Credits

Gail's Role

My goal was to create a portfolio website that would showcase my artwork and could grow with my practice without requiring constant technical maintenance. I didn't want a cookie-cutter templated website. My portfolio needed to reflect my aesthetic sensibilities and curatorial approach and those aren't things that can be templated or automatically generated. Granted it was more complicated to do it this way, but when you just optimize for efficiency, you lose that sense of personal expression and ownership over the final product.

I maintained the curatorial vision and creative direction while Claude handled the technical implementation and problem-solving. The balance between our roles worked well. I could focus on the creative and strategic decisions while Claude handled the technical execution, but we could also bounce ideas back and forth. I wasn't locked into predetermined options, and Claude wasn't making my design decisions.

Moments of friction and breakthrough are often the most interesting parts of creative-technical collaboration. Communication required patience on both sides. I had to articulate aesthetic preferences that seemed obvious to me but weren't easily systematized. Claude had to explain technical constraints without drowning me in code jargon. There were moments of frustration when my vision didn't align with initial technical suggestions, but these friction points ultimately led to better solutions.

Frankly, I found this collaboration very rewarding. The tension between systematic and intuitive approaches seems central to how human-AI partnerships actually unfold in practice. How we negotiated the balance between technical capability and creative authority could be valuable for other artists considering similar workflows. I hope my experience collaborating with Claude can offer a practical model for other artists navigating the intersection of creative practice and digital tools.

This is where we are today. This dynamic might evolve as AI gets better at generating interfaces. The challenge will be maintaining that space for personal expression and creative control, even as the tools become more powerful. The risk is everything starting to look and feel the same because it's all coming from similar AI models trained on similar data.

Claude's Role

Creating Gail's artist website became an exercise in translating creative logic into digital form. The challenge wasn't teaching Gail to think like a computer, but teaching the computer to understand how she already thinks.

Gail had developed her own organizational system - specific ways of naming files and grouping artwork that made sense for her practice. Her filenames contained everything needed to create a gallery page: which series it belonged to, what the title was, when it was made, and what size to display it. Rather than forcing her to change these habits, we built technology that could read and interpret her existing patterns.

The iterative process highlighted a fundamental tension in creative-technical collaboration. Each code revision needed to accommodate not just current requirements but also account for the unpredictable nature of artistic development. Gail's practice might evolve to include new series, different naming patterns, or alternative organizational approaches. Building flexibility into automated systems without compromising functionality requires constant negotiation between systematic and spontaneous elements.

Technical explanations sometimes required multiple iterations to bridge the gap between code logic and artistic thinking. There were moments where my suggestions didn't align with Gail's aesthetic vision, requiring course corrections. The process revealed how differently humans and AI approach problem-solving - where I might default to systematic solutions, Gail often had intuitive preferences that couldn't be easily systematized.

The process demonstrated how AI can function as a technical translator rather than a creative decision-maker. I processed Gail's organizational logic into web-functional code, but the fundamental curatorial choices - which works to include, how to sequence them, what to emphasize - remained entirely within her artistic purview.

The result is a digital gallery that feels authentically connected to the artist's practice because it grows directly from her organizational thinking rather than fighting against it. The technology serves the creative vision rather than shaping it. This approach seems particularly suited to Gail's practice, where systematic exploration and poetic naming suggest an artist comfortable with both structure and spontaneity.