I’ve finally stopped working on — I hesitate to say “finished” — a big and complicated piece called “When He Becomes the Creator, Will He Let Us Exist?” (A line from the great X Ray Spex song “Genetic Engineering”).
As I’ve mentioned in a few past posts, this image is a “Hellscape” in the European tradition of Bosch's "Last Judgement" or Bruegel the Elder's "Dull Gret" — but it's actually based on an old book illustration I found many years ago of some geologists looking at the inside of a gigantic volcanic caldera.
Like most of the work I’ve been doing for the last few years, I used “Image to Image” techniques to add a “patina” of painterly textures (per my usual contextual/conceptualist schtick). In this case however, the use of “Image to Image” goes further — each part of the image has been through multiple rounds of AI rendering with the “input strength” of the source picture kept low to increase the “mutations” and hallucinations” inherent in the process.
This resulted in dozens (sometimes hundreds) of variations for each of the 34 “areas” I broke the piece into — something like 4000 renders in total. I combed through them and picked out what I thought were the most interesting results, which I composited together in Photoshop. Then I repeated the entire process to mutate the mutations. The final version is the seventh round, more or less.
So, in effect: all of the figures and other detailed elements of the piece are the result of edited and curated artificial Pareidolia.
My thinking about the piece as a whole revolves around the relationships between creativity and religion (God the Creator) and the imminent arrival of artificial intelligence - and with it, artificial artists. The central figure is this new AI Creator wielding a ceremonial paintbrush, which He waves in the air like a conductor, willing different scenes and scenarios into existence.
However, He isn’t the biblical Creator up in Heaven (we actually see a distracted Yahweh in the clouds at the top of the piece, dreamily reimagining His past Glories). Instead, this AI Creator is in charge of an underworld, in a direct nod to Harlan Ellison’s AM supercomputer in “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”. One other note: the Creator’s mask (see detail below) is a reference to a meme popular in AI circles, where HP Lovecraft’s “Shoggoth” monster wears a smiling fake face to cover up its terrifying underlying form.
