stated with seeming authority that she had succumbed to heroin addiction.

But, as a writer named Rich Flint has suggested, all of this probably comes from a line in Marianne Faithfull’s 1994 autobiography, in which Faithful wrote, “She became a heroin dealer in Marseilles shortly after the film and is, I think, probably dead by now.”

The writer of the Guardian piece told us that he probably “absorbed Marianne Faithfull’s comment via some intermediary piece…. I regret to think my repetition of what turned out to be hearsay had contributed to something false being taken as fact, particularly in respect of such a difficult story as Michèle’s…. Let’s hope she’s alive and well somewhere.”

Let’s hope. It sounds as though she is/was a nice, damaged person. And a good actress.

Melyssa Ha

Melyssa Ha is a comically “pervy” writer who used to post frequently on Twitter. She also wrote autobiographical essays on Medium, which were linked to her Twitter account.

Her tweets were witty; her essays were explicit, but funny and culturally insightful, uninhibited but not nearly as “pervy” as she claimed.

When she disclosed on Twitter that “Melyssa Ha” was not only a pseudonym but a kind of secret identity, known not even to her boyfriend, we reached out to her to write about her double-life for our magazine.

She thought about it for a while, then declined. She had writer’s block.

In the months that followed, she criticized Elon Musk and mused about leaving Twitter for good. Then, without warning, she was gone.

She also seems to have tried to scrub her entire literary oeuvre from Medium. An out-of-context essay remains; all the others, and her bio, have been erased.

Who was she really? A good writer, that’s all we’ll ever know.

Connie Converse

You may have seen an article in the Times in the last week about this singer/songwriter, who almost hit it big in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but just didn’t quite make it. She won a spot on the CBS morning show with Walter Cronkite, which was lost; her record album was never released. Frank Loesser deemed her uncommercial, and his music company passed.

(Full disclosure: Frank Loesser was my uncle, almost. He was my great-aunt’s brother; but not quite my uncle. I wish his company had done something for Connie Converse. How the world of music would be different today!)

She was Dylan-before-Dylan. She left New York, worked as a secretary, then vanished in 1974 at the age of fifty. She wrote a series of letters to friends and family announcing her intention to make a new life somewhere else.

In 2004, her music finally began to catch on, old recordings were released, and today she’s a hit on Spotify.

Maybe she committed suicide; maybe, indeed, she made a new life for herself. Back then, it was easier than it is today.

She would have been eighty in 2004; let’s hope she lived to see her renaissance.

Jon Etheredge

In the ‘aughts, self-publishing was re-dubbed “indie” publishing, and it had a little moment. Some writers, like J. L. Bryan and, of course, E. L. James, self-published genuine bestsellers.

The scene waned by 2011, due to a glut of awful self-pubbed books and a nasty change in Amazon’s algorithms that ghettoized self-pubbed authors. By 2012, when Jon Etheredge self-published his excellent neo-ghost story, Abigail Dare, the “indie” industry was dead.

This was too bad! Etheredge’s book is chilling, sweeping, intimate and scary in the most unexpected ways.

In 2022, I tried to reach Etheredge to talk about the tenth anniversary of the book’s publication, give it a little boost in this magazine, and hear his thoughts about the death of the indie book industry.

His email bounced; his Goodreads and Linked-In accounts are inactive. There is no obituary online.

Where did he go? Was he even a real person? Was that smiling face a stock photo?

One likes to think that quality will also rise to the surface, that the public is destined ultimately to discover a book as great as Abigail Dare. But it isn’t true. It doesn’t always happen.

But sometimes it does. And you can still buy it on Amazon; maybe the royalties are going somewhere, and he’ll know you bought his book.

^^^

Content by Oblivioni. Photograph by Kalyee Srithnam. Article written by Steven S. Drachman.

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Two Cheers for Obscurity and Oblivion: What is Wrong With a Legacy-less Life?

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A friend of mine told me recently that he wants to write a book, so that he will be remembered after he is gone.

“If I believe that my name will be carried forward somehow,” he said, “that is probably the most important thing.”

Why did he care? I wondered.

“Because I just do,” he replied.

Ah, legacy!

On Being Remembered in a Hundred Years

People think that if you write a book, you will be leave something permanent behind, and that people will remember you a hundred years from now.

Think of them, yesteryear’s authors of acclaim!

My friend seeks to join Ishbel Ross, for example, the first woman who worked fulltime for a daily American paper, and whose acclaimed and popular debut novel, Promenade Deck,sat on the bestseller lists for an entire year in 1932, spawning a film version that starred Zasu Pitts.

He yearns to be in the pantheon beside Joe David Brown, whose novels included Addie Pray, a bestseller turned into an Academy Award winning film starring Tatum O’Neal and a TV show that starred Jodie Foster.

How many people recognize the names Joe David Brown or Ishbel Ross today? Their books are long out of print. Promenade Deck warrants two reviews on Goodreads, one by me, one by someone to whom I recommended the book. The film version is so little remembered today, it doesn’t even appear in Rotten Tomatoes’ list of Zasu Pitts’ movies. Where can one watch it today? It may or may not be lost; no one cares. If you want to read the book, there is one copy for sale in the whole world. Some university libraries have archived copies. And this is a great book!

