AI Art experience
The excitement of a possible extension of my creativity when I’m clicking generate or queue.
Personal experience
My interest in analog photography greatly helps in directing and guiding AI with preliminary knowledge of cameras and film characteristics. Having a creative background also aids in collaborating effectively with AI when it comes to storytelling.
Unexpected thought
I’m not sure if it’s the feeling that machines could have digital emotions, or if it’s just a creative reflection of our collaboration.
Description
I’ve been interested in analog photography for a long time, and I’ve been exploring the capacities and limitations of AI models in conveying emotion and storytelling in my own way. One of the works I curated and co-created with AI is titled ‘Loss,’ which is featured on Instagram under the account @viewfainder. It represents both the news of a loss and the solace that follows. I wanted to share its impact with you as well.
Process
In general, due to my work, I already work with AI systems every day. However, outside of work, I often find myself pursuing the question of whether human-level or even superior storytelling is possible through human-machine collaboration. The pieces I’ve curated on the @viewfainder account reflect small traces I’ve found while chasing this question. Overall, each model has its own unique communication capacity. I try to produce my results without sticking to a single model (recently with Flux). My daily notes and several LLMs, primarily claude, assist me in crafting scenes or the stories in my mind. I do not interfere with the results in any way.
Tools
My personal notes, midjourney, claude, a lot of iterations (not inpainting, outpainting or fine tuning just prompt enhancements, seed & parameter changing)
Götz Ulmer is a creative force of nature, electrifying the European advertising and design scene with his boundless imagination and infectious energy. Known for his influential and convention-defying work, Götz has become a beacon for those who believe creativity should be bold, unapologetic, and transformative.
Every new technology (and there have been many since the digital revolution) enables creative people to bring into being works that could not have been produced before. Generative tools are used by many image creators to explore ever more elaborate or impressive superlatives of what is technically possible, superlatives that the generations before them were only able to achieve with a great deal of patience and time.
This is beautiful and impressive to look at but leaves me completely cold—emotionally, it’s about as exciting as watching the onion-peeling world champion.
I was thus all the more surprised by this interpretation of as deep a human emotion as grief by an emotionless machine. In black and white, with a dash of Magnum photography, Oz interprets three fictional people—absurdly emotionally untroubled, but at the same time all the more credible—who grip me with their imaginary binary grief in such a way that I begin to believe the ghost in the machine is not just an invention of sci-fi writers. Wonderful.
