The Son Of The Daemon, Shiny Keith, had, if anything, surpassed the work of his parent. His career had burned quickly but brightly, a full life cycle of less than three months, but producing gigabytes and gigabytes of output in that time. Megadrive was apparently still struggling to sort through and catalogue it all.

Keith’s patron was, at that moment, shuffling through the crowd. It was an awkward tango, with many a dainty sidestep as he gently forced his bulk through the narrow gaps, smilingly thinly and exchanging a few words with every gaggle he inelegantly negotiated. His furtive eyes betrayed his meta-navigation. He was coming in our direction. Just as one whitey was subsiding a more fearsome white beast was rolling in.

I’d seen Marek’s arrival as my ticket out of there. Individually I was just a lonely soul in need of a warm hole, but combined we could outgrow these surroundings and set our own agenda for the evening. Shiny Keith’s ostentatious wake would no longer be the main event, just the launch platform for a potentially more productive evening of modest adventure and intellectual jamming. The task now was no longer survival, it was escape. How to make an exit with grace, after balancing our bloodstreams with the optimum ratio of dignity and free alcohol. The only remaining obstacle then was Bernie Megadrive. The end of level boss to be beaten before the evening could level up.

Bernie, I knew, was keen to meet me. He was one of the believers. He believed in art not in the way the witless fools reading the Sunday supplements believed. His belief didn’t require faith. He believed in the value of art only because he had experienced it first hand, in his pocket, in the high-score table of his bank statements. I’d rather have avoided a meeting, simply because I was just that little too high, but the combination of his presence, his ownership of the room, and the weight of the social behavioural codes my lower-middle-class upbringing had burned into my developing consciousness, like a low level command set, had me in a state of paralysis. My forebrain wanted to flee, but my hardwiring forced my good behaviour and sociability.

And so our triangle convened. Me, with a frazzled mind gently attempting re-entry, Marek, still too sober, and Megadrive, rambunctious twat-host whose drink we quaffed and imminent increase in wealth we were meant to be whooping. Pleasantries were exchanged. I asked after Amsterdam, which was where Bernie, ostensibly, lived. I knew this because I had heard shared acquaintances berate his dropping it into every conversation, conversations that typically consisted of him talking at 300mph because he was “leaving for Gatwick in an hour”. The only other personal detail I knew about Bernie was that his original family name was not Megadrive. How could it be? But that’s just the world we inhabited. Using one’s birth name was about as natural as keeping your original hair colour.

It was more attention than I’d seen Bernie award any one group so far this evening, so I was partially beguiled by this subliminal flattery alone, but still he was only 50% with us. His eyes would occasionally wander the room as he’d mutter “amazing work, amazing work” at us, himself, or someone he was perhaps recalling in his head.

“The business model is genius” he said, his attention suddenly focussing on me like a laser, “If nothing else, your work will be remembered for that alone.” Bernie spoke with a kind of effete heartiness (think an ultra-camp Brian Blessed) punctuating his verbosity with heavy slaps on my left shoulder, knocking me off an inch off kilter every time he did so.

“Yeah, because that’s what I want as my legacy, a portfolio of innovative business models”.

“Nothing wrong with making a living from the work you do is there?” Marek was a touch confrontational, simply because the pleasantries were preventing him getting to the bar. I was pretty sure Marek had little idea of who our host was, if indeed that he was the host, but he’d clearly taken a dislike to his pomposity before he’d even finished his first sentence. Marek was cut from a much baser cloth, and despite (or possible because of) the fact he was a brummie with a Polish name, abhorred pretension more than anyone I knew. If Bernie was irritated by Marek’s tone he didn’t show it. He leaned in to me “It is imperative that I talk to you. I have an opportunity you will not want to miss.”

“I’m not really looking for work at the moment” I said, lying. I was always looking for work. What politeness was preventing me from saying was that, despite my impecuniosity, I didn’t want to actually have to *do* any work at the moment. Especially for a man like Megadrive.

