I’m working on a smaller, less realistic computer game to get the Luna project out of the doldrums. Plan is to get some momentum and then re-deploy some of the work into the more complex construction. This post is about an interesting flow of ideas that went in an unexpected direction. Don’t worry there’s lots of pictures.
So I wanted to make a game level based on Bosch’s Musical Hell based on plastic Fisher Price musical toys. There’s no specific reason for this – it’s just a flow of ideas. I’ve built quite a few models but thought this might be a place where AI would actually be useful in pre-visualisation. So I asked for a landscape by Bosch with plastic toy instruments. Here’s one of the images I got after a lot of rewording and negating bad results.
Two main things – doesn’t look much like FP plastic musical toys. But the lighting etc. is really helpful in terms of the dramatic staging and texture.
As I looked at it I had a really serious buzz in the back of my brain that it was based on something familiar. Some artwork that I’d seen before. Not Bosch. Spent some hours rummaging through art books. Thought I’d seen it re-used on an old science fiction book.
Deep in the midnight the subconscious said Gleeson. GLEESON!! JAMES G L E E S O N !
It wasn’t Gleeson. Gleeson is washy and windy and no shiny edges. It was … it might …
Yves Tanguy. Archetypical surrealist artist, all booze and wife bashing and fucking Peggy Guggenheim for access. As he was dying in the USA in 1954 he finished his final canvas…
OK that’s pretty damn close. But still not my man. My man paints red and ends up on book covers … he’s not charging major painter fees. More looking I find that Tanguy inspired an American artist who went on to define an entire era of Sci Fi book covers.
Richard Powers. Bingo. Full on Media Arts degree in action.
So I’m not saying that this changes anything – it’s still going to be a Musical Hell. But it soothes my responsibility a bit to acknowledge where this comes from. I don’t know that AI has followed this path – but I followed a path and that takes back control from the machines.
Art’s all about taking the bits you like from different influences anyway, the more influences and stimuli you have, the richer and more complex the final product. Not necessarily better, in the same way a meal is not improved with more ingredients, but like you say about the path, the train of thought as you go from one source to another is something that only your imagination can produce. That initial AI image is pretty good as a starting point… I’d find it tempting to feed all these images you’re discovered back into the AI, and combine and jumble them up from there, just to see what gets spat out again. Which wouldn’t help the game, of course, it’d just be amusing.