There are eight Creations that you will be producing for this class. You have one week to create each one, so they should not be precious or labored over, however you should spend substantial time making them. Be prepared to explain your process and choices. You get graded for DOING THEM: P/F.

They will serve as “sketch” material for your one major projecte: Final Project and Exhibition.

• 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 technologist 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 sketches in creations 1, 4, and 6 are an easy example of that (check them out for details). 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 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. My sketchbook cost only $6.99.

• The example creations we've posted shouldn't change what you want to make or how. They're just there for general guidance if you feel overwhelmed about the general assignment expectations, NOT as a literal how to that you should copy exactly as a process.

- AV Marraccini

Orient yourself with this intro to Midjourney first and use their online guide (in the sidebar of this link) to prompting and other features if you need more help.

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

Inspiration/Example:

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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?

4. 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!

5. 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

DESCRIPTION: MAKE a deep deepfake (or series of) and post on discord and upload copies to your folder on the class google drive. INCLUDE a text file (caption on discord) that describes your process and the applications used. See my example below.

And what do we mean by deep deepfake? Go deep into the process. Compare and contrast results. Deepfakes are easy to make these days. Choose an aspect that you want to push. Is it content? resolution? aesthetics? humor or absurdity? or something else? The choice is yours, just dive deep into it!

BE PREPARED to discuss this creation in class or on discord next week.

COURSE NAMING CONVENTIONS FOR DIGITAL FILES: YearSemester_CourseTitle_NameOfActivity_FirstLastName.fileformat Ex: 24FA_AI_MessingAround_KaraBillingsley.doc

INSPIRATION:

DEFINITION: The term deepfake combines deep, taken from AI deep-learning technology (a type of machine learning that involves multiple levels of processing), and fake, addressing that the content is not real. The term came to be used for synthetic media in 2017 when a Reddit moderator created a subreddit called “deepfakes” and began posting videos that used face-swapping technology to insert celebrities’ likenesses into existing pornographic videos. (source: https://www.britannica.com/technology/deepfake)

EXAMPLES:

Deepfake apps used in this example:

AKOOL Swapface.org photohero.ai myheritage.com

A few other deepfake applications that I haven’t tried yet:

Deepfakefx.com - FREE 3-day trial https://docs.facefusion.io/ - have to configure for your system and install the application with a python script https://www.deepswap.ai/ https://character.ai/

DESCRIPTION

1. Use multiple platforms and practices this week.

2. Elements from previous class assignments can be incorporated

3. This can be a collaborative project.

4. If the work is time-based (performative or video) please make sure it is under 7 minutes.

5. Course Naming Conventions for Digital Files: YearSemester_CourseTitle_NameOfActivity_FirstLastName.fileformat Ex: 24SP_AI_DoSomething_CarlaGannis.doc

6. If a live performance, please make sure to arrange in class video documentation of your performance (*this will be the digital file you turn in as the assignment on the class google drive)

7. Questions? Ask us!

INSPIRATION: Iteration: “Take an object, do something to it, do something else to it”-- Jasper Johns

Example (you are required to make a hand drawing, sculpture, or other physical medium as your starting input for this creation)

Example by Alex: I made this sample work using a three step process. First, I did a sketch inspired by my thinking over the summer about the latex and rubber sculpture of an artist I've been obsessed with lately, Eva Hesse. Then I fed the sketches into Midjourney. I tried working with both versions 6 and 4 of the standard algorithm, but they were too posterized and clean-- essentially boring. You can see the three outputs that finally inspired me were from setting the algorithm all the way back to version 1 (click outputs to enlarge these images) ! Then, after upscaling, I used those outputs to inspire another physical sculpture. This piece, which I'm calling Untitled Industrial Chronic Illness, uses one of my own prescription bottles, some latex sheeting to wrap that, and plastic aquarium tubing to do the coils on top inspired by the Midjourney outputs. The materials cost about $4 total max at Canal Rubber (where Hesse herself often bought latex and rubber-- visit for fun sometime or if you want to use tubing too, it's on Canal Street on the Lower East Side!) but your local hardware store is a great, cheap resource for sculpture too. The hardest part was honestly getting the superglue off my hands with acetone afterward....

If I was asked in a crit about this piece, I would talk my listeners through my process, from sketch, to digital, to physical again in the form of sculpture. Then I would explain how my choice of materials and form, as well as prompt inputs, relate to Hesse's work, her premature death from cancer in her late 30's, and my own experience with chronic illness (that's why I had a prescription bottle just lying around to make this with). The process is part of the concept of the final artwork. If I were doing this for our class, I'd be sure to bring the sculpture with me in person the next week, since it's small and portable, as well as post images from many angles on the Discord.