What about the famous movie stars of yesterday?

Remember Harrison Ford, a movie star quite popular in his heyday? He co-starred with Mary MacLaren in The Mysterious Mrs. M. He was a popular Jazz Age heartthrob who headlined around a hundred movies. No one remembers him today.

You’ve guessed that I don’t mean Harrison Ford, of Indiana Jones fame. I mean the other Harrison Ford, one of America’s first big movie stars. Our Harrison Ford originally billed himself as Harrison J. Ford to avoid confusion, but by 1970, a mere ten years after the silent star’s death, he quietly dropped the initial. No one would be confused, because no one would ever again remember the Harrison Ford who came before.

These were giants of their era; less than two generations later, they have vanished without a trace from public consciousness.

Why Do We Care About Legacy?

While many people aspire to leave a lasting legacy that will be remembered by future generations, the reality is that most of us will be forgotten in less than two generations, or even one, even by our families. What can you tell me about your great-grandfather? Maybe a little bit. What can you tell me about your great-great-grandmother? Her name? Maybe not even that.

I disabused my friend, the would-be-author, of the notion that writing a book will give him any kind of immortality. Even if you achieve some renown in the here-and-now, people will almost certainly not remember you.

How can we come to terms with this and still find meaning in our lives?

Why Do We Seek to Leave a Legacy?

There are many psychological reasons why you might seek to leave a legacy, including a desire for immortality, a need for purpose and a fear of death. Many cultural and societal influences reinforce the idea of legacy, such as the importance placed on famous historical figures, the emphasis on accomplishments and achievements, and tributes paid to those who have died. Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write something worth reading or do something worth writing,” and Shannon Adler opined, “A legacy is etched into the minds of others and the stories they share about you.” How many times have we heard this kind of thing: Whenever someone tells a joke, people will remember Jack Benny’s humor and wit. But this kind of thing is never true. I wish it were so; at the turn of the next century, people should still listen to Jack Benny’s old comedy radio shows, which dominated the 8 pm Sunday time slot for decades. But they won’t.

For many years, Jack Benny had a radio feud with a comedian named Fred Allen, who is today even more obscure than Benny. Fred Allen, one of the most popular stars at the time, a titan of vaudeville, radio and movies, saw it all coming; he titled his autobiography, Treadmill to Oblivion. It’s a really excellent book, by the way, acclaimed and wildly popular in its time. It’s out of print.

The Limits of Legacy

There are many historical and cultural factors that can determine who is remembered and who is forgotten. Wealth, power and social status are some of the factors that can influence how someone is remembered. For example, people who have held positions of power or influence, such as political leaders or wealthy individuals, are often remembered for their accomplishments or contributions to society. Julius Caesar killed a lot of people and was himself murdered, although his military strategies were ingenious and are still studied today. He leaves a legacy.

However, it’s important to note that the process of remembering and forgetting is not always fair or equitable. The selection of what is worthy of being preserved for future generations can be influenced by cultural and political reasons. Some people may be forgotten despite their contributions or accomplishments.

And some people may be remembered in ways that no one would especially desire. In 1974, Tom Stoppard wrote a play called “Travesties,” which centers on the figure of Henry Carr, an elderly man who reminisces about Zurich in 1917 during the First World War and his interactions with James Joyce when he was writing Ulysses, Tristan Tzara during the rise of Dada, and Lenin leading up to the Russian Revolution. Stoppard chose to feature Carr, a real-life figure whose main claim to fame was a little-known dispute with Joyce, because of Carr’s comical obscurity; Carr’s legacy, today, is that of a hapless fellow who inadvertently inspired a great play.

Similarly, Lisa Gherardini and Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga are remembered today, hundreds of years after their respective deaths, not for their own accomplishments, but as the inspiration for great works of art. You don’t even know their names, but you know their faces. The latter lived only to the age of eight, but his legacy has inspired the world for hundreds of years; he would doubtless have preferred a full life to an artistic legacy. Emmett Till’s murder helped bring about the civil rights movement; he inspired Rosa Parks to remain seated. “I thought of Emmett Till and when the bus driver ordered me to move to the back,” she later said. “I just couldn’t move.”

Emmett Till’s legacy is famous and impactful.

Still, he would have preferred a quiet childhood and a long life of obscurity.

Finding Meaning in a Legacy-less Life

Is there “meaning” in a forgotten life? A process known as “meaning-making” has arisen to address specifically that quandary.

Meaning-making is not a concept that was created by one person, but rather a term that has been used by various thinkers and researchers from different fields and disciplines, including Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and holocaust survivor,  who wrote about the importance of finding meaning in life, especially in the face of suffering and adversity, Robert Kegan, the  developmental psychologist who used the term “meaning-making” as a key concept in his theories of human development and counseling, and Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, educational critics and promoters of inquiry education who published a chapter called “Meaning Making” in their book Teaching as a Subversive Activity.