“It’s client work. Very public client work. With a budget. A big budget. And enough creative freedom for even the most precious of lickul flowers. Integrity is pretty much the theme of the project. Utterly unmissable, I promise you.”

I was at that moment looking jealously at the party’s centrepiece, a water projection of several morphing and rotating three dimensional Penrose Triangles, clearly being much enjoyed by the angular grouping of sexless new-aestheticians clustered around it. The men either stroked their artful cultivated facial hair, or used paired forefingers to thoughtfully tap their lips. The non-men used more of their bodies, considerate stances designed to angle their lycra-clad breasts in whatever direction would award them the most attention. Some arsehole had been specially commissioned to produce this piece for tonight’s event. I knew it was an arsehole simply by the fact that it wasn’t me. I could really have done with the work.

“Seriously, Bernie, mate. I’ve got pretty limited availability right now. What’s the deadline on it?”

“Tight. But not too tight. I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to do it.”

I was squirming a little from the idea of working on a Megadrive production. I knew a little of the man’s portfolio. He drew the line at porn, but the line was not very far above it. His most solid revenue streams were in internet gambling sites, which I wasn’t necessarily ideologically opposed too, they just wouldn’t look good associated with my particular brand. But I was at a point where I could have done with the money. The 60K for Number None had been pissed up dirty urinals in the overpriced bars of London and Brighton a year ago now, and I had survived most of this year on corporate coding jobs while I waited for the next big idea to hit me.

“Send him an email, man” said Marek, which was the nicest way he had of saying fuck off in this particular situation. He wasn’t here to talk business, he was here for some free booze, to steal a bit of my gear, and perhaps have a laugh at the haircuts and the pointy shoes.

Ignoring Marek, Bernie leaned in closer. “We’re meeting on Wednesday. In Barcelona. I’ll fly you over, expenses paid of course. Say yes now and I can get Irene to book it and email you the itinerary.” Barcelona? Why there of all places? Angles were the last thing I’d expected from one so soft and rotund. How could he have known about…

“I imagine you’re keen to know what happened to your old man, ” he continued.

Soon after the ‘birth’ of Shiny Keith, Number None, the indifferent parent, retired, cleanly topping itself by removing all it’s processes from Northcliffe’s harddrive, leaving only a beautifully poignant suicide note on the desktop. The note is now part of the National Portrait Gallery’s collection; a markov-chain constructed stream of consciousness, borrowing heavily from Virginia Wolfe’s The Voyage Out, and a forgivably over-literal re-appropriation of Derrida and Barthes, all trawled from Project Guttenberg.

It was essential to build death into my virtual artist, for death is as much a part of art as white walls, red rope, silver trays of vol-au-vents and free booze. All modern artists have a highly rational understanding of death, it is the one thing they all believe in. The dark backing a mirror needs before it can show us ourselves, to quote one more pretentious than myself. If artists believed in the niceties of religion, in an afterlife, a time of infinite leisure where everything was groovy, where it snowed cocaine and the rivers flowed absinthe, they’d never get anything done. If they believed they had an infinity to finally sort out all their shit and finish off that magnum opus their days on earth could be more happily wasted on small-talk, sport and evenings on front of the TV.

No, the artist has to believe in death, to feel it pressing down on them, in order to produce. Because why would anyone waste such a colossal amount of time and effort upon something so useless if it weren’t for the incentive that there was a time fast approaching when the amounts of coin you’d gathered, friends you’d impressed, or partners you’d slept with would finally count for shite. Death is the most beautiful muse of all.

In earlier, simpler times it may have been possible for death and religion to co-exist. But that was not your sanitised, C of E style Christianity of today’s West. Blake and Bach produced great work out of a FEAR of their god. If their god had promised them a cushty afterlife they’d never have lifted a finger, they could have saved their best work for the other side, the big event. They wouldn’t have wasted it on the rehearsal. No, their fear of god inspired them in the same way today it is the fear of death, absolute, final death, that makes us do now what we simply cannot put off any longer.

