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 point for us to construct the imaginary world: "In the area between New Delta’s low skyscrapers, buildings and homes were carpeted with its world-famous stunning green grass, and the roads were fringed with it, but in this scene the grass was covered with smiley-faced bopping periwinkle flowers. It looked ridiculous, like one of those ancient animations from the early 1900s or a psychedelic drug–induced hallucination." I've come to realize that the BOT has a its own weight when trying to understanding and explicating a complicated, multi-word text prompts, which is possibly related to a statistically stronger association between particular terms in the prompt and the big data archive. That's why it seems that the BOT couldn't understand a sentence too well--we have to do the job by reducing (what we think) less important information in the prompt and help negotiate the relationship between data and noise in a prompt.
Another thing I noticed while experimenting with different configurations of a prompt was that the BOT seemed to understand the difference between a subject matter and a description of the style. For instance, when I used the prompt
"Post-oil Nigeria, low skyscrapers, buildings and homes carpeted with greenest grass and smiley-faced bopping periwinkle flowers, ancient animations from the early 1900s," the term "Post-oil Nigeria" seemed to be manifested as the architectural form in the image and the "animations from the early 1900s" seemed to give the postcard-like hue to the picture.
However, I found the result not "futuristic" enough so I replaced the "post-oil Nigeria" to "afrofuturism":
"afrofuturism, low skyscrapers, buildings carpeted with grass and smiley-faced flowers, animations from the early 1900s."
The image above was striking for me as the architectures are indeed more "futuristic" in the sense that it has a more postmodern form and shape and the flowers on the foreground are patterned in a way that helped create a seemingly "city of garden" in the future world. I consequently rendered a couple of more variations:
The first image is fascinating as there is a human-like figure being created in the middle of the image (this imaginary world) even though the text prompt is rather "inhumane."
Another variation gave out yet an even more detailed presentation of an architectural form that resembled the broadcasting tower we can see nowadays with a TV/screen/radar-filled overtop. Similar to this but with a reversed structure or even the Torre de Collserola in Barcelona:
However, as a variation of my original prompt, I believe the TV tower was only generated as a manifesting form of the keyword "skyscraper" as I didn't suggest tower or broadcasting in my prompt. These generated images are indeed more contemporary but not necessarily, "futuristic," from my own opinion; or to be more specific, they seemed to be futuristic in the last century. Looking at these pictures feels like reading a science fiction being written in the 1900s--I guess the prompt of "animations of the 1900s" really helped create this kind of atmosphere.
In the next step, I wanted my images to be more specific in terms of their styles--afrofuturism is a very broad term and a school of arts/thoughts that entail different artistic styles--because I feel like the generated images were more influenced by the keyword "animations from the 1900s" but not so much from "afrofuturism." Therefore, I decided to replace "afrofuturism" with two afrofuturistic artists to give a more signature form to the image. The first one is the foundational figure of afrofuturistic art, Sun Ra, who linked the African-American experience with ancient Egyptian mythology and outer space, creating early examples of afrofuturism in the mid-20th-century.
"Sun Ra, low skyscrapers, buildings carpeted with grass and smiley-faced flowers, animations from the early 1900s"
The keyword "Sun Ra" instantly changed the style of the images, though still with similar subject matters (skyscrapers and grassland). Its explicit motif of the sun and the dominating yellow tone of the images successfully present Sun Ra's obvious heliolatry tendency but I'm not sure if they can actually represent Sun Ra's Egyptian tradition.
My assumption is that because Sun Ra is not a painter per se but a musician and an experimental theater performer, his artistic style is not easily represented in visual terms--the only references are his costume and prop designs which are pretty expressionistic. These images did give out the "surface-ness" of expressionistic designs but more likely because of the postcard style the "animations" prompt created.
The second figure is Wangechi Mutu. As one of the most important Afrofuturistic and feminist painters in contemporary art scene, Mutu's work explores the influence of Africa on other cultures, intertwining themes from her experience as an African woman and migrant. Although trained as a sculptor and multimedia artist, Mutu is best known for her large-scale collages, wildly colorful works including printed and painted papers as well as synthetic materials such as glitter or plastic pearls, and punctuated by armatures drawn in ink. A typical work of Mutu is in the style of a collage, often featuring a female body decorated with/mutated by botanical/floral elements:
Hence I found it an even more perfect artistic style to depict an afrofuturistic story about pregnancy, mothering, distributed forms of care, and botanical futures.
"Wangechi Mutu, low skyscrapers, buildings carpeted with grass and smiley-faced flowers, animations from the early 1900s."
The images we got here are not necessarily in the form of collages but they definitely feature alienated forms of flowers and plants and large areas of light colors--pink, white, light green and yellow. Two specific variations are interesting though--presenting two possible directions of what the images could become: the first one is more pink and white, foregrounding the floral dimension of the prompt; the second one is more focusing on the architecture, surprisingly showing a human-like figure standing in the middle of a (seemingly) pollen storm.
Next week, I will build upon Mutu's style trying to re-tell/reimagine some sequences of "Mother of Invention." With different possible angles and pov prompts, I will try to explore the cinematic potentiality of these AI images.