On Originality in the Age of Weirdness: Part II

When I started teaching in 2006—at the same university where I still teach—the cultural landscape was noticeably different than it is today (. . . obviously). This was before online streaming existed as a formidable presence and long before AI saturated the media ecosystem. Back then, one way I introduced students to experimental filmmaking (a much more esoteric art mode than it is today) was through a sub-genre called culture-jamming, a form of subversive media that uses parody, satire, and appropriation to disrupt or critique dominant institutions, especially corporate advertising and mass media. The core purpose was exposing the hidden power structures behind the messages we absorb every day.

During that period, I was taking students to those less traveled landscapes and introducing them to something new and edgy. Within my Gen X worldview, there was the mainstream and the weird - and you had to go more out of your way to find the weird. And that’s what made the whole process exciting. 

Somewhere along the way between 2006 and now, however, mainstream and the weird became indistinguishable. For me personally, the critical mass point arrived when I showed an example of an absurd found footage news mashup in class and some of my students didn’t understand it was satire. This wasn’t a denseness on their part but rather a sign that the mainstream and the weird had started to merge. 

For several years, my preferred path to originality as a media creator was via the weird. There was a pleasure I felt when experiencing that particular flavor of novelty, myself - whether in a song, a work of art or a film. So, I wanted to create works that generated that same type of pleasure for myself and others. 

If one nail in the coffin for the weird as novelty was the point at which the surreal news cycle became mundane, another is generative AI.

[Side note 1: I’m sure there are many more nails, but I’m just singling out these two.]

I don’t have a straightforward love-or-hate relationship with AI. It’s complicated—and that’s what makes it interesting. What does disturb me is the massive amount of energy it consumes to operate and evolve. Beyond that, things feel fuzzy.

One of the things that fascinates me about generative AI art and other AI media creations is its ability to collapse the weird into the mundane. On the one hand, if I want an image of a pink and blue spotted rhinoceros serving shots at a bar, I can prompt Midjourney to spit out several iterations of an image that fits that description. And at the same time, there are thousands of other Midjourney users feeding countless image prompts into the platform and birthing other dreamlike images - all of these images tinted with a certain Midjourneyness. 

[Side note 2: It feels fitting that the mainstreaming of psychedelics—after decades of taboo—has unfolded alongside the collapse of the weird and/or dreamlike into the mundane.]

One criticism about generative AI, particularly when it comes to writing, is that it flattens the creative landscape. Individual voices might give way to either corporate-speak or some amalgamation of well-known authors or speakers. So one could argue the body never really has a soul.

I wonder, though, if generative AI is just speeding up a path we were already on. Even before AI, creators were chasing originality—sometimes pushing into the strange just to stand out. But when weirdness becomes the goal, rather than the outcome of deeper process, it starts to feel like empty calories: novelty without nourishment. Add to this the growing tsunami of content in general and it becomes harder and harder to wow - or be wowed - amidst the volume of voices.

At the same time, much of what gets made now loops endlessly through familiar patterns, softened by algorithms into a safe, palatable blur. Originality is still possible—but harder to recognize when both extremes are accelerating at once.

Again, it’s not that we weren’t already headed this way. Formulaic movies, TV shows, music etc. as well as cultural memes existed long before AI. Generative content has just amplified this trend. And at the same time, I have always felt that generative AI is  also dreaming its own dreams - but that’s for another post.

There is a deeper current to all of this that makes it a bit of a challenge to write about because I have to squint to see it myself and it shifts in and out of focus. Having grown up with a product based mindset, I realize that I’ve been framing the conversation around originality from a very limited perspective.  

The value of originality is not just about creating something completely new. It does not live in a vaccum. Sure, I guess I could make random noises with my mouth and call it an original language because no one else has made those exact noises before but then what’s the point if the noises don’t actually mean anything to anyone listening and especially to me.

Since my days as a film production teacher who championed originality, I have become exhausted by the concept of originality. There’s a reason the biblical phrase “there’s nothing new under the sun,” resonates so deeply with so many. And the irony that my quoting this proverb in this post may come off as . . . well . . . unoriginal isn’t lost on me.

In order for something to be original, it must be compared to something that is unoriginal in the same way that you can’t have insides without outsides. It becomes a competition - externally motivated. How original can you get? It’s exhausting. I know. I spent so many years trying to be original that I feel like I missed the point of it all when I was in this mode - which by the way is very product based.

But perhaps there is an originality that is not based in out-originaling others - where one can take the best parts of originality; the adventure and the novelty while also grounding it in something more primal. We’ve all figured this out already anyway - at least our bodies have, as have the trees with their many different branching forms, the animals we share our world with and all life forms for that matter. No two snowflakes are alike and yet they share formal qualities.

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In the third and final installment of this topic (and to me personally, the most yummy), I’ll explore the idea or originality, not just as an end unto itself, but as a byproduct of an attempt to contact the “source material” or origin of creative energy.