Arting

Part of what excites me about generative AI LLMs and GANs is the back-and-forth between language and representation. I’ve lately been playing more with MidJourney and Deep Dream Generator and a local install of Stable Diffusion, and using them to extend my art-hobby tinkering with Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter. I enjoy abstract and non-figurative art, and I find thinking through the links between language and representation and abstraction—how to represent abstraction in words—scratches a pleasurable itch. And I like making pretty stuff. The images below started from a composited photo I’d made from two visits to Patrick Dougherty’s stickworks installations in Northampton MA in the 2000s and in Washington DC in the 2010s.

I’d originally used the above image for texture, to apply its look of bundled and twisted vines and twigs to other visual elements. The fun surprises came from running it through some of the technologies above and asking the machine to describe the image in language, editing the language, and then asking the machine to visualize what was represented in language. Thinking of this cycle as taking place over time opens up possibilities for metaphor and irony: I’ll sometimes apply a description from later in the process to an earlier image, or apply an earlier description to an image rendered later—so there’s a purposeful mismatch between linguistic and visual representation.

Rendering those mismatches as a series of individual layers, tracing them in Corel Painter’s various representations of natural media, and then compositing them in Photoshop got me to the above image. After producing that image, I took each of the individual layers, flipped them horizontally; re-ran them through Deep Dream Generator and Stable Diffusion, re-rendered them in Painter, and composited them again in Photoshop.