October 2024 - Sharlston - iPod

October 2024 - Sharlston - iPod