Pure Fiction (and semi-fiction)
The people in this gallery do not exist. They are the result of my ideas, inconsistent prompting skills and artificial intelligence.
There is a lot of justified concern racing through the artistic community about AI and its implications. Writers, painters, illustrators, designers, musicians and actors are correctly worried that their work and aspects of themselves, (i.e., their image and voice) may be sampled with little or no regulation at the present time. I support the conversation about fairness.
At the same time, I like the idea of creative people opening themselves to re-thinking artistic expression. Right now, I see and hear a lot of knee-jerk calls for maintaining the heavily commodified and hierarchal statis quo.
For the present, I experiment with such collaborations. I am very open to the possibility of paying royalties one day, provided that the quality of output becomes more consistent than it is now. I do not sell any of my promptographs, try to pass them off as anything but AI and I try to limit the images I share of people in my life. For now, it is a fascinating opportunity to extend my own imagination and to flex my own creative muscles. I still think this is what art should be about.
AI Art Inspired by Real Photos of Things Theatrical
Here is some AI Art featuring fictitious characters that resulted from messing with real photos of me playing fictitious characters. (Well, almost all of them are that.) The image of Nurse Ratched is, hands down, my favorite. It is the only AI Art I've generated to date that is an honest-to-goodness, intelligent interpretation. What's even better is that it matches my interpretation of her. Ratched is, for all intents and purposes, a machine. And, as her deliciously disorderly hair shows that she is beginning to lose her iron grip on her world as the play ends. (The springs are beginning to pop out.)
"King Lear" was a happy accident and the outcome of my learning how to age and gender-swap digitally. (I know how to age in real life.) My vanity-morph photo that combines my features with those of Elizabeth I's makes me look infinitely better than in reality. And my interpretation of the Guthrie image is that it is a post-apocalyptic world in which there is infinitely better parking available.
