Friend and fellow mature student Catherine Banks and I have been discussing the impact of deep learning image-generating models and how we’ve brought them into our practice. The following is the first of two posts, focusing on the images we generated using each other’s writing or themes as prompts. The second post will contain an edited version of our discussion, which took place mainly via email. Catherine will also post a related blog, which I will link here too.
(Incidentally, during our chats, we routinely refer to AI images, as that is the colloquial term and everyone knows what we are referring to. Despite this, I am fully cognisant that there are problems with “Artificial” and “Intelligence” as terms: but perhaps that is for another discussion later on.)
As my own project has evolved, I tend to use four words/phrases in every prompt, along with something else. The four words/phrases are:
Lamella/Pink/Hyper-real/4D render
At some point, I may need to investigate each of these in depth. For the moment, on the website lamella.org, which I am building as a form of live unrehearsed performance (i.e. it has been released before it’s even remotely ready), there are pages devoted to the words.
Another one of those pages is called H’omelette anyone? It contains a fragment of my writing – no AI was involved in its formation, although there are pages where that is not the case.
I asked Catherine if she’d be interested in using some or all of my core words and any phrases from H’omelette anyone? as prompts. I suppose this comes from my interest in the suggestion that AI has removed the act of creativity for artists of all persuasions. (As you may imagine, I do not agree with that assertion one little bit, although, of course, I don’t deny that machine-learning has had a significant impact on the way creative people might earn a living. But we’re far from the only ones!) More than that, I am deeply concerned with the linguistic lines we draw between selves and others, machines and human, culture and nature. And that concern underlies all my work and its various forms of inquiry. By asking Catherine to employ my words as prompts, and then by doing the same in reverse, I wonder if there is a dissolution of lines – and I guess, I am focused on when that might start to become uncomfortable for either of us.
I’m grateful to Catherine for agreeing to collaborate with me on this. Here are the images that emerged when Catherine used words I’d written (I edited this sentence, because as above, I used the phrase’, my words’, but then thought, hang on, they’re not mine. I don’t own any words or the alphabet and never could. Yet, I subscribe to the notion that if I put some words in a certain order, they become mine … just a thought).
Catherine’s experiments using words I’d written:
- Pink, lamella, an esoteric joke in the mind of a dead French philosopher, an embrace with the father – Midjourney
- Pink, Lamella, 4D render, an esoteric joke in the mind of a dead French philosopher, an embrace with the father – Dalle
My experiments using words Catherine had written:
A few days later, I made some images with Catherine’s words. She has tentative plans for a project called Time Traveller, and has written an introduction. The words she wrote below are in green, and the ones I used as prompts (I think I recall correctly) in bold.
There was a woman once who became unbound from time and place. Although very old she managed to stay young at heart until a silent pestilence swarmed over the Earth. Too small for the naked eye to see, it poked its many fingers into all spaces large and small; spreading its spores so far and wide that many died. Fear and grief stalked the land and time stood still holding its breath in silent sorrow.
Silent skies and stifled machines gave a new silence against which birdsong sounded so much sweeter. Spring flowers bloomed more vividly in clearer air. She realised and felt stronger connections with the hidden world of night creatures.
Whilst appreciating those new treasures, the woman was angry that some of the few remaining years of her life were being stolen. Restricted freedom allowed more time to look back on her life which had begun in the chaos of war and now was threatened to end in a world which was falling apart at the seams.
The following images were made using a custom image-generator provided by RunwayML. I have uploaded images from a book published in 1960 called Zabriskie’s Obsterics for Nurses which informs most of the images I have asked the machine to generate in the last few months. I really love some of these images, although less keen on others. And you should know, I’ve not uploaded every one Runway produced. I’d love to include a couple in the Lamella project – but am not quite sure how, or if that might be a bridge too far for Catherine (which of course, it may be!)
Please look out for the next blog, which details our conversation about this process and other AI related questions, and Catherine’s blog too, which I will link here.
Ref:
Fitpatrick and Eastman (1960) Zabriskie’s Obstetrics for Nurses. Philadelphia/Montreal:Lippincott.