🤖01 Messing Around
Lead on this creation: Alex
Last updated
Lead on this creation: Alex
Last updated
DESCRIPTION: Use Midjourney to make an art historically inspired piece and be prepared to discuss it in class or on discord next week.
COURSE NAMING CONVENTIONS FOR DIGITAL FILES: YearSemester_CourseTitle_NameOfActivity_FirstLastName.fileformat Ex: 24FA_AI_MessingAround_JillianBenizzi.doc
I made this work using a multi-step process. Midjourney often produces more interesting outputs starting from another image. I often encourage people to use sketches. It doesn't matter if they're bad! It's kind of like a guiderail for the software. You can even draw stick figures, but this physical step also helps you conceptualize what you want the final piece to resemble and work out why in your head. I started with this sketch of a robot in a garden, inspired by the painter Fragonard:
I just took a picture of this on my phone and uploaded it to the Midjourney website-- no sophisticated scanning, nothing, you just type the prompt next to the image you're using as a guideline.
A lot of using Midjourney for this course will just be putting the hours in and learning the contours of the model by experimentation. Because I happen to like French rococo painting, one of the things I've noticed is that Midjourney sucks at distinguishing the style of those painters from each other and later works. So you have to use workarounds if you want something in that style. I wanted to evoke Fragonard, but also a biomechanical android figure that represented the topic of this course for me, merging my own interests with the syllabus for this example. My initial prompt resulted in this in Version 5-- I set the algorithim back one version because 6 and above are very posterized, and I don't like that look. I wanted something that felt like paint. My first output looked like this:
This was fun, but way too "cute" for the style I was going for here-- and also it still looks more like a sketch on paper than paint on canvas. So, I set the algorithm back further. Versions 4 and 3 tend to look more like physical paint if you want to play with that aspect of the digital-physical illusion. I used this output as a guide with the same prompt-- "a biomechanical woman in a garden as a French rococo painting by Fragonard"-- to get these next two outputs:
These were cool! But still not exactly what I wanted as my final image. Midjourney has a lot of algorithmic bias. If you ask it to depict a woman, even a robot woman, she'll almost always be very attractive in a heteronormative way, and be surrounded by flowers in a garden that actually don't exist in French rococo painting-- but there's no way for the algo to know that, right? So I decided to merge all three images in the style of the v 3 algorithim output, once again with the prompt "as a french rococo painting by Fragonard with a biomechanical robot woman in a garden":
Okay, this was much closer to what I was going for! But it didn't feel painterly enough, I wanted to see the strokes. So I used the name of another French painter and applied this image in the prompt box, and cranked up the "chaos" setting to get something out of left field from the predictable algo:
This is how I got my final result here:
But I'm not done. I could bring this into Photoshop, or paint in actual acrylic or even oil if I wanted to. Or even just use it as an inspiration for another output-- maybe a digital video, a costume made of cardboard, or something else entirely. I'm happy with this for now though, but for a crit, I have to think about what my piece is doing intellectually. I wanted a painting that didn't look like a cliche poster or videogame art, and that looked like it had the artifacts of actual paint-- marks, strokes etc. This is because I wanted to think about the idea that we're all still looking at a digital image here, not real paint, something that will come up when we read Walter Benjamin. I chose a robot as a subject with the contradictory setting of an 18th century French garden and painting style so the viewer would know I was playing with irony.
This should make a few things clear to you about your creative pieces every week:
You can't just make a single output in thirty seconds and turn it in, unless you have a sophisticated conceptual explanation for why you did that. In general, you always have to be able to explain why you made the artistic choices you did.
Play around! Experiment! There is no right answer. Unlike a problem set, a work of art doesn't have one correct way to engage. You are trying to develop your own sensibility as a maker and tehcnologist in this course, and part of that is taking risks to figure out your own style using these tools. Sometimes you'll fail and that's fine too. These are pass/fail assignments that give you a pass just for turning it in for this reason-- we want you to try to push yourselves.
Art and especially art made with generative tools is as much about ideas as it is outputs. Be prepared to think about your viewers-- how do you want people to see this piece ultimately? As a print? On a screen? Each creation you make won't have to be finished to this degree, but your final project for our exhibition will and it helps you to think about this every week. The point is not to make something beautiful. It can be beautiful; it can also be ugly, abrasive, or uncomfortable. The point is to make something worthy of interest. Hold yourself to the highest standards you can: would you be interested in this piece if you saw it in a museum or gallery?
Get your hands dirty, even if you've never made physical art or design before. We encourage students to consider hybrid physical-digital outputs every week because they often bring out strong work via a multi-step process. My sketch here was an easy example of that. But you can also think about photographs, videos, sculpture, and found objects as sources of inputs that are in the physical world. Similarly, you can also return your piece to the physical world by printing, copying, re-making, and being inspired by it to use another form. Our class has a huge space in the Navy Yard to exhibit your final pieces, so you can think big too!
Keep a sketchbook or commonplace notebook for your ideas. This helps when you feel burnt out and need inspiration, or if you have an idea to jot down some other time on the subway or at 4 AM. You can see I use my sketchbook in all the example pieces I have made for this syllabus. I also use a notebook for my writing, including my first book, where I jot down quotes, make doodles, and take notes in my life when something seems like an important concept. I like my notebooks to be tiny so I can keep them in my bag with me all the time, so I use pocket-sized ones, but you can use anything you want.
INSPIRATION:
DESCRIPTION: Use Midjourney to make an art historically inspired piece and be prepared to discuss it in class or on discord next week.
COURSE NAMING CONVENTIONS FOR DIGITAL FILES: YearSemester_CourseTitle_NameOfActivity_FirstLastName.fileformat Ex: 24FA_AIStudio_MessingAround.doc