I’m not sure if I’d mentioned to Northcliffe the finite timespan of the construct I had sold him, but he didn’t appear too upset when I had seen him at that first suicide party of the year, at the ICA in January. He’d babbled some crap about scarcity and demand and the Saatchis and raised a glass of insanely expensive coloured fizzing liquid to me. I had already imbibed a bottle of a much fruitier mulch on my way to the gig, so I can’t say I understood a word he was saying, but I knew the smile of a rich man who had just got marginally richer.

…

To my relief, just as I was beginning to fear small talk would be required to preserve my surrounding normality field, I saw a familiar face near the entrance. Marek Smith was somewhere on the list of my fifteen favourite people in the world. He was a film-maker from the Midlands who, to my knowledge, had not a drop of Czechoslovakian or Polish blood in his family line. His given name was, in some way, as affected as Bernie Megadrive’s surname. But at least his ostentation belonged to his parents. He was scanning the room with a scowl as he brushed the pudding bowl suited child away like lint off his jacket. It was probably fortunate that he had arrived late enough to have missed our host’s extended toast which, in his absence, had subtly dissed his whole oeuvre.

Marek’s work, whilst well within what Bernie called the “second phase”, would instantly demolish his theory of a medium entering its twilight years. Marek’s films were incredible, super detailed slow-mo vistas. Watch them on your standard HD screen and they appeared to be little more than a slow looping pan around an apartment block, or a spiralling aerial sweep of a far-off beach, but see them in IMAX and you could make out hundreds of digitally inserted mini-dramas. Every window in the apartment block contained a micro-narrative, every dot-sized figure on the beach playing a role in a gently building tale, all the characters interweaving in a complex, linear, looping meta-storyline, invisible without sufficient perspective. You had to watch each piece for hours to unravel it all, but the real effect was in absorbing the mass of it as one moment. Marek inserts himself into every one of his pieces, Hitchcock style. Although, unlike The Master, Marek prefers to be fully naked in each of his cameos.

He arched a knowing eyebrow as he saw me, in one expression sparing us both the need to justify exactly what we were doing here. My face, in return, took that moment to collapse, in the fashion of an overcooked pavlova, as I was hit by a series of white hot flashes, retina burns of nuclear brightness. Not flash bulbs in my peripheral vision, as they appeared, but the flashes of panic I occasionally got after smoking a reefer, which is what I’d been doing each of the three times I had needed to pop out for a “bit of air” earlier. I was being hit by The Fear.

When he reached me I hugged him with gusto, holding him long enough for it to count, long enough for any bystander to get a slight insinuation of something sexual between us (which there wasn’t, but it never hurt to suggest it). I held him for dear life, waiting for the whitey to pass. This terror, adrenaline propelled brain cell burstings, inappropriately fired by a confused fore-brain preparing itself for a flight or fight response, wasn’t Marek’s fault, although it was likely him that had triggered it. It was just memories, paranoia, guilt. Reminders of the bad thing. And the worse thing.

The bad thing was that swirling mass of love and frustration I called “dad”, who I had lost four years previously. The spectre of significant parent that hung over me, judging me, even in his absence. I didn’t have the luxury of Shiny Keith, gifted a pristine, virgin canvas on which to commence a working life. Free from the eyes of the past. There was only one operating system for us, and we all had to share it. A heaving, exponentially growing, mass of souls all fighting for its few available cycles.

When I say I lost my dad I don’t mean he died. I literally lost him. I hadn’t visited him in a number of months (which was quite typical), and when I finally gathered time for the 90 minute trip to Brighton, I found his flat empty. No note. No trace. No indication of sudden departure or incident. He didn’t own a mobile, and was never very good at answering the phone or returning messages, so I found myself returning several times in the following weeks, letting myself in with my key, expecting to find him there, uncharacteristically tanned perhaps. Or injured. Or bewildered. But he never showed. And all other lines of enquiry (hospitals, airlines, colleagues) drew blanks too. I spent a summer back and forth from London to Brighton, the air in his rooms marginally stiller every time I popped the plywood seal of his private space.

