In Short
Digital art made in collaboration with various artificial intelligences. So far, mostly imaginary girls. I figured I'd get tired of making them at some point and start making something else, but that point still has yet to come.
Artistic Goals (in the most general sense imaginable)
Make things that make good things happen.
Official(ish) Bio
My name is billy Z duke, and I'm the "human" in "inhumantouch." I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree (with top academic honors) from Mason Gross School of the Arts (NJ state school Rutgers University's arts college) and was the first Rutgers student ever accepted for a junior year abroad at the Slade School of Fine Art in University College London. My primary concentration back then was oil painting, but as time went on, I branched out into multiple media, ranging from minimal, digitally-printed text-only pieces to sculptures in various media and larger-scale, site-specific installations, usually used as settings for related performance art pieces and/or pre-recorded video presentations.
"Magnificent [Outpainted]", Self-Portrait with Sheet Magnifier, Photo + Photoshop, 2000 + DALL-E 2 Digital Outpainting, 2022
After graduation I moved to NYC and entered the job market, which has proven to be, as with most anyone else I've ever known with artistic inclinations, a very mixed bag. In retrospect, I think I went about acquiring and becoming accustomed to the wrong kinds of jobs for my temperament (full time, in-office, at a desk), and this would repeatedly lead to relatively rapid burnout in every subsequent position, as I struggled against the repetition of the daily grind to find the time and energy to pursue any of the creative goals I would always find more personally meaningful. As early on as my first such office job in the city, I began to pacify my frustrations by veering toward any available computers, because a) I'd already observed how colleagues making art-for-hire were treated, and I didn't think I could hack a design gig involving constant requests for revision to artistic output in which I'd inevitably become emotionally invested, and b) I found it somewhat less stressful to work more with computers and less with co-workers. At the second office job, I began to teach myself HTML (super easy to pick up if you ever "revealed codes" in WordPerfect waaaay back in the day) and coding for the web.
My timing, in this one mid-90's historical respect, was quite fortunate: the web soon expanded exponentially, and thus various flavors of internet development (front-end, back-end, application layer, full-stack, etc.) have kept me largely employed since then (at least until quite recently) and able to support myself well enough for the past couple of decades. But with each subsequent gig, I noticed I became more stringently confined to the narrow "career path" I'd never really chosen, but only defaulted to; the boundaries of which were more firmly delineated by every new acronym I added to the already Scrabble-worthy pile on my resume. Yet no interviewers have ever once seemed remotely impressed by the fact that I managed to acquire all of my programming knowledge without a computer science degree or any formal training whatsoever (and in fact, many interviews have seemed intentionally constructed to filter out self-taught candidates like myself who lacked those prerequisites).
My real job, this entire time, regardless of the specific employer, ultimately boiled down to a constant search for new ways to make the work interesting enough to keep myself focused on it, to ignore the sense of creeping dread, the feeling that I had started a digital crossword puzzle that was too large to ever finish, that no one ever expected anyone to finish. Yet the unspoken expectation to work on it forever (or at least until I keeled over) almost every single weekday remained, above all else. Sure, I make it sound dramatic, but this is what I meant by these jobs being wrong for my temperament (although by this point in my life, knowing full well that jobs more appropriate for my temperament, particularly in this field, don't necessarily exist, I think it's more likely that capitalism itself is simply incompatible with my temperament). I could walk away right now (and I've tried, on several occasions), never look at code again, and have no regrets about that. As Rust Cohle warned in the first season of True Detective: "Life's barely long enough to get good at one thing. Be careful what you get good at."
Self Portrait Outtake for 2021-11-30 Live Solo Show Promo
On a less dire-sounding flip side, though coding jobs have eluded me lately, I have been slowly teaching myself Python anyway, which, if coding at all will have any part in my future, seems like the smartest path to take. "Web development" as I once knew it barely exists anymore. ChatGPT has already eliminated a staggering number of programming jobs in just the last few years of its nascent existence. I've been doing a Udemy course and using the knowledge gained from there (and from decades of JavaScript and PHP) to write small scripts that can automate certain repetitive tasks, such as creating motion graphics to accompany my AI-assisted artwork (especially now that generative AI video capabilities are ramping up). As far as I can tell, Python is also the language behind the deep learning processes of the AI engines themselves, which would make related knowledge even more crucial. But I digress. Let's get back to talking about art, back to when I graduated and moved to New York:
The very process of attaining my degree had brought with it an increasing sense of disillusionment with artmaking in general. The program at Mason Gross was heavily focused on helping students hone their artistic intentions and craft personal manifestos, whereas I had been expecting (and hoping for) more technical instruction in various media and processes (which was available there, albeit only in the printmaking department, which, as a painting major, I never really breached). At the time I had zero desire to analyze why I made art, because time spent analyzing felt like time I could have better spent just continuing to make things. I wanted greater and wider mastery of my creative skills, but I was repeatedly pushed to stop and think instead.
Of course there are useful aspects to be found in both approaches, but at the time I wasn't ready to be stopped, and I certainly didn't want to think, at least not about my art, which for me was all about feeling. It was the one haven in my life where I didn't have to think, where I could just pay tribute to whatever ideas had appeared that I'd fallen in love with, by manifesting them into the physical world. This process had always made its own automatic kind of sense, that for me defied rational explanation or analytical examination. And to be honest, I was afraid to try and stop it, or even to stand in its way, afraid that the ideas would stop choosing me as their conduit. Regular religion had never worked for me (which feels even more true these days), it was beauty that I worshipped. And, like its own breed of deity, that beauty always seemed to be entering me from somewhere else: somewhere to which I had limited, if not exclusive, access; somewhere better, more perfect than here could ever be.
