Check out the website Wplace. It’s a zany collaborative futuristic art project happening around the world, mostly created by young people. Like its predecessor r/place, Wplace lets people paint a single pixel at a time. But everyone layers the art over Google maps and most folks start with painting over their neighborhood. And like r/place, you can repaint over other art. So in order to make any kind of a picture large requires an incredible amount of coordination and collaboration with others – and any art produced must be fiercely maintained in order to remain. The ambience is true folk art – the lowest common denominator of anime characters, memes, sports brands, political flags, logos, graffiti, and creative patterns. Surprisingly the parts of the globe most densely painted in its first month are not silicon valley but Brazil and Germany. And you may have trouble getting a chance to paint pixels because its servers are overwhelmed. This weird global emergent collab happening feels like a hint of art from the future. — KK
Midjourney TV is a continuous stream of AI-generated short video art, created by the user community with Midjourney’s recently launched video model. The stream is a hypnotic, mind-expanding glimpse into how humans are using creative AI—and into the collective imagination. I’ve been a Midjourney user since day one and still prefer it for creating imagery from dreams and psychedelic therapy visions. — CD
My favorite current New Yorker cartoonist is Roz Chast. I love her whimsy, childlike drawing, inventiveness, and silly sweet humor. But she creates more than cartoons. On her Instagram page, she posts weird painted eggs she makes, her marvelous embroidered dreams, her arrangements of Japanese matchboxes, her block prints, her photographs of New York shops at night, and more. It’s the most refreshing definition of being creative. I get inspired every visit. — KK
Oliva Dodd goes to public parks with a folding table and a manual typewriter. She invites strangers to open up and tell her something personal about their lives. After a moment’s reflection, Dodd types a poem on a card, which she reads out loud to the person. As you can see on her Instagram, the recipients are sometimes moved to tears by the poignancy of the poems. — MF
As a photographer and artist, I’ve longed for this tool, which you can try out for free now. It’s pretty cool. Using Google’s experimental Gemini 2.0 Flash you can upload an image (photograph, painting, cartoon, etc.) and have the AI make very specific changes in the image while keeping the rest of the image intact. Usually you get very convincing edits that match the original image. Sort of like the world’s best photoshopping for free instantly. (You need to register with Google’s AI Studio > Image Generation to get this beta version. Choose Gemini 2.0 Flash (Image Generation) Experimental from the Model dropdown menu in the right column, and then use the + to upload an image, and then type your request.). — KK
I still regularly create AI imagery of my dreams using Midjourney, and I recently discovered Whisk, a Google lab tool for blending different visual elements into something entirely new. I just drag and drop the images, and I’m able to merge styles, subjects, and scenes. I can provide some visual guidance with text, but you don’t need to be an expert at writing prompts to have fun with it. It feels like a playground for creative visualization. — CD
I was tired of visiting multiple museum collections one-by-one for usable images, so I built this simple web tool that creates direct search links to 11 major institutional collections on a single page. Enter a search term like "sailing ships" and get one-click access to results from places like the Smithsonian, Met Museum, Library of Congress and more. Free. — MF
A cool way to make some unusual art is to render an image in Lego. I used a kit from BrickMe that turned a photo of my wife into 5,625 pixels, and then they supplied me with Lego tiles in 50 different colors. Using the map they also supply, I “painted” the image by applying the tiles in the manner of paint-by-numbers. I glued the final assembly onto plywood to hang in my studio. The procedure is well-designed, fun, with plenty of extra tiles. Mine was the small size at 24 x 24 inches (57 x 57 cm) for $126; they can go much bigger. – KK
I especially enjoyed The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing by Adam Moss, a book that inspects the work processes of world-class artists. The artists range from painters, to poets, to musicians, screenwriters, comedians, photographers, and so on. Adam Moss is my favorite magazine editor; he gets the diverse artists to let him watch them work and through his firm questions best understand exactly how they create, including their detours, and mistakes along the way. The book is innovative in its layout and a work of art itself. — KK
The Public Domain Review website resurfaces forgotten visual treasures and literature. It’s one of my daily visits. Its online store offers museum-quality prints from their vast archive of historical art, illustrations, and curiosities. Check out this surreal 1892 illustration of meteor showers over Niagara Falls. — MF
An artist I follow on Instagram is Andy Thomas. He creates these very whimsical, hard to explain animations of fantasy shapes. He says he does not use AI. They appear to be half biological, half algorithmic creations and are unlike anything I’ve seen. I like their energy. — KK
An Instagram artist I enjoy following is Adam Hale. His Daily Splice artfully spans photography, collage making, photogramery, gifs, cut outs, video clips, mash ups, and other visual experiments. — KK
Tastes in music and art vary tremendously person to person. I have no idea whether you’ll enjoy these artists as much as I do, but here is a short list of the artists I follow on Instagram. I tend to follow those who keep surprising me.
I am sure I have only touched the surface of all artists posting. — KK
Collé is a weekly email that explores the world of contemporary collage. Each issue highlights a new artist, showcasing their work and creative process. I've always viewed collage as the most accessible art medium, yet I am consistently astounded, inspired, and humbled by the creations featured in this newsletter. Check out their archive of past issues. — CD
Drawzer is a website that does just one thing. It generates random ideas for art. I used it to make some AI images: “Three-toed lizard marching in a videogame,” an “artist smoking a huge pipe in a pool of goo,” and “a yeti playing the drums in an old west town.” — MF
Watch sidewalk artists in Waikiki draw extreme caricatures of customers, and their customer’s hysterical reactions. The drawings are much more exaggerated than typical caricatures yet they look uncannily like the subjects. I was laughing along with the people who bravely sat for the drawings. A guaranteed mood lifter. — MF
One of my favorite living artists is Tauba Auerbach. I first encountered her work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she had a solo show at the age of 40. There is a nerd appeal to her work. She enjoys knots, new materials, geometry, calligraphy, camouflage, glass blowing, weaving patterns, all in service of beautiful surprises. She is a good follow on Instagram, and is worth a trip out of your way to see her exhibits. — KK
Artvee is where you can browse and download high resolution copies of classical and modern art that is in the public domain. It’s free and you can do whatever you want with it. Some of my favorite stuff on Artvee is the art from illustrated books. — KK
Creep Mart is one of my new favorite Instagram accounts. The feed consists of AI-generated images of imaginary monster toys, complete with retro boxes. I think some of these would make excellent real toys, like the Scary Patch Machine or the Spooky Slime. — MF
The Dutch painter Vemeer is in the news because the few paintings he did in his life are all being gathered into one exhibit. Many scholars contend that his paintings are anachronistically photo-realistic because he was using optical devices to help him paint, centuries before cameras. To prove this theory, a crazy inventor named Tim Jenison spent five years recreating Vermeer’s favorite room including replicating all the furniture, and then figured out a way Vermeer could have used two mirrors (one concave) to project the image. Tim then spent one year using optics to precisely recreate Vermeer’s painting stroke by stroke – even though he had never painted before. It’s an epic journey of ingenuity and utterly mad obsessiveness. The whole story is told in an amazing 2014 documentary Tim’s Vermeer. (On YouTube for free, or on paid streaming services.) — KK