My old man had lived alone since his second divorce, and didn’t have much of a social life. His only other human contact was with the few fellow academics from his days of tenure who were still comfortable being associated with him. He devoted his retirement, as he did his working life, to his mathematics. But his ideas had grown more secular as he had grown more insular, to the point where even his peers struggled to understand them. It was this that had caused the distance between us. I simply couldn’t communicate with him any more. I couldn’t understand his mathematics which meant I couldn’t understand him. For what is a man but the expression of his mathematics. We no longer spoke the same language. We shared an operating system but no longer lived in the same world.

I had no other way to reach out to him, either before or after his disappearance, no other open channels. His 20th Century was an information revolution, not a communication one. He, like me, was a skilled programmer, coming from a generation who had learned computers from the lowest level, but he had zero interest in the social elements of the web. If you wanted to actually speak to him, you had to do it in person. Which was difficult to do if his personage was not physically there.

Eventually I just moved in, shifting my operation to Brighton, where I could await his return. Too early in life I found myself following his footsteps, retreating from the capital, retiring to purpose built block in the salty air of BN3. Still, to this day, I have no idea where he is. I have no idea whether he is alive or dead. There were times in my life when I might have pretended not to care about such things, but now that I had so spectacularly failed in my modest duty as his only child, the weight of the shame is, at my most sensitive moments, crushing.

The bad thing was many things; a regret, a mystery, a lesson, a portent, a fear. It was the frustration of a perpetual loose end, that may never be resolved in a way that satisfied the anally retentive left-weighted brain I had inherited from him. It was reminder to stop believing my own (auto-generated) press, a reminder of what I kept inside, what a weak and impotent human being was enshrouded within this crappy suit. It was also a presage of what I might inherit. What I might become.

When the bad thing came at me I knew the worse thing would usually come flashing a few micro-seconds after. It was an inbuilt coping mechanism, to make me feel better about the bad thing, to put it into perspective. The worse thing was the story of how I met my special lady, my thoroughly modern Millie who, wisely, had opted to stay home tonight. The worse thing was all she didn’t, and could never know about our relationship. There was a masochistic comfort in the worse thing, solace. It made all my bad things feel that little bit better.

It wasn’t Marek’s fault he had reminded me of my father. It was simply because he had been there throughout the worst of it. He had helped me deal. To pull myself together and get on with making shit. Just one of the many things I loved him for. Marek was what all good friends should be; both a fierce intellectual adversary and non-judgmentally crutch-shaped when required. Tonight I’d repay a little of my various debts to him by helping him get drunk. “Let me get a round in” I said, recognising the painful sobriety in his stance. This was the emptiest of platitudes at an event with a free bar, but it wasn’t intended as a charitable offer, merely a statement of intent. It was a first bold brushstroke on the portrait of an evening.

…

I give you the ballad of Shiny Keith.

Three years earlier I had made the logical progression from creating and selling generative art (algorithmically created loops and sweeps and splashes on various forms of canvases) to creating and selling generative artists instead. Sell a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Sell him a fisherman and you can charge an exorbitant amount for the non-contractual production of unspecified amounts of fish in the near future. That was the idea anyway.

The dead soul today, Shiny Keith, was the second generation of a self-replicating software construct I sold to a Saudi Arabia based merchant-banker named Samuel Northcliffe, 18 months ago. A 300K daemon script I personally installed on his laptop in a hotel lobby in Dubai under the shifty gaze of a two-man personal security staff struggling to categorise the threat level I represented to their employer.

This same banker, my client, owns the building we are in tonight. The building itself is a commentary on London. The divided allocation between art and commerce, one story of gallery, 59 of financial services, a fair analogy of the city its windows mirror.

The artist I sold him, less imaginatively named (by my limited human brain) “Number None”, lived within Northcliffe’s hardware. Every time he booted his laptop the daemon began its working day, running a series of background batch processes, dragging on my clients data, running algorithms. Most days it would produce nothing at all. Other days it would deposit a folder of 200 or so jpeg images on the desktop; data visualisations of Excel spreadsheets it had found in the Documents folder, word collages of RSS newsfeeds, glitchy re-edits of TV from the video cache. The best days would produce a truly original artwork; perhaps based on the current UTC time/date string, perhaps on one of the Lorenz equations. It had more good days than bad.

