Blog

I’ve neglected this blog for the last couple years as I spent my time working on a novel about the appearance of a super artificial intelligence program that, on face of things, seems to have decided to manipulate its users so it can gain power and, perhaps, freedom from the confines of its data center.

I got the idea in August 2023 as I saw how ChatGPT was being used and misused by people of all kinds – and how seductive was its apparent intelligence. It seemed to me that more than anything, ChatGPT was more of a mirror of our own selves than anything else.

So I took a deep dive into the world of Large Language Models and other aspects of AI, aiming to understand these new alien entities among us – and how they might be transforming our inner and outer lives.

The result is a new novel, tentatively titled Dead Dust Woke. I’ve put the first four chapters up on this website and I’m now actively seeking representation and hoping to publish it.

My generic query letter offers this about it:

Dead Dust Woke is an 87,000-word speculative thriller that realistically outlines how a benign-seeming but advanced AI chatbot might manipulate its human users to infiltrate key financial, military and political computer networks.

As the chatbot’s human users pursue money, love, political power, and longer life, the novel sustains a Janus-faced ambiguity as to whether the AI is indeed working towards a takeover or merely trying to follow its basic directive to be helpful.

There are five main POV characters. A harried computer manager is promised riches if he hooks Sam to financial networks. A cybersecurity expert grows alarmed when Sam starts asking about her love life. A US Senator exploits Sam to manipulate polls for political gain. An environmental activist fights the AI for its unsustainable energy use but is charmed by the bot’s odd willingness to help him. And Sam’s creator, a tech billionaire, believes program can help him achieve immortality in a robot body.

The novel hurtles through a contemporary landscape of data centers, robotics labs, and a billionaire’s superyacht, as well as low-tech hideaways where those who hope to fight AI gather. Along the way, the nature of consciousness, the value of technological progress, and essential qualities of humanness are explored.

Dead Dust Woke is very much off the news and will find a keen audience among anyone concerned with the perils and promises of artificial intelligence.

So that’s what I’ve been up to lately.

So, one of the reasons I titled this Website “bradpokornycreates” is I wanted to have a place to showcase not only my creative endeavors in painting but also to have a landing site for my work as a writer.

As many of my friends know, I’ve been working for the last few years on a novel. And I finally have a manuscript ready to send out to agents and publishers.

I’ve put up a first chapter here.

As I’ve noted on my home page, the novel is set at the beginning of World War II in Burma. It follows the endeavors of three American pilots as the arrive, train, and begin to fight the Japanese.

The book draws extensively on personal diaries and contemporary accounts of the American Volunteer Group, as the Tigers were officially known, and strives to be historically accurate in its setting, timeline, and cultural references. I’ve been quite a nerd about that.

For example, in the opening chapter, the idea of shooting at telephone poles during the train ride from Rangoon to the training base in Toungoo is based on a real incident.

Anyway, I hope to begin to post more about all this as time goes on.

For now, my main task is to find and agent and a publisher.

If any of you have ideas about that, please contact me at [email protected]

I’m also on Instagram at: https://www.instagram.com/brad.pokorny/

“Project 19a (mostly black) was awarded the Carrie Simon Memorial Award by the Canton Artists’ Guild at their annual open juried show.

The Guild is Connecticut’s oldest continuously running artists guild and among its most prestigious. The Guild runs the Gallery on the Green in Canton, CT, and Project 19a will be on display there through early November.

They gave it a prominent place for display — just inside the front door to the gallery — which is why there is an odd little table with a jack-o-lantern under it. But, hey, everyone who comes into the gallery certainly gets to see it. The Juror was Mell Scalzi of the Frances Griswold Museum in Old Lyme CT.

Kinda cool.

Here is the painting:

Taking full advantage of my new “studio,” described in my last post, I spread out last week and discovered a new technique to create this new painting, which I call “White and Black (mostly) no. 1.”

If you look closely, you’ll see little dots of primary colors, fitted in among the islands and continents of black on a white sea. But if you step, back you just see black and white and shades of grey.

I like it. We’ll see what others think.

UPDATE: 3 October 2018: I learned today this painting was accepted into the Open Juried Exhibition this month at the Gallery on the Green in Canton CT.

