To Absent Friends

Verse meets A.I. Imaginings

*Page under construction - work in progress:

I am currently working on a tokensied verse series, using a marriage of blockchain technology and A.I. imaginings to raise support for each species covered.

Of the collection of animal poetry, some is species-specific, some more generalised. It seeks to add an informative and emotional perspective to the current mass-extinction event that humans are causing. Wherever possible, I have included accurate data to contextualise the problem.

As self-appointed keepers of The Earth, I think we have a lot of responsibility for our fellow terrestrial travellers. So, the exploration of 'Man' as the effective catalyst for disastrous change is one that runs constant throughout the pieces.

The imagery is cinematic, emotive and surreal. It is achieved synthetically by prompting select elements from the poetry text itself into an artificial intelligence procedural generator. Each piece is painstakingly assembled though a strange process of trial, error and revelation; until the visual narratives resonate properly with the source texts used to create them (some mock-ups below - not final formats). Many of the images took hundreds of iterations to perfect.

Although this is an ongoing project, the rights to all images and poems are reserved.

More to follow…

artist notes:

Entering into a dialogue with an A.I. has been odd. My normal workflow is ‘see picture, take picture, process picture’. For this project it has become more ‘imagine the picture you want, think of how best to describe that picture, reword the description to alter output, iterate through countless image versions tweaking details, process image’

It put me in mind of the chicken and egg thing; or opening a box with the crowbar inside… starting from verbal source text and then going through stages to only find out what the image looks like at the end.