I haven’t had much time to write recently but I thought I would break my hiatus to share some fun explorations I’ve been doing with generative imagery (using a tool called Midjourney) in case it inspires others. I find this technology absolutely mind-blowing, and I constantly find myself surprised by just how amazing it is.
I thought I would share what exploring with Midjourney looks like in practice by making images that riff on the concept of Dia de Los Muertos (the Mexican Day of the Dead).
Using Generative Imagery Models Feels Like I’m Incanting Spirits
I won’t go into the technical aspects of Midjourney since that’s not my specialty and others have done it better, but a simple way to think about Midjourney and other Generative Imagery models is they take all the images/text descriptions they’ve been trained on (often enormous amounts) and they create a giant high-dimensional model for visual reality.
I think a useful term here is the German word Geist. The term is used in Zeitgeist (spirit of the age) and seems to mostly trend back to the philosopher Hegel to express the spirit of the world. Geist is often translated as “spirit/mind” and it also means ghost (it’s the same etymology).
When using Midjourney and image diffusion models, I think geist captures what is happening. You can type words, you can provide an image, or do a combination of image & words and then the model turns it into a picture. But not just any picture - it’s a picture that captures the geist – the spirit, the mind, the ghost – of the prompt.
But words don’t really get my point across so let me show you what I mean…
When a school project turns into a visual rabbit hole
This exploration started with me making a project for my son’s school around Dia de los Muertos. I wanted images to capture the spirit so I turned to Midjourney for help. I first needed to choose photographs or words to use as my “seed” for the spirit, the geist, of “Dia de los Muertos.”
After scrolling Google Images, I found the photograph below that I felt captured the occasion. This is an ofrenda, it has some skeletons, marigold flowers, and photos of the deceased. Good enough!
So then I turned to Midjourney.
Invocations using the Ofrenda’s geist
Taking this ofrenda seed photograph, I then asked Midjourney to “imagine” the following prompt: “<use this photograph URL> art deco”.
That’s it. Seed photograph + 2 words… And the result is below:
Midjourney took the picture and mapped its spirit to art deco. This is an Art Deco ofrenda - completely capturing the spirit of Dia de los Muertos but applied to this theme.
I’ve played with this tool for over a year now but it never ceases to amaze me. It feels like magic.
Here is the result for the seed photograph (our simple ofrenda) applied to “beverly hills kardashian”.
I don’t know why the model abstracted a weird-looking ghost-like-dog in the front, nor the clothes and specifics - but the photograph anchored the geist of the seed photograph and then the additional words incanted other spirits.
Here is the seed ofrenda photo applied to New York. The street corner, the building, the candles on the pavement… just incredible.
Then I took the seed and incanted further afield.
Here is “<seed photograph> + Qing Dynasty”. You can see that pumpkins have evolved somewhat: you have Qing Dynasty art, the ancient pagoda in Dia de Los Muertos colors and an entire Qing Scene.
Midjourney also generated some other takes on that prompt which I found fascinating: plates and a painting from the Qing Dynasty in Dia de los Muertos spirit.
Some more:
Tokugawa shogunate + <seed ofrenda>
Wild West America
The Kikuya People
Eskimo kings
Maybe everyone has gotten used to this technology and it’s ho-hum… But the idea that I can feed an image, and that the model can capture its spirit and transport it into anything my imagination can dream of, is pure wonder to me.
If you want to explore, it’s really quite simple to do. Tons of good YouTube videos to help start.
Until next time!
🙏
Wow. We are entering a very interesting era in history. I will look into this technology further....
Thanks for sharing.
This is truly interesting. You have piqued my interest big time.....
Thank you!