From my vantage point in the present, obviously there were plenty of good reasons to stop and think. But at the time, the further I engaged with Mason Gross's prescribed process, the less attached I felt to my own. This resulted, at least temporarily, in a wider array of artistic experimentation, desirable in and of itself, but by the final year I wasn't actually painting at all anymore. Spending my junior year at the Slade in London was also a mixed blessing, I wanted to stay, to transfer there and graduate, and I couldn't afford to, so my senior year back in NJ felt like returning to ground I'd already covered all too thoroughly. My fears had, to some extent, come true: the lovely ideas were coming fewer and further between. I had no sense of what I might aim to do next once I'd completed the curriculum, and thus I... got a job, because that's just what I'd always been told you're supposed to do after you graduate college.
Female, Six Kits (Extra Large), Mixed Media Installation, New Brunswick, NJ 1992
Thus began a lot of time just living my life without making any art, at least not visual art. I used my free time to focus more on music composition and live performance (assembling various backing bands) as my artistic outlet. The most recent such collective was The Wrong Windows, which technically still exists, although, after the unfortunate societal decimation of the pandemic, it's back to basically just me as the lone member, making continued production/performance more of a time-and-energy suck than it already was (and believe me, as much as I loved doing it, it certainly already was).
I always suspected I would return to visual art at some point, but was still pleasantly surprised to be so inspired by the emergence of generative AI in late summer 2022, and have been doing little else with my spare time but messing with that ever since. I decided to return to my high school artmaking roots, when I would spend a lot of time doodling imaginary girls in the margins of whatever notebook whose contents I happened to be bored stiff by at the time, and quickly developed a system (primarily using DALL-E 2, often with a dash of GFPGAN facial restoration and always with generous helpings of Adobe Photoshop) to create enticing alterna-girls from sheer ether, and place them in settings that were as intriguing as possible.
Working with any generative AI as a collaborator has been and continues to be an extremely interesting experience, and somewhat a different one from making more traditional art on my own. Although these AIs cannot be knocked for significantly compressing (by several orders of magnitude, it would seem) the amount of time it takes to craft a decent image, this particular partnership frequently requires me to loosen my grip on exactly what I'm trying to achieve, to pick up on subtleties (or not-so-subtleties) that the AI is suggesting and run with / emphasize / enhance them, rather than reject and quash generation after generation until it happens to produce something more in line with "what I want." There's no guarantee, after all, that taking the latter path will ever result in a success, the only guarantee there is massive frustration.
"Curse of the Hairy Palm (Panel 2: C-Face) [Outpainted]", Oil on Canvas, 1992 + DALL-E 2 Digital Outpainting, 2022
Of the publicly available options, I originally preferred using DALL-E, mostly because of OpenAI's brilliantly simple, intuitive online editor interface (known as the "labs" site), which made inpainting (altering select portions of an already-generated image) and outpainting (extending the frame of an existing image, i.e., "zooming out" or "uncropping") extremely easy and quick (at least when their site wasn't being hammered too hard and my internet "provider" wasn't clamping down on my bandwidth). Creating and revising images in this piecemeal, quasi-mosaic fashion allowed me to remain deeply involved in a process of ongoing creation, as opposed to the "one-and-done" nature of prompt-then-image that one initially got with alternative engines Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.
At a certain arbitrary point in time (specifically, late October / early November 2022), my dependence on DALL-E definitely began to have significant downsides, when it suddenly decided to start sucking (for lack of a better descriptor) for no apparent reason. Suddenly, it took a lot more effort (and more generations, meaning more paid credits) to get output I considered sufficient/satisfying/high quality, when I could get it anymore at all. I've spent a lot of time since trying to figure out if, after an initial string of dozens of almost instantly "successful" images, this shift was due to some adjustment in my own perception/expectations (I've definitely become more perfectionist over time), some failing on the part of the AI, or a little bit of both, and to tell you the truth I still can't say for sure. No one else I've found seems to have had a remotely similar experience. I continued to hope that OpenAI would release an upgraded labs site for DALL-E 3, but they never did. With ChatGPT as their flagship product (with new image engine 4o already tied into that), and other image (and now video) engines outpacing OpenAI's efforts at every turn, a new labs site seems less and less likely the more time passes.
Meanwhile, out of frustration, necessity, and curiosity, I've spent much more time learning the ropes of Midjourney, various iterations of Stable Diffusion, and other, even newer sites/engines such as Recraft, Black Forest Labs' FLUX, and krea.ai (which has been serving as a handy central hub, offering access to multiple engines from a single website). Each of these continues to offer fairly regular upgrades to newer versions at a pace I've never experienced with any prior technology. My current workstation's central MacBook is one generation too old to run any of this stuff that can be run locally (goddammit), so for the time being I've been forced to resort to online subscription options to facilitate further experimentation. It's still rare that I feel like I'm successfully replicating the initial sense of interaction/collaboration I could achieve using DALL-E 2's labs site, I've continued to soldier onward. Compelled to combine results from multiple engines and frequently pick up the AI's slack to achieve the kind of images I'm after, I've inadvertently learned more about the intricacies of Photoshop in the past 3 years than I had in total over the previous 20.
"Arranged Marriage", Performance/Installation Detail, London, 1993
In early 2025, I began to experiment with both AI-generated audio and video as well, and plan to integrate the more successful results of these experiments into my online output within the year.