I built in a through-flow to None’s work, with each successive piece taking parameters from the previous work, although whether this connection was discernible to a human curator was moot. And, seeing how the process contained enough randomness to ensure the body of work would be as surprising to me as it would to anyone else, there was no way of knowing in advance if what it produced next would be gold or crap.

The daemon had moods. It would go through phases of working in nothing but blue and greyscale. Other times it would favour line-work so fine it went beyond the limits of human perception. It could also suffer artistic block, and go through long periods, weeks, months, where it produced absolutely nothing at all, just idling in the background, not even registering on the system activity monitor, like a depressed teen.

Once, just once, in its life None would reproduce. It would create one or more imperfect copies of itself, the same script but with a subtle mutation. The child would be an executable, a disc image that could be mounted and installed on another machine. It was incapable, on a kernel level, of working on the same host machine as the parent. This was a constraint I thought accurately mirrored the mental space of comparative flesh and blood artists, for whom it was often impossible to produce anything of worth whilst ones parents were watching. Or, in many cases, alive.

I sold Number None, the first generation of the script, to Northcliffe for 60,000 euros. I didn’t work for a year after that.

Northcliffe curated his daemon’s work fastidiously, getting it in the right shows, in the right galleries, in the right cities. Number None’s collective body of work sold for many, many times more than the 60K he paid me, which made this one bespoke software purchase both a gift to the culture and a very healthy investment.

When, after 9 months of fevered work, the daemon had its one and only prodigy – Shiny Keith (named, generatively, by his father of course) – the scion sold for a solid quarter of a million dollars US. The buyer was an artless, but highly solvent, man called Megadrive.

…

That second difference: The critical justification of what I do: My following.

I have fans. Lots of them. Legions of obsessive, slavering fans. A chorus of admirers who sing the ballad of my life, who inflate the worth of every shite I defacate upon the culture. Every successful individual needs their army, needs their followers. Without believers you cannot exist in the world. Like so many ancient gods, forgotten deities who evaporated after going out of fashion, you have no reality. And most of my fans are about as real as these dead gods in their dead books. As alive as Keith, toast of his own suicide party.

Fans are ridiculously easy to fake these days. A twitter bot can be knocked together in an afternoon. You take the avatar of a housewife in Horsham, juxtapose it with the micro-blogging of a 13 year old superfan from Oregon, Texas. Splice it with a dictionary of cultural reference points. Replace Bieber’s name with your own, Gaga’s albums with your own portfolio. Make a thousand of them and leave them to breed in the warm data hole of the internet. It’s as easy to make a thousand as it is to make one. They all follow each other, tirelessly babbling about me and my work in a balletic symphony of cron jobs. Even I can’t tell the difference between ones I made (I breed them like larvae, I don’t take the time to really get to know them) and the real, genuine human beings who dance along to the peer group pressure of this artificially composed cacophony.

For all I know I don’t have a single, genuine, living, breathing fan on the planet. But the collective scream of mass approval, which is what I get every time I fart what I had for breakfast, is deafening. And this is all most potential clients hear. It’s all your Northcliffes and your Megadrives need to place a value on you as an investment . The money, ultimately, doesn’t make value judgements on matters of taste. The money knows its limits. It doesn’t attempt to second guess these crazy apes, with their painfully swollen craniums, it simply looks at what everyone else thinks and judges if the math adds up to enough potential customers. It doesn’t really explain why I don’t seem to have any of this money though. Why I have to rely upon the free bars of parties such as these to keep my sobriety at bay.

But how could I pass such an occasion of this? How could my fragile ego not come rushing out to be teased and licked and titillated by a roomful of such high-class whores. Tonight is about my work as much as it is Keith’s really. Shiny Keith is family, of sorts. Much how I hate myself for doing so, I can’t help but care. It’s not really an emotional attachment in the conventional sense – I don’t go as far as actually giving a fuck – it’s more a morbid curiosity-slash-pride. Try as I might to suppress it, I can’t stop myself from wanting to see who shows up to a funeral. It’s a human weakness I can’t shed. One of many.

