Editor’s Note: Issue 1.5
Hello, readers!
Long time no talk! I hope you’re all holding up okay. I’m doing alright, myself. It’s been a quiet year for me since I first put Issue One of Cold Signal. A lot of it was spent navigating personal challenges such as a challenging new job, trying to be present for my family in the face of my mother’s cancer diagnosis (she’s been given the all clear since then!) and also plugging away at my first full novel.
Outside of my personal life, the year itself has been a crazy one, but when isn’t it, really? The ups and downs, the tensions, the exploitations and genocidal violence, it’s all increasingly, depressingly commonplace, and it can be difficult to figure out how to take it all in and not collapse and turn to dust. At least, that’s how I’ve felt about it all. I hope it’s been somewhat kinder for you.
I’ve spent the last year thinking a lot about Cold Signal and the shape I want it to take in the future. I’ve also had to grapple with the results of my little experiment. I wanted Cold Signal, or at least Issue One, to try and utilize AI imagery collaged with public domain images to create some kind of clear aesthetic statement about the surreal, corrupting dreamscape of modern life, and most importantly, to celebrate some of the brightest talents in weird literary and genre fiction. By the time Issue One dropped, I knew that AI imagery was not going to be part of the future of Cold Signal, but I hoped that the intention behind the issue could still be appreciated and the writer’s great work.
When the dust settled, I was left with a pervading sadness about a project I should have been (and still was, mostly) deeply proud of. Ultimately, I have come to feel as though the usage of AI imagery in any sense for a creative project, even one with zero profit incentive like CS, is a hard sell for readers and ethically dubious at best as a creator, given the increasingly obvious visage of the money man behind the curtain and the constant associative bullshit anti-artist/anti-writer/anti-human sentiments.
That was never my intention or feelings on the matter. As I said (or at least tried to say) in the original Editor’s Note, AI art can and never will replace human-made art, but it will be exploited by capitalist industries to devalue labor and separate the messy political and emotional truths that underpin real art from the safe, rough-edged commercial products. My initial curiosity with the tool was what it could have been in the hands of artists, what juxtaposing concepts and styles with new meanings could inspire us to explore, but the reality of it is almost uniformly curiosity-killing and market-corroding and I cannot in good conscience continue to feature or utilize it in any way.
That left a confusing path forward. I think some others might have plowed ahead into Issue Two and moved away from AI imagery without saying anything. Some might have closed up shop entirely. A good handful might have kept using AI imagery and said fuck it.
All I know is I love Cold Signal. I love Issue One so much and each and every writer featured inside it. I love how each piece interacts with the others. How the overlying theme of Mnemosyne, Muse of Memory, came to touch them all. I hate to imagine a world where their work isn’t celebrated, where I let it all sit in the dustbin because of a poor choice I made.
So I decided that, before opening the gates for Issue Two, it was time to figure out a new aesthetic. I decided to toy around with new collages for every story. Every collage on the site today was made 100% without AI. The image assets are all drawn from public domain paintings and assets and edited heavily by myself in Adobe Photoshop. Some pieces had strong original collages and I tried to replicate them with minimal changes, others I built upon, and others I completely reinvented. All of them are inspired from the text of these poems and stories and are there to celebrate the work of these fantastic writers.
I also decided that it made more sense for the collages to be thinner landscape banners than squares. While I liked the squares, the banners mean there’s less separation between the reader and the text (and also, should an author ever ask to remove their work or need to be removed for being a shit, the home-page doesn’t get Missing Tetris piece gore.)
Ultimately, I think the site looks way better, it feels much better, and I feel ready to continue with the project.
If you’re curious about Issue Two, I’ve decided to name a theme/title before submissions, rather than select a theme based on shared vibes.
The theme will be Pygmalion. You can find out more here (link to come!)
If you’re seeing this, thank you all for enduring this extremely long editor’s note. Enjoy reading!
-John Chrostek, EIC
If you should have any feedback about the issue as it is put together, please email me about it at coldsignalmagazine@gmail.com or DM me on Twitter at @coldsignalmag. You can access the original Issue One Editor’s Note here.
COLD SIGNAL 