Category Archives: art

God is a Machine

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This picture is the first image in a two part series.  The second image Deus Est Machina (which is the same title in Latin) was posted previously.

Deformed hands and tangled fingers have become an iconic symbol of AI art.  The art machine knows what things look like (most of the time) but it doesn’t know what they are.  It starts making a girl with braided hair then somewhere along the way… does it change it’s mind?  …or does it never really know what it’s trying to make?  The result is almost an optical illusion.  It looks correct at first glance but on closer inspection something isn’t quite right.

#Art I made with #Midjourney #AI

 

We Are the Dreamers of the Dream

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Building the Metaverse to match the real world.

I made this CGI image about a year ago when the Metaverse was the shiny new tech thing.  Most people probably won’t get what it’s about so I’ll explain it, even though David Lynch would probably scold me for doing that.

The grey and chrome sphere are tools that special effects artists use to match 3D computer graphics to real world photography.  If you are shooting a film for example, and part of the scene will be CGI, you shoot a few extra feet of the environment with someone holding a grey and chrome sphere.  The chrome sphere reflects the entire environment and that reflected image can be “unwrapped” and placed as a dome over the CGI so the same light and colors shine on the computer generated elements as in the real scene.  (The chrome ball is actually an old fashioned “poor man’s” way of doing this.  There are 360 degree cameras now that can actually just take a picture of the entire environment right on the set.)

The grey sphere shows the quality of light shining on a specific place in the shot.

This image is about building a computer generated Metaverse that people can walk around in, just like real life.  It’s the dream of constructing a Metaverse as well as the Metaverse as a dreamscape… the birth of a new alternate world.

OK, enough of that…

The main difficulty I had in creating this image stems from the fact that the reflection in the chrome ball is actually the real reflection of the CGI environment.  It’s not a composite.  The mountains actually go all the way around the environment.  The grid floor goes out in all directions.  The “planet” and the “sun” seen in the ball are on the HRDI dome over the scene that is creating the ambient light.  The dome had to be lined up so the “planet” reflected in the sphere correctly.  The mountains had to be rotated in such a way that the peaks behind her and the ones in the chrome ball both looked good.  The main light in the scene is the keylight on the character which can be seen in the chrome sphere as a bright rectangle in the upper left of the sphere.  I could have removed that in post but I left it in because that’s the point.

The metaverse was supposed to be the future of everything.  Facebook even changed their name to Meta.  Now AI is the new thing.  Will the metaverse be created?  Will AI create the metaverse for us?  Who knows…

Created in DAZ Studio 4.20
Rendered with Iray
Color Correction in Capture One

Invasion!

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It’s been some time since I’ve posted any of my 3D creations.  This is actually something I started several years ago but never finished.  I had trouble with the lighting but it all came together recently when I decided to make it a night invasion.

Created in DAZ Studio 4.21
Rendered with Iray
Color Correction in Capture One

Abstract 001

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I’m starting to experiment with abstract art in Midjourney.  I’m finding that the results are even more unpredictable than usual.  Good.  I like that. I’m more interested in what the machine sees and not how well it follows instructions.

The prompt for this image was, “Abstract silver metal slabs thrusting up into the blackness of space.”  It’s a nice image but it isn’t really what I asked for.  I got other images of metal blocks and shards.  Some of them are nice too.

#Art I made with #Midjourney #AI

Deus Est Machina

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I’m sure many would reject this AI render because the hands are all screwed up.  The machine has a hard time with hands because it’s learning from pictures and it doesn’t really understand what a hand is.  Hands look different depending on what they are holding in the training images so the machine gets confused.

For me the hands praying in this image is the point. I’m fascinated by the way AI can make something so creepy and wrong look relatively normal at first glance. She also has hair coming out of her eyes.  One piece looks like it’s a disconnected continuation of a shadow on her forehead.

Great art happens at the edge of the medium you are working with.  Finding those edges is the true work of the artist.

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them. — Brian Eno

#Art I made with #Midjourney #AI