This journal is likely to be a combination of discussions about my process in creating sculpture, carving steel, how I got my inspirations, and my tools. Also, maybe mixed with musings about art in general, the art world, other artists I admire, and discussions about technology and my dual paths in life - working in steel sculpture for 30 years and working as a product manager in tech companies for 35, 37 years. I've got a lot of thoughts to share. We'll see where it goes.
I'm doing an experiment with dictating straight into an AI dictation tool. This is likely to be rambling. Maybe I'll find that it's too rambling and I need to do some editing of it.
For now, I'm just going to play with the idea of what happens if I just talk. Probably mostly talking while I'm taking a walk in the forest, walking around the property wherever it is, and see how that translates into a blog. I'm already feeling like this might be a blog that I'm not interested in reading, so I might have to be more focused. I might have to actually start with an outline, a concept of what I want to get into.
I'm going to play around for now, see where it takes me. It's also an experiment in building the technology to make this happen. I'm using a tool right now called Google AI Edge Eloquent, which is an AI-powered dictation tool. I'm going to take the output of this formatted text and directly paste into a mobile CMS that I built using another AI tool called Antigravity to post that directly to my website.
I'm looking for a way to streamline the process so that as the thoughts come up, they can easily be captured and put onto the blog page without a lot of extra steps, without a lot of blocks in the way to prevent me from actually posting. I feel like fewer blocks in the way will be an inspiration to do more posting, not getting stuck in the feeling that everything has to be perfect, not getting stuck in the idea that I have to edit and reedit until it sounds perfectly right and I sound like a brilliant mind, a brilliant poet. Get out of the way and let it flow. Turn it into some sort of stream of consciousness. Perhaps you won't like that. I don't know. I'm just going to see where it goes.
For now, this is the first blog post through this experiment. I hope that there will be many more. I hope that they will become interesting in some way. If not, that's the point of experiments, right? You try, you fail, you learn, you grow, you change. That's the whole goal. The whole goal is to, well, Joseph Campbell said it best:
What is the meaning of life?... It's simply the experience of being alive.
That's why I've kept creating art for 30 years, for my whole life really, but 30 solid years of carving steel whenever I make the time and have the energy for it — so that I could experience that feeling of being alive.