Gimme Friction

I can’t remember how long Instagram has dominated the doomscroll, but it seems like forever. Over the time that I have been an active doomscroller, I have noticed that we have gone from seeing each other's cups of coffee to only hearing from our friends when they share a post. And now, I don’t seem to see many posts that come from people I actually know at all.

So it makes sense that people feel that if they don’t have their stuff on Instagram, they in effect do not exist. This is very relevant for artists and creative producers like myself. So what started off as a kind of peephole into other people's studio lives has become endless scrolling through artist reels specifically designed to ‘stop the scroll.’

This, I think, has cultivated a trend of playing to the audience, where artists are creating for the algorithm: that split-second opportunity they have to deploy a lethal dose of dopamine. In my opinion, that led to the rise of the photo-realistic art that has exploded on these scrolling superhighways. The instant likeness is like a bolt of lightening from the gods. “Wow.” And inevitably, that has ended up in actual physical galleries.

As Kyle Chayka notes in his 2024 book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture:

"Frictionlessness is always the Filterworld ideal: as soon as you slow down, you might just reconsider what you're clicking on. Friction allows people to think about their actions."

By removing the friction of human choice, the algorithm has prioritised the immediate over the meaningful. We have traded the grit of the studio for the gloss of the feed.

And now for something completely different. Enter AI and the protagonists, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. Now that an instantly recognisable and photo-realistic charcoal drawing is achieved in seconds, the gloss begins to tarnish.

It appears to me that AI is having the effect of making real, gritty, handmade art more valuable and that the new luxury is ‘made by hand.’ You can see that in recent art market reports; the 2026 forecast suggests that collectors are rejecting AI perfection in favour of visible humanity and intentional imperfection. They want to see the backstory, the friction, the process, the evidence of humanity. This should give us all hope.

As Seth Godin reminds us:

"Art is a human act, a generous contribution, something that might not work. You can be perfect or you can make art."

That is not to say that I do not respect or appreciate photorealistic art; I do believe that, like most genres, the best of it will remain relevant and compelling, rising above the two-second dopamine rush to leave a lasting impression and a meaningful statement of intent.

Generative AI is frictionless. It is excellent at interpolation (averaging out what things look like) but is currently quite poor at expressing what things mean without resorting to cliché. It also represents a purely functional proposition; if AI is great at playing chess, do we want to look at two AIs playing chess together? Do we want to look at art that is devoid of human connection?

I myself am currently exploring different ways of seeing and expressing myself through my art, seeking to use the vehicle of the subject to express the moment, the emotion, and meaning. I am moving away from "illustrating" the subject to expressing meaning through the subject.

Here are a few of my recent explorations.