A gentle seduction
The value of friction in creativity.
ML Issue 52 - A weekly takeaway for creatives đĽĄ
âThe most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.â
Lite Bites
đ The word studio comes from the Latin studium, meaning zeal, or to study.
đ CĂŠzanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire nearly 80 times. He believed that painting from nature wasnât the objective, rather it was to achieve sensations.
đď¸ Agnes Martin destroyed most of her work created before the late 1950âs, and started again from nothing at the age of 44.
Monaâs notes
I was a kid who doodled in the margins of everything: books, homework, magazines. Painted everywhere. Quiet, introverted, pretty sheltered - the kind of girl who spent a lot of time inside her own head, building and dreaming (and I still do!)
Then technology arrived, and it started pulling things out of meâŚ
The Walkman and Discman gave me a private room. Borrowing music from the library, I discovered things about myself in those headphones, alone in public. When the internet arrived, I heard the sound of the dial-up connection and felt something I can only describe as a handshake with eternity. The tamagotchi, Gameboy, the first phone with a camera: I was a complete sucker for all of it. Never technical, but each one let me do something I couldnât do before.
When the pandemic hit and I gave up my workbench in Hatton Garden, I decided to learn Computer Aided Design (CAD) for jewellery to continue creating, and I noticed my ideas evolving differently. Thatâs when something shifted. The constraint wasnât the problem. Instead it was the engine, pushing my practice into a shape it wouldnât have found otherwise.
AI seems to have arrived the same way. A gentle seduction: incremental and frictionless, with each step feeling like the obvious next one. But this time it feels different. My ideas arrive faster than they ever have. They blossom quickly and furiously, and die just as fast.
I have always made things in the friction and now, using AI, I am realising the value of that resistance, and the cost of losing it.
Speed isnât always the answer if you lose fidelity, quality, authenticity, or the precious feeling of flow.
The temptation is to use the new toy on everything, but we need to flex our judgement on quality: Is the output really better, or just quicker than you?
â Love Mona x
p.s.
If youâre a creative sitting with similar feelings (what these tools are actually for, and what they might cost) this week I made something using AI that reintroduces the right type of friction, deliberately:
đ¨The AI Prompt Toolkit for Artists - Eight structured prompts built for a careful creative practice: artist statements, idea development, research, client conversations. A framework for thinking more precisely about your own work Not shortcuts.
Free, always, at realmonalisa.com.
p.p.s. Whatâs the tool (digital or physical) that changed what you thought you were capable of making?
p.p.p.s. If this resonated, please forward it to one artist who needs to hear it today.
Q: What is your exact favourite time in the day?
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