snadwich

Description

A breach bursts open in the thin wall, cracking the certainties of a familiar place. An unsettling landscape, shrouded in the silent fog of a dream peeks through the debris of what has been destroyed, while two souls stand witness, surrendering, perhaps seduced by the unknown, perhaps afraid. The vision is a portal to something deep, unexpected, and feared. Yet there is no way through, because, in the end, every opening reveals itself to be just another wall. Darkness guards what remains unexplored, and still, a presence watches, patiently, over the spectacle.

Process

Photography has always been my medium of choice for giving shape to the unanswered questions that have trailed me since childhood. Yet viewing the world through a lens forces abstract ideas into the rigid outlines of physical reality. The advent of generative technology struck like a bolt from the blue: suddenly, visions once impossible came to life before my eyes. The boundaries of the real disappear, making way for possibilities that seem limitless.

Tools

I work primarily with Midjourney, pushing its customization features to the very limit. After hundreds of iterative prompts and rounds of curation, the parameters settle into an equilibrium that yields images whose stylistic grammar stays consistent and coherent. The selection and clustering phase let me group images whose affinity is driven not only by aesthetics or subject matter, but by deeper veiled affinities. Adjacent coordinates in the model’s latent space expose subconscious associations and hidden truths, suddenly brought to light. Once the settings reach the optimal equilibrium, the prompt hardly matters. A couple of vague keywords, hints, or even random characters can spark images that no deliberate pre-conceptualization could predict. They feel strangely familiar, as if the network’s weights know something about you before you do. Trying to control the output down to the tiniest detail with endless, ever-more-elaborate prompts is pure agony for me. With each generation I feel the weight of impossible images that never saw the light, so I abandon any desire for control and let chaos carry me to places I could never have imagined, yet have visited a thousand times.