A few months ago I was thinking about what Google Lens would find in my work. What similar works, anything derivative or clear influences. I went through three key areas of my work: Drawing, painting and aerosol. All of my work is eclectic and I sometimes use found references, I draw from life, I take photographs, I capture video and use stills.

A lot of obvious influences came up in my drawing and painting from Google Lens searches such as De Kooning, Auerbach, general Cubism but they weren’t derivative as in I copied them but clearly influenced by them. I do love these artists and I am also influenced by Gerhardt Richter which is why I work from photos as well.

With aerosol work searches my own work popped up with similar works, generally messy graffiti and portraits but nothing derivative or influenced by any particular artists. There was a piece I did recently that had a Dez piece pop up and I can see the relationship in that it was clearly New York style letterforms but not a rip off of Dez.

With style writing or aerosol work, it is a new artform overall and Google Lens didn’t come up with clear results at least with what I do besides showing some of my other work and just random aerosol work. What worries me about that though is does the way we view art in general translate into the coded aerosol format which although original gets lost in its inability to be understood and viewed by anyone other than other aerosol artists?

Years ago I wrote a small book called ‘Reading the World’ published on iBooks where I discussed the problem of anyone actually seeing aerosol art at all. It talked about a few different topics on the subject and I felt that being out in the public meant that people were too distracted by getting from one place to the next to really see the world around them. 

It is too hard to make the time unless for some reason you do notice it and for most people it is just more noise in the environment. Yet I am influenced by messy graffiti although I didn’t like the results from Google Lens that appeared. For example I like work by Neck Face but I don’t derive any clear influence from him, it’s just the messiness of it I like. Neck Face didn’t pop up in the searches by the way.

My first thoughts on looking at Google Lens was would it find correlations from all of the references in a lot of my work. I would go to do a work and bring all sorts of references and drawings, video stills and kind of combine them into the work I documented. What I found though was Google Lens couldn’t see anything other than a messy graffiti work and found other messy graffiti works that had nothing to do with my process or references in the work.

Google Lens couldn’t see anything in particular either in what I and other graffiti artists see which is a clear distinct work different from other graffiti works. Talk about getting put straight in the trash by big tech. I suppose these tools are just an extension of the status quo and what we define as art or non art. What exists or doesn’t exist.

A lot of street art is derivative and that is a feature of street art, style writing is original in comparison but can be coded although that is normally original coding. Lately a great name in the aerosol scene Merda made a ban on painting birds as a way to talk about the way a lot of mural artists working for councils rip images off Google Images without respecting the copyright of the original photographer or artist.

He explains that a lot of councils could get into trouble with copyright infringement and should have standards around making original work that isn’t derivative. Merda then became ‘Birdman’ the private investigator and found many clear examples of derivative work and showed how easy it is to find the original photographer through metadata. It shows the inherent laziness of a lot of highly paid muralists who pump out bird murals on a conveyor belt of unoriginality. 

I suppose the uniformity and ease of making derivative work is inherently locked into the technology we rely on everyday. Anything remotely original is too hard to define or deal with with some technologies. Even the backgrounds of the meticulously copied birds are fairly lacklustre without the plagiarised bird as a feature. I think that is sad and original artists like photographers who sometimes have cameras worth more than a car aren’t credited or celebrated for their inspiring work.

I guess this sort of generic factory like mural creation, spending of government grants and money derived from rates is exactly what people want. It just has to look ‘nice’ and it’s ok no matter how much it damages the real creators of these images that are plagiarised by mural artists who are basically lazy and unethical. Lazy and unethical though, sounds like politics which sounds like everything else in what I have called many times as a shit society. I know that sounds harsh but if anyone has a brain cell to clang together and is remotely ethical the signs are everywhere.