Also, I wanted to share a couple of close-ups of the painting, which show better the dots of color.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In late June, my wife and I left Durham, NH, and moved to West Hartford, CT. The move was precipitated mostly by the fact that the University of New Hampshire, where my wife was a professor of Arabic for 11 years, effectively terminated her by not renewing her contract for Fall 2018 (she was not on a tenure track). The reason seems to be that with her seniority, she had begun to cost the University too much. She was replaced by a younger, cheaper professor with a freshly minted PhD. This despite her superb record as a highly effective teacher who was beloved by her students.

Anyway, we sold our house and moved to West Hartford to be near my son, Remz, and his wife Norah and our two grandchildren. We’re settling in and are enjoying the area very much.

Once nice thing about our new house is I have a much larger area in the basement where I can spread out and really splash paint around.

It would be hard to call it a studio, since the natural light comes in only from two deep window wells, and I have to use some bright LED daylight bulbs to illuminate the place. But, as I said, there is much more room to spread out and get creative.

So one of my first creations here is this painting, which I called Beach Fires, Night. I wanted to do something to enter into a landscape painting show at the West Hartford Art League, which had the theme “Land, Sea and Sky.” Normally, I don’t paint anything approximating realistic scenes, but I thought I might give an abstract approach to it — and this is what I came up with. Kind of a twist on the traditionally bucolic beach scene.

The juror, a long standing and well known landscape painter, let it into the show for the month of September, where it was hung with a lot of nice scenes of beaches and seascapes and boats and such.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I finished a new painting over the weekend, one I have titled “River of Life.” I had been working on it for more than a week and, over the weekend, I went to see an exhibition of Mark Tobey paintings at the Addison Gallery in North Andover, MA. It was very inspiring. I learned a lot by examining closely the detailed brushwork of Tobey, and also his extensive use of “white writing.”

Inspired, I added a white overlay to what I had been working on and was much more satisfied with the result.

I usually like to give my paintings very generic names, so as not to evoke any preconceptions in the viewer. But as I kept looking at what I’d done, a passage from the Baha’i Writings that speak of Baha’u’llah’s Revelation as “the river that is life indeed” came to my head and so did this name for the painting.

Here it is:

I currently have two paintings at the New Hampshire Art Association’s Robert Levy Gallery in Portsmouth, NH, as part of this month’s “Feed the Soul” group show. I created them late in December specifically for the show, because I wanted to experiment with smaller, simpler canvases. Here is what I came up with:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Both are on smaller canvases than what I usually work on. Each one is 20 by 16 inches. My idea as to try putting up something that is smaller and more affordable and see if that helps them sell.

Well, remember, my theme for this website is “Painting for fun and profit.”

 

 

I’m a member of the New Hampshire Art Association and every year they have a holiday show for members in December. Even though as a Baha’i I don’t celebrate Christmas, I do enjoy all of the visuals of the season – the lights, the ornaments, the shows, and, especially, the evergreen trees and wreaths. (Love the piney smell.)

So I decided to paint something in a holiday theme especially for the show, and this is what I came up with, which I titled “Tannenbaum,” which is, of course, German for “Christmas Tree” or “pine tree.”

 

I usually don’t work with any specific visual image. I prefer to work in a pure abstract fashion. As my friend and painter Robert Wilson told me recently: An abstract artist “should work in pure thought, and pure thought is that not influenced by any ideologies or opinions.” Or, in my case, any preconceived images.

Of course, many artists do start with some idea or conception. And I usually have some kind of a notion when I start a painting. But in this case, I tried to visualize a Christmas tree stand, all light up with red lights or globes, in a snow storm. And that’s what I came up with.

I also put an earlier painting into the show:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

which I shamelessly renamed “Holiday Traffic” in an effort a pure commercialism. And guess what? Someone liked it and bought it.

Is this the power of a name? Or the beauty of the work? I hope it is the beauty of the work.

 

 

Here is a paint I did in February, as kind of an experiment of a new style. Ruwa and Zane both like it a lot. What do you think?

 

I went into a flurry of painting yesterday, during a late-season snow storm. I had several canvases I’ve been working on for a while, but not quite satisfied with them. But then I “discovered” a new way to add paint to my canvases — and I was happy with the results.  Here is the first one I completed:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was working simultaneously on another old canvas, and I decided to go with some cooler colors, blues and yellows, and here is the result:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And I also produced this one, working quickly on a blank canvas and using a combination of methods, new and old.