alcohol marker and color pencil; 16×20″
“Imagine you spend your entire life perfecting a craft, It could be something like music, animation, or digital art. Next imagine you place all you can into your art in hopes of getting a job having to do with that perfection and you finally get the job and are living your dream. Then one day your boss calls you up, you don’t know why but you decide to go to his office since you can’t really argue with your boss. Then your boss sits you down and explains that you are getting fired not because you are a bad artist but because an A.I. art service is cheaper than you and so all your life’s work is thrown away all because you wanted payment for your work and the boss decided he would rather use an A.I. to do his art than pay you. In my art piece I drew a picture with two halves in order to show the divide between human artists and A.I. “artist”. On the halve representing A.I. I had a lot of robots in cubicles making “art” on computers. I did this because cubicle jobs are often seen as a soul sucking job which I felt worked perfectly for the A.I. since I feel it really shows how the A.I. is lifeless. I also used cold colors to show just how cold the atmosphere was and I didn’t color the robots in since I feel having no color further emphasizes how the robots have no soul.I also had the A.I side be very box-like in design and I used box imagery to further show how the atmosphere felt boxed in and suffocating.”
ARTIST BIO: Drake BASTIN is a grade 11 student at Butler Tech School of Art studying art under art teacher Mary Catherine Ruby.