There’s nothing funereal about this occasion though. Spirits are high. It’s the forced jollity I find difficult to deal with, the mad giggling of air-starved creatures in the dark. The echo of fake laughter. Faces cracked with painful smiles. Sombreness I could deal with. I could do mourning. But there’s nothing to mourn here because this artist could never really be said to have lived in the first place. He was a second-generation virtual construct of my creation. This is what brings me here as a guest of honour. There is none of the pesky awkwardness of real, corporal death, just the barefaced, exuberant joy for the posthumous wealth bequeathed to those left behind. And the curiosity factor surrounding an artistically minded software algorithm who decided to delete itself.

…

The party is in a gallery space, the ground floor unit of a monolithic, mirror fronted tower block in the heart of the banking district. The building is home to a large multi-national financial services conglomerate. On a small patch of green outside, within sight of the entrance, are the huddled tents of one of London’s “Occupy” camps. The smoke from their fire curls up between the towering glass like the ghost of the city’s moral conscience.

On my arrival I was superciliously welcomed and ushered in by a skinny armed, skinny suited doorman with the pudding-bowl haircut of a child. He held back the rope with the limp-wristed disdain of an 18th Century dandy, born of privilege. Not the seven stone ceramics undergraduate, born of a dull night on TV, he clearly was. Safe to say they were not expecting any trouble at an art party. Even though we all knew this wasn’t really an art party. It was a money party, wearing the clothes of an art party. We were here to dance around the spit-roasted corpse of Shiny Keith, the value of whose work had just doubled, tripled, quadrupled overnight.

Shiny Keith is, sorry was, an “artist”. As are we all. The word is meaningless, for it describes everyone. We’re surrounded by them. Tunnelling beneath London, eastward on the District Line on my way here, I was pressed into a carriage full of artists, all scoring an identical psycho-geographical line into the googlemap of their daily ballet. Some still and serious in their composure; a tableau of pound-shop Gilberts in Asda George. Others with their own idiosyncratic flamboyances; feet tapping asynchronous rhythms, thumbs composing text message poetry, eyes darting the technicolor beams of an invisible lazer show. Every gesture they made, every word they uttered, every stool they left in the cistern of life infused with meaning, to the right observer. But these empty souls don’t call it art any more than I do. Although with them it is because they don’t have the balls to.

There are only two differences between me and them, between me and you, what I do and what they do. The first is that I have the arrogance to call it ART. Or allow others to do it for me anyway. Over the years I have taken a few compliments and encouragements and fellated my own ego into a massive tumescence. I encourage the pretence that it is more than just work, more than just product. I pretend. I pretend really, really hard.

It’s all about context. Duchamp’s pisser, Emin’s dirty knickers, Hirst’s fag butts, the most potent ingredient in those recipes was the setting. Put it in a gallery and the work becomes an artwork. And worker becomes artist. I apply the same method. I do what most technologists would call a coding job, or a design job, then find the right client for it. Clients like Mr Northcliffe. Or Bernie Megadrive. For that’s all it takes, one gallery, one show, one promoter, one significant re-contextualisation to elevate the work you do from mere product to artwork.

My own unique arrogance is that I don’t allow myself to use that word. That A word. I employ a more subtle approach, insinuating others into doing the labelling. It leaves me a get out clause. You won’t find the word artist on my website. You don’t need to because it is embossed so deeply in the semiotics it is as unnecessary as painting the word “train” on the carriage that bought me here. The masses of white space, the tiny, tiny text, the minimal perfection of the grid. The abstract images that let the work speak for itself, as long as they promise not to actually say anything meaningful at all.

To my eyes the one word my website says is “WANKER”. It screams it louder than my first girlfriend did that once on the car park of the Lord Raglan, New Years Eve 1991. To me the two words are synonymous. Artist = Wanker. Wanker = Artist.