Meaning-making is a process by which you can construe, understand or make sense of life events, relationships and the self. Widely used in constructivist approaches to counseling psychology and psychotherapy as a way of learning that involves identities and emotions, meaning-making can help you find purpose and fulfillment in life, even if you are not remembered by future generations, and to develop more nuanced, complex and useful beliefs to live a better, more whole and happy life, to value life in this moment and to live and love fully, knowing that you may not get another chance.

Twenty years after your death, that editorial assistant who worked for you for six months at Novelty Press will occasionally recall that you were boring but OK and that guy who moved into the apartment on the 4th floor of your co-op in Park Slope will tell his grandkids what an asshole you were. And they will both be right. And twenty years after that, they will both be dead, and no one will know that the guy on the 4th floor of your co-op hated you, or that the editorial assistant at Novelty Press would have disagreed.

Finding meaning in life is a personal and subjective process that can vary from person to person, but there are a few easy rules of thumb: Focus on your relationships, pursue your passions and embrace the present moment.

Focus on relationships

Relationships with family, friends, partners, pets or community members can provide a sense of belonging, support, love and purpose. They can also enrich your lives with joy, laughter and shared experiences. To cultivate meaningful relationships, be present, attentive, empathetic and respectful of others — although you will not always succeed! (Accept your flaws, friend.) You can also express your gratitude, appreciation and affection for them. You can seek out people who share your values, interests and goals, and who inspire you to grow and learn.

Pursue your passions

Activities or causes in which you feel deeply interested or excited, or to which you are deeply committed, can provide you with a sense of fulfillment, creativity and self-expression. They can also challenge you to develop new skills, knowledge or perspectives. Identify what you enjoy doing, what you are good at or what you care about. Set realistic and attainable goals for yourself and celebrate your progress and achievements. Seek out opportunities to share your passions with others who appreciate them or benefit from them. It may be birdwatching, something that no one will note a hundred years from now. OK, then; pursue your passion for birdwatching and let future generations pay no attention.

Embrace the present moment

The present moment is the only moment over which you have control and that you can experience fully. It is also the moment that contains the most potential for meaning and happiness. To embrace the present moment, be mindful of your thoughts, feelings, sensations and surroundings. Practice gratitude for what you have and acceptance of what you cannot change. Seek out moments of beauty, wonder and awe in nature, art, music or spirituality.

How Was Your Day, Today?

While the desire to leave a legacy is understandable, consider the possibility that it’s not necessary, that it’s not even desirable. Embrace the present, focus on living a meaningful life now and find ways to make a positive impact in your own way. How was today? No one will remember it in a year’s time, you won’t even remember it a year from now, but you are experiencing it now, and how was it?

Shakespeare wrote that the evil people do will live on; but the good that people do will be utterly forgotten, “interred with their bones.” If you have done something terrible, people will really remember you. If you do something good … eh, not so much, as the kids say.

How many diners enjoyed the Sumptuary Restaurant during the 35 years that it graced the second floor of its 3rd Avenue storefront in Manhattan? Many many many! Yet who will speak of it in a hundred years? Who speaks of it today? Still, I had many great meals there. It was worthwhile, it was beautiful, during every single moment that it lasted and not a moment longer.

So what’s so bad about not being remembered a hundred years from now?

Not Even the Universe is a Forever-Thing

As I wrote back in 2012,

[A]m I the only person alive today who has read all Ishbel Ross’s novels? Are my daughters the only modern children who have read Peggy and Paul and Laddy? Including the authors’ families? I think I take a little strange pride in being a huge fan of something no one else remembers. Don’t even get me started on the Cleek books, the unfinished version of The Thief and the Cobbler, and the late Randy VanWarmer’s Terraform album. (Really. If you bump into me at a party, don’t get me started.)

…. We think that literary and commercial success brings us immortality of a certain sort. But it’s immortality of the most transient kind, which is to say, not immortality at all – it just seems like immortality while it’s happening. The same way everyone always insists that we will live on in the hearts of those who knew us, it’s the beauty of a firefly’s light. But a writer, musician or artist can still always dream that someday, seventy or eighty or a hundred years from now, we’ll entertain someone again, someone wandering through a dusty bookstore or looking on a shelf at a ramshackle vacation rental. So there’s always hope, I guess.

Till the human race goes extinct, that is, or the universe collapses.

There are two trillion galaxies in the universe, and around two million quintillion planets. There are only seven and a half quintillion grains of sand on Earth, which means that there are 267,000 times more planets out there than grains of sand on Earth. We are living our silly and insignificant little lives on just one of them. As I noted in 2017, our whole planet is less significant than a grain of sand on the beach. Our most famous and significant Earthling ever (Barack Obama? David Bowie? Cleopatra?) is less than a gnat in the whole scheme of things, because Earth is less than a gnat in the whole scheme of things.

It’

s all beyond your comprehension; you will drive yourself crazy trying to make sense of any of it.

So: Enjoy the here and now, on this grain of sand, if you can. Don’t worry about your legacy. Don’t even think about it.

Don’t.

^^^

Written by Steven S. Drachman; content and illustration © Oblivioni

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