PS-- If I were thinking about expanding this for the final project, I'd consider scale. Should I make a really large piece to increase physical presence in the gallery? Maybe 20 or so wrapped bottles for more visual impact? What about doing this with a set of related sketches and making all the outputs into related sculptures?

DESCRIPTION: Make something tacky, camp, kitsch, or intentionally ugly. OR make something queer that leans into the sensibilities of queer history, like camp.

Example:

Alex:

First, I got out my sketchbook and watercolours. I wanted to play with the phrase " a little fruity" that is an old fashioned-- and now jokey way-- of talking about queer people like me. I wore a t-shirt with it on it to Pride this year, which gave me the idea. Paintings of fruit are also a total kitsch, dining room cliche, so I wanted to try making something both queer AND kitsch today. Here were my initial tools-- once again I decide to start with analog materials because they give me a feeling of richness in my work:

I painted some kitschy watercolour fruit that looks like an elementary school kid did it. These are the cropped photos from my sketchbook pages I used, thinking they would make a good dataset for PlayForm-- I made many more than this but here's a good sampler:

I uploaded my full dataset of watercolour fruits to PlayForm. Then I set it as my training dataset for a GAN for 2 hours and 30 minutes, or 15 credits worth of computing.

As you probably know by now, Playform by default for this training time offers fifty outputs. This gave me a lot of choices. And choice is an important part of artistic agency. I had these images to choose from when constructing my final piece, which I decided should be a triptych in a nod to classical painting forms.

Here's the individual final three outputs you see in the example piece above merged into the final form of the triptych:

After choosing my three parts, I made the final piece combining them in Photoshop, with a simple black ground that suggests the triple framing of a triptych in physical life. You can see the final piece under the header that starts this page. In the end, how you present your work matters too! Think about the after-process you have for your outputs-- sometimes you might want to use a raw output, but sometimes not. For me, the reason not to use all the outputs, or just one, was to hone my concept in the direction of my vision of queer art.

DESCRIPTION: Based on the readings for Week 04 (*see bulleted READINGS list below) develop a relationship with an online identity (*or if this is too uncomfortable to you, produce a speculative fiction work about your relationship with an AI service, robot or agent). This relationship can be platonic or romantic in nature. DOCUMENT via screen shots, videos, text files this blossoming relationship. At the end of the week, WRITE a or to your AI friend, based on your feelings about the experience. INCLUDE the AI's response to you, and/or add any personal anecdotes about the experience.

• The documentation of this creation can be collected in a .pdf, a slide presentation, a video, or in some other form, for example a talking avatar telling the story of your relationship, or you performing the

• You should engage with your AI friend no fewer than 3 times during the week, for at least 15-30 minutes.

READINGS:

• "

SUGGESTED APPS:

INSPIRATION: HER, 2013, an unconventional love story between a human man and an AI operating system.

I'm Your Man (2021) A scientist at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin is persuaded to participate in a study to get funding for her research. For three weeks, she must live with a humanoid robot designed to be the perfect life partner for her.

EXAMPLE:

Below are excerpts from a conversation that my "AI avatar" C.A.R.L.A. G.A.N. (Crossplatform Avatar for Recursive Life Action Generative Adversarial Network) had with a virtual friend on candy.ai. In this conversation she explains to the chatbot (that is set to "human mode") that she is virtual. He debates with her over this, and expresses how much he prefers "real experiences."

DESCRIPTION: This week you're going to "iterate your identity" Revisit the "Are You There AI God? It's Me, (Insert Name)"

*This is similar to the "Do Something and Do Something Else" project, BUT you will be writing an artist statement about this project.

• You can approach this iteration multiple ways:

  • You can choose a new medium or media form to translate your original work

  • You can expand on the work you've already produced, for example if you made a 20 second video, it can now be longer form or you could audio or interactive components

  • You could create a new work if you feel after class material covered together there are different ways you'd like to represent yourself

  • You can surprise us with some other approach we did not mention above ^^^

REQUIREMENTS:

• Do not use an AI platform to write your artist statement.

• For the second iteration of your identity one component of the final work should be authored by you, meaning it should not be only an AI generative project. For example, you can take a generated image and bring it into Photoshop or After Effects to edit, add, or change the work in some way.

EXAMPLE:

ARTIST STATEMENT FOR THE WORK: “The Selfie Drawing Project” began as a search, turning my gaze upon myself (and my electronic devices) to see what I might find there. In January of 2015 I felt an intense urge to begin working on a new body of work, one that in fact, incorporated my body. I felt vulnerable at first, speaking more directly through my own voice, and using myself as a character in the digital narratives that seem to be my most natural form of expression. I’ve been taking selfies for years, but before incorporating them into my art, I needed to find an element of selfie vernacular to recontextualize. Drawing, usually the first phase of any series I begin, became the vehicle for me to embark on this project. The project includes a collection of 52 digital drawings that I completed over 52 weeks – a year-long project in which I performed “the self” through digital drawings from January to December 2015.

