Me and the Prompt
What AI means for image prodution
Sitting in front of the computer, this wishing machine, and being able to wish for whatever you want by entering a prompt is certainly one of the strangest situations imaginable. And above all, you are confronted with the disconcerting possibility that your wishes are limitless - and that bliss lies in nothing other than an otherworldly beauty. However, if you look at the results that spring from this - Pinterest offers great illustrative material here - the disappointment is huge. This is because an endless armada of extraterrestrial beauty queens marches on, who are not only equipped with all the sexual attributes that one (man) could wish for, but are also set in the corresponding sci-fi environment and dressed accordingly. And if you want to boil the whole thing down to its cause, the only conclusion is: the human imagination seems to be extremely limited, indeed, of a shocking uniformity.
But perhaps this also has to do with the abstruse starting position: that there is a machine that fulfills all my wishes.
This was precisely the fascination, indeed, the great feeling of happiness that overwhelmed me when I started working with Martin Burckhardt on CompanyMachine - and the basic idea was not to place the wishing machine at the center, but a text that deals with a specific problem and here, in a subtle way, seeks to limit a problem. With this decision, the focus was no longer on the wish - my prompt - but on the question of what happens when you translate images of language and thought back into imagery. Well - this process is now a year old and we have gone one step further in this field in that we have taught the images to walk, which is not particularly difficult, as there are now a good dozen great models that accept image-to-video.
Here’s a surprising result, thanks to Martin’s great essay The Monster and the Telematic Guillotine. Essentially, this text is about the consumer who, equipped with his remote control, creates his own world - but above all encounters his own ghosts. Frankly, I don’t know how and why the AI made this little girl out of it - but the result has kept me very busy. In a curious way, although completely surreal, you have the feeling that you are dealing with very realistic questions - and in this sense, working with the source material, which once again functions via a prompt, is almost a matter of course. So here is the result.
