i am a camerAI
the zAItgeist
TL; DR: AI-imagined images, some verisimillituned…
Above: a text-to-image iteration of a real photo from this sequence: Gravity / Antigravity
Technology is a time-stamp. Steam engines, flip phones, electric cars (etc) all signify a photo’s moment in the stack of history. Artificial-intelligence is invisible, but the photographs in this post reveal the current tectonic technological shift — all the shots were“taken” by text-to image software in order to generate versions of real, missed, or wished-for photos for The Window .
Above: a text-to-image realization of a missed photo op of two men in navy white dress uniforms passing two women in black burquas on the crosswalk below. (I was too slow; most shots must be done in <3s)
Above: IlluminatAI? Another photo generated by the exact same text prompt as used for the previous picture.
Above: verisimillituned… an artificial clown spawned into a real setting. (See the original photo and setting in the NOTES, bottom.)
Above: an image-to-text-to-image photo. An arrangement of visually-rhyming Window photos inspired an ekphrastic haiku — “petals pink blossom, / bright disco ball reflection, /snow. home. so soon gone” — and those words were then input into DALL-E to make the above image. No overhead Window POV — the “1” in 24/7/365/1 — but hey an AI aesthetic exception. (Here’s the original 4 photo poem: Disco Balls and Apple Blossoms )
Above: this image was solely generated from the word-prompt: “high angle establishing shot from 3rd floor window in dim night lighting of a crime scene photographer in a dark blue uniform taking a photograph with a tripod of a pink car”. Below is the actual photo taken by me, 4 am, 1/2 way into the 24/7/365/1 Window project:
NOTES:
- “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking” is from Christopher Isherwood’s novel ‘Goodbye to Berlin’ (which inspired ‘Cabaret’).
- fashion counts as technology
- this post’s portmanteau count: 4. I’ll send an editioned signed print from The Window to whoever points them out first
- text-to-image tools are another way to work on a few of my themes: infinite reiterations and recombinations, shifting POVs, words as images (graffiti, kanji, etc), information and code…
- 2 bonus images below: the first is the real photo used as reference for the clown pic; and below that is an AI BEV LSD weird (and hairy-armed) alternate image of the generated crime-scene photo, using the identical text-prompts
- AI:II is coming