The first culmination of this body of work was “A Subject Self-Defined”, a solo exhibition at TRANSFER Gallery in 2016 of large-format looped moving images and an augmented reality book (produced in collaboration with UNBOX and Blippar), that took its title from Joseph Kosuth’s 1966 neon sculpture that spells out and is eponymously titled “A Subject Self-Defined.” He belonged to a group of artists involved in stripping down the art object, reducing it to ideas and information that were detached from personal meaning. Forty-nine years later, when we find art in the age of networked identity and digital dematerialization, I am perplexed by subjecthood and self-definition in relationship to the “personal” when performed publicly.”

In 2017, the project was expanded for a solo exhibition at DAM Gallery entitled “Until the End of the World.” I provided new hybrid transcriptions of the Selfie project, including an augmented reality wallpaper installation “The Selfie Wallpaper“ and the 3D animated video work “Until the End of the World,” for which the exhibition is eponymously titled and which enhances a narrative component to the selfie project. Inspired by a sequence in the 1991 Wim Wenders film “Until the End of the World” where a woman is addicted to watching her dreams in a small, handheld device. I exploded the concept into an operatic mash up that addresses the digital identity politics of our age.

DESCRIPTION: Although the title of this course is Visual AI Studio, this week we encourage you to use an AI audio application to complete a remix (see definitions and inspiration below) of a beloved or despised song. You can include visuals of yourself or your friends deepfaked as the singer or the band; you can create a remixed music video; you can create a new score using musical notation. The sky is the limit in how you choose to remix, but given that the concept of Remix "often referenced in popular culture derives from the model of music remixes which first produced around the late 1960s and early 1970s in New York City," audio should be a core component in this work. (quote: https://remixtheory.net/?page_id=3)

BE PREPARED to discuss this creation in class or on discord next week.

COURSE NAMING CONVENTIONS FOR DIGITAL FILES: YearSemester_CourseTitle_NameOfActivity_FirstLastName.fileformat Ex: 24FA_AI_Remix_GongfuWu.jpg

Suggested Text to Audio/Sound Apps:

Suno

Udio

Eleven Labs

PlayHT

Image to Sound (Based on image generated for text to image) :

ChatGPT

Open Source :

Piper Version Control

Tortoise

Topaz for AI

INSPIRATION: This quote by Jim Jarmusch, who additionally quotes Jean-Luc Godard: “Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: ‘It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to.’”

...and Everything is a Remix

Everything is a Remix is a four-part documentary series on remix culture. It was produced by Kirby Ferguson, a US-based filmmaker. The series focuses on remixing as form of creativity.

Remixing, mashups and sampling have all been with us for many years now but the saturation of high-speed broadband has seen an explosion in the access to media and its inevitable resampling and subsequent sharing, where the process begins over again.

Pablos Picasso once said “good artists copy; great artists steal,” and Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, used this line again in a 1995 interview.

DEFINITION: What is a Remix?

Generally speaking, remix culture can be defined as the global activity consisting of the creative and efficient exchange of information made possible by digital technologies that is supported by the practice of cut/copy and paste. The concept of Remix often referenced in popular culture derives from the model of music remixes which were produced around the late 1960s and early 1970s in New York City, an activity with roots in Jamaica’s music.[1] Today, Remix (the activity of taking samples from pre-existing materials to combine them into new forms according to personal taste) has been extended to other areas of culture, including the visual arts; it plays a vital role in mass communication, especially on the Internet. Definitions:

Remix: A remix is a piece of media which has been altered or contorted from its original state by adding, removing, and changing pieces of the item. A song, piece of artwork, books, video, poem, or photograph can all be remixes. The only characteristic of a remix is that it appropriates and changes other materials to create something new.

Mash-up - something created by combining elements from two or more sources: such as

• a piece of music created by digitally overlaying an instrumental track with a vocal track from a different recording

• a movie or video having characters or situations from other sources

• a Web service or application that integrates data and functionalities from various online sources

Appropriation Art - appropriation in art is the use of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation applied to them. The use of appropriation has played a significant role in the history of the arts (literary, visual, musical and performing arts).

Cultural appropriation, at times also phrased cultural misappropriation, is the adoption of an element or elements of one culture or identity by members of another culture or identity. This can be controversial when members of a dominant culture appropriate from disadvantaged minority cultures.

