Media Arts and Technology

What is the aesthetics of computational images? The class we are in posed this fundamental question right at the beginning of the first session and I have been pondering this question throughout the whole quarter. When we say the “aesthetics” of anything, what does it mean? What kind of premise does...

For this week, I experimented photo-generating with Text2Light and material_stable_diffusion. If I compare these two, they are both easy to use but it's pretty obvious that material_stable_diffusion is more time-saving as it has a more straightforward interface. Looking at their results, I am pretty...

For this week's project, I experimented with both the COLAB version of Stable Diffusion and Lexica. My first interactions with these two platforms, or in general, with Stable Diffusion were pretty messy. In comparison to Midjourney, the time Stable Diffusion took to generate images was generally lon...

Following up on previous weeks' project, I continue on exploring the Midjourney AI's ability to "tell" a story through its image composition, or how we as users/creators are able to tell a story with the help of Midjourney. As I mentioned last week, if we imagine telling a story in cinematic terms, ...

This week I continue on exploring the question about how AI imagines and depicts speculative futures. Nnedi Okorafor's "Mother of Invention" continues to be the narrative foundation to which the Midjourney BOT keeps referencing. I started with this one simple description last week as a departure poi...

The core question I ponder for this class is: how does machine-generated images speculate our planetary futures? My weekly assignments will be centralized around producing images with speculative-fictional literatures as thought experiments on imagining different forms of futures. With that, I hope ...