Dr. Nettrice Gaskins, an acclaimed Afrofuturist scholar who pioneered the Deep Dream neural network as an art medium back in 2019, is now experimenting with Midjourney, the new AI project that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to generate new imagery.
The results, some of which you can see here, are deliriously stunning. Nettrice's image above, for example, was generated by a line from Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (one of her favorite novels):
“For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it."
"[Midjourney] tries to understand human language," Dr. Gaskins explains. "It's about the text; the order of words. The cool thing about NLP AI (Midjourney, DALL-E, etc.) is another person can use the same exact text prompts (same order, etc.) and never be able to duplicate the ones I generated. This means every single image is one of a kind / unique."
Here's another that she generated through inputting the text, "Afrofuturistic Black woman botanist in trippy alien utopia":
And here's another built from a passage of the Bible she entered into Midjourney -- “And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone”:
Other text inspirations include the songs "Golden Lady" by Stevie Wonder, and "Golden" by Jill Scott.
Since starting to upload her images to social media, she's gotten requests from people who want to buy copies. A print of this one, for instance, "Vitruvia" is available on her site for $70:
Dr. Gaskins is even creating and selling hard copy prints of these images:
All this, as you might imagine, raises the question of whether AI-generated images can even be called art, a topic we recently discussed at length here.
Dr. Nettrice Gaskins' answer to that is straightforward:
"The images I'm generating is unique to me; it starts with my imagination. The machine attempts to understand and match my text with imagery. I don't think anyone who sees my work would say it's not art."
She documents this process and its relation to her Afrofuturism on her Medium blog:
Conceptualized in 1993 by Mark Dery, Afrofuturism has come to encapsulate works of Black creative and cultural production that treat futurist themes concerning Africa and its diaspora. In Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, I wrote about the coming “semantic web” that "(I)ncludes software used to render digital images and objects in new media technologies".
Or as William Gibson is quoted as saying, “The future is already here…” In a short time I wasn’t just writing about or predicting what was to come. I also dived head-first into the fray by creating my own AI artworks, algorithms, and possibly a new Afrofuturistic practice. The characters in my Midjourney botanist series live in a utopia that doesn’t need a specific geography. I used Deep Dream Generator and Adobe Photoshop to remix and layer or composite some of the Midjourney output.
All images by Dr. Gaskins.
Like all artforms new technology comes along, and equivalent debates arise in different fields. “Is electronic music really music?” Same question.
Some people will always value craft (or instrumentalism, in the music case) and so for them no it won't be art. And that’s fine.
For the rest of us art is about ideas. Brian Eno talks at length about how he allows machines (or software) to create sounds. and how his role becomes that of a curator. When the pseudo-random oscillators create a pleasing result only then does he mark that recording as one to keep. And what order does he edit and present them in? That is the art that makes his ambient music interesting.
A professional photographer will throw away hundreds of shots and select just twelve images for their gallery exhibition.
In much the same way Nettrice Gaskins must have written or entered hundreds or thousands of prompts, and experimented with small adjustments and finally only selected the greatest results.
These are incredible and yes IMHO it is art.
Posted by: Liv | Wednesday, August 17, 2022 at 03:28 PM