Cultural syncretism is when distinct aspects of different cultures blend together to make something new and unique. Since culture is a wide category, this blending can come in the form of religious practices, architecture, philosophy, recreation, and even food.

Plagiarism: the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own.

SCAMPER: Subsitute Combine Adapt Modify Put to another use Eliminate Rearrange or Reverse. You can post images of other works that seem related to what your artist does, or post an image of the artist's work and write about ways that you think they have used the SCAMPER technique in some way.

EXAMPLES:

Cat Lady's Lament

Cat Lady's Lament 02

Prompts Used: Ethereal synths and ambient tones echo alien femininity—hypersexualized, objectified, and underestimated. A Cat Lady defies male-centered worlds, revealing the eerie uncanniness of forgotten female bodies5:51Yesha ShahAmbient drones and glitchy synths pulse through alien femininity—hypersexualized, objectified, yet powerful. A Cat Lady disrupts male-dominated realms, embodying the uncanniness of forgotten female bodies.5:51Yesha ShahAlien femininity—hypersexualized, objectified. A Cat Lady, set to ethereal synths and ambient tones, defies male-centered worlds, embodying the eerie uncanniness of overlooked female bodies.

MORE INSPIRATION

A Musikalisches Würfelspiel (German for "musical dice game") was a system for using dice to randomly generate music from precomposed options. These games were quite popular throughout Western Europe in the 18th century. Several different games were devised, some that did not require dice, but merely choosing a random number.

MOZART EXAMPLE

DESCRIPTION: Make a piece based on your identity, yourself using some form of AI, for example a self portrait or a selfie or some other form that encapsulates an aspect of your identity.

BE PREPARED to discuss this creation in class or on discord next week.

COURSE NAMING CONVENTIONS FOR DIGITAL FILES: YearSemester_CourseTitle_NameOfActivity_FirstLastName.fileformat Ex: 24FA_AI_Identity_JorgeMendoza.doc

INSPIRATION: NarGIFsus: This is an exhibition co-curated by Carla in 2016, pre-dating much use of AI in image production. Still there are some hilarious digital takes (check out the fan as selfie) in this collection of work.

Some articles that may be helpful in your thinking about yourself

1. THE SCIENCE OF SELF: "What Is a 'Self'? Here Are All the Possibilities" by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, 2016, Live Science https://www.livescience.com/57126-what-is-a-self-all-possibilities.html

2. AI AVATAR SELFIES: “How Is Everyone Making Those A.I. Selfies?" by By Madison Malone Kircher and Callie Holtermann, 2022, NY Times https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/style/lensa-ai-selfies.html

3. FACIAL EXPRESSIONS IN SELFIES: "AI and the American Smile How AI misrepresents culture through a facial expression." by Jenka, 2023, Medium https://medium.com/@socialcreature/ai-and-the-american-smile-76d23a0fbfaf

4. SELF IDENTITY, SELFIE HISTORY & PHILOSOPHY: "THE 'Selfie' Phenomenon as a Basis for Self-Identity Search. Preamble to a Philosophy of the Selfie Photography" by Sylvia Borissova and Liliana Yakovleva, 2020, Philosophy

5. OBJECT ORIENTED PHILSOPHY & NARCISSISM: "The I in Object: Selfie Culture and Object-Oriented Philosophy"

6. ANTHROPOLOGICAL: "The Origins of Self An Anthropological Perspective" by Martin P.J. Edwardes , UCL Digital Press https://ucldigitalpress.co.uk/Book/Article/91/115/6744/

7. FACE TRACKING: "Working with Faces: A journey into the art of face analysis and classification. by Kyle McDonald, Medium https://kcimc.medium.com/working-with-faces-e63a86391a93

EXAMPLES: Carla Gannis: "self portraits as a wwwunderkammer" 2022

Description: "So I've been thinking about 'mixed media art,' about 7,810,000 Google results and the possibilities of "mixed algorithm art" 1 Google result. Over the past two days, I trained midjourney AI on 'wwwunderkammer, wunderkammer, cabinet of curiosity, cabinets of curiosity, feminism, decolonization, futuristic, hyperreal'. I trained Lensa AI on photos of me ranging from 6 years old until now. I then used the images generated from both of these platforms in playform AI (a platform I have been using since the early days of 2019. I love the abstractions an artist can achieve with playform) to generate a new set of images. So a few results (with some further tweaks by me in Photoshop) and a few of the generated images from midjourney and lensa that went into the soup."

Student Seun Elemo: An AI generated image of a "Black man," a statement on how Seun's unique self is seen as a "flat" generic identity by others

Student Benjamin Liang: He passed this poem that he wrote to GPT and asked it to render an image of how I felt in the moment he was writing it (i.e. a snapshot of him “self”).