Mike's sketch

We have all the time in the world

Wanda pondered the canvas before her, palette in hand, mixing the finely ground pigment into a puddle of nano-polymer medium. In a matter of moments the pigment would arrange itself into an array of iridescent crystalline structures that would create pleasing undulating surfaces on the mirco-structure canvas. Wanda was still unsure of the speed in which the structure would form, this was a new pigment derived from metals that had been mined on an asteroid off-planet. While much off-planet mining activities were geared towards gathering raw materials for infrastructure projects and building materials, there were always a portion of materials set aside for leisure-production, the nano-painters guild being one of the prime recipients of this allocation.

As the paint self-arranged into small nested lattice structures, Wanda tried to reflect on how this latest canvas she was working on would fit into the canon of contemporary nano-painting. Wanda had a lot of time to think about these sorts of things, it was almost as if time for reflection was a built-in component of the process, just as important as the computation and transmission of programmatic information that would download from the brush into the program of the liquid medium transmitting through the particles of the pigment. She often thought about what it must have been like for artists before the Collective era, in that heightened period before the adoption of the grand network. Just before the last collapse when the pre-intelligent market forced painters into an unsustainable pace cranking out market-derivative security-backed canvases in vain attempt to keep the engine of global financial capital from coming to a grinding halt. How many painters had collapsed, literally painting themselves to death ? It struck her as deeply ironic how things only got worse for that generation of painters when the crude first batch of counterfeit canvases flooded market, generated by decommissioned factory robots running on those neural nets that were just on the cusp of becoming something else. And something else they would become, but not before the market bubbles and cluster collapses brought the whole pre-intelligent regime down. In those days the old academies would teach about the revolutionary power of art, but they never predicted that it was the collapse of the art market precipitated by the intelligent machines would bring the whole system down. It was only a matter of time, Wanda though, before we would have so much more time.

With how scarce time must have been in those days, it was a wonder that anything could develop. It was almost as if we were a different species back then, she thought, could the human mind even conceive of the type of experience that Wanda was attempting in her latest body of work? How could they ever devote the full week required to absorb the full sensorium expressed in the subtle evolutions and shifting optics of her finely considered nano-canvases. Wanda shuddered at the thought of her ancestors stealing a 15 second glance at a canvas as the rushed through the museum counting the seconds before they have the perform the useless labour that would soon before done some much more efficiently and quickly by intelligent algorithms. Just as it was inscribed on the wall of the Grand Server temple, “We have all the time in the world.” We have all the time in the world.