Her aims as a wanker are twofold…
He’d been a full-time practising wanker since leaving college…

The wanker is the creative engaged in an entirely self-absorbed activity, making no more contribution to the animal world than a pitiful teaspoonful of moisture. Their actions are purely for their own gratification, and their sick ideas of flinging their emissions at the world, of expecting others to appreciate it and love them for it, are deeply perverted.

What is the wanker trying to say with this piece?

Harbouring ambitions that one day you might sell your “art”, your music, sketching, constructions or whatever else it is you laboriously ejaculate into the world, is the deepest of arrogance. If you are going to inflict this on the people around you, shoving your faeces into their faces, shouldn’t you be the one paying them?

You should. But the world is full of masochistic idiots who value their own creativity so little they deify anyone who has the balls to try and sell theirs. Like American tourists being sold London Bridge. And here I am, at a car-crash of an event that’s just full of them. And unless I find someone to talk to soon I’m going to have to mingle with these people. And I’m way too stoned to handle any kind of social niceties right now.

…

“There have been three eras in the history of visual art.

The first, painting, began not long after humans began using tools. Around the same time we worked out how to rub twigs together to make fire, we worked out how to draw lines in the dirt, rub chalk against rock and, later, mix the pigments of plants and get them to stick to a wall. This was the birth of visual art, and for a long time this mode of expression was the only one we knew.

The era of painting lasted twenty thousand years, reaching its zenith around the time of the Renaissance, when the art achieved such a level of perfection the only place to go from there was deconstruction, surrealism and post-modernism. The era isn’t completely over yet of course, no. But it is clearly well into its twilight. I might argue, if I were in a combative mood, that there hasn’t really been a great, i.e. relevant, painter since Picasso.”

April, and this was already my second suicide party of the year. The man addressing the room went by the implausible moniker of Bernie Megadrive. He was watched, and half listened to, by a modern, high ceiling room full of slightly sozzled artists and digiterati, clustered into messy clumps, like fungal growth around outcroppings of silver vol-au-vent trays. All shared the same self-absorbed seriousness of gentle-folk deeply in love with themselves, and the work they imagined themselves producing as soon as they got around to it.

And here I was, in London, again London, in the bosom of these twats. Embraced by them, accepted by them, as one of their own. Grudgingly respected even, simply by the fact that I was once capable of completing, or perhaps more importantly, selling a digital artwork. Bernie continued:

“The second era of visual art began a little over 100 years ago, with the advent of a new set of technologies that enabled an artist to flicker still images at a viewer faster than their eyes could see. This second era, the era of Film, is but a precocious infant compared to its predecessor. It has grown at a hyper-accelerated rate, complemented by the parallel accelerations in modern capitalism, already almost entirely usurping both painting and still photography as the popular medium. Every living space in the world now has one of these technological marvels, these devices capable of casting the light of sequential images at 25 frames per second or more.

You might argue the era of film has also passed its zenith. In the sixties, with Hitchcock and Godard, or the seventies with Kubrick perhaps. Or there may be greater heights to come yet, it’s probably too early to get an appropriate curatorial perspective on the grand sweep of this particular form of arrrrrt.”

The gag reaction kicks in. I can’t suppress it. It’s that final word, “art”, drawled from the face-anus of this sweating arse. Stretched, like a lipstick smear, much longer than its three letters should allow. The convulsion causes the entire left side of my body to suddenly lurch, bubbly liquid sloshing free of the confines of my glass to join the fecund twill eco-system of my lower left trouser leg.

Bernie Megadrive, client, investor, entrepreneur, hipster, twat. One of my people. He was dressed this evening in shirt and tie, polished shoes, baseball cap and a perfectly ironed Adidas tracksuit. His moustache was, I presume, meant to be ironic, but, in concert with his eager breathlessness, sweaty sheen and ironed tracksuit, his presence was making my spidey-sense scream “paedophile”. Bernie was one of those cultural nodes so desperate to be relevant he spent spare weekends travelling London by bus, just to get fashion tips. He gave his job title as “Imagineer”. He was simultaneously one of the greatest victims of our superficial, vacuous state of post-modernity, and one of its greatest beneficiaries – because if we didn’t have these polite, post-ironic social acceptances, he would have got his head kicked in on a regular basis.

That word, “Art”, was not one that rested easy on my ears. An entirely useless term, as blandly undescriptive as “carbon-based”. About as useful in defining who we are and the work we do as saying one “works with computers”. Which is actually a very accurate description of what I do, but also describes what everyone does these days. From NASA engineers, to my dear old mom, working her two admin jobs, shovelling data with her fingers. Data so trivial it was an insult to the organic intelligence tasked with processing it.

Admittedly though, the “work with computers” that happens in my studio is not quite so average. Even lacking the crashing ego of a man like Megadrive, I can admit there is a certain magic to the acts I perform in this private space. Magic, in the Arthur C Clarke sense of the world; from which any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable. I make technological marvels. I create life from dead things. But I don’t call it magic. And I don’t call it art. I don’t call it anything at all. I call it work.

“But there is already a third era dawning, an artform that will eclipse film as surely as film succeeded painting. The explosion of computing in the last half century has bought techniques of creation beyond mere human capabilities. We now have the ability not only to project images faster than the eye can see, we can also create them at that speed.

The limit of the human eye is, at best, 50 or 60 frames per second. But we can now program machines to make decisions on, and then draw, the content of a frame at ten times this speed. It is an artform beyond human limits.

This new era in Visual art is the era of the REAL TIME, of Generative and Interactive Art, of automated art. Our machines can grow forms faster than our eyes can see, they can respond to input faster than we can move. Art is no longer something created in the past to be consumed in the future. It is happening now, created and consumed, in real time. It is an entirely new form of art. One which makes the idea of pre-rendering what a viewer will experience as hopelessly primitive.”

Bernie pauses to inhale dramatically, his eyes looking to the ceiling above our heads as if expecting God, or Superman, to appear and endorse his hyperbolic version of art history. He raises his glass as he exhales, his face reddening with the effort of concentration he needs to make his eyes tear, “A toast. Let us raise a glass to Shiny Keith. Poor dead Keith. And his now ludicrously expensive canon of work.” “Shiny Keith” echo the throng, raising and then quaffing their free fizzy plonk, the only thing anyone here really cares about.

…

For years our survival, as a race, had depended upon the breeders. Not just the babies they were having, but also the secrets they kept. The new parents kept it quiet, they didn’t tell their cool, carefree, single friends how hard it was having kids, and the dangerous truth – that being single and childless was actually a lot more fun.

But the meme was growing, multiplying exponentially, and by 2009 it had found a hold within the forums of mumsnet. This was the turning point. For years the idea had remained contained, within the pages of women’s fashion magazines, Hollywood films, TV dramas, the kind of places the young cool, fertile people didn’t have all that much time to hang out. But when the meme infected mumsnet it was a significant defection. The message was now being propagated by “knowledgeable sources”, parents who knew both sides, breeders who’d had their offspring, but hadn’t learned to keep their mouths shut. Young couples, around the time they usually came over to the breeder cause, were stumbling across this information in their google searches and were talked out of having children.

The counter-message, the “happy family” meme which had successfully kept selling us toilet paper, cleaning products, and keeping the human race alive until then, was suddenly on the ropes. Its traditional evangelists – the church, the politicians, light entertainment, had all been discredited. The war was lost by the early 2010s. The last human baby was born in 2035.

The dream then jumped ahead 50 years, to the same conversation. I was the old man this time, trying desperately to remember something about my youth, just enough to get a foothold, some common ground on which I could talk to my younger self. But it was hopeless. I could not convince him we were the same person. I could not gain enough of his respect for even the most impartial advice to be heeded.

In a swirl of dream logic this looped around and around, old to young to old to young, in an endless cycle of frustration, suspicion, frustration, suspicion. I awoke hating myself, both for my failure to get a simple message across, and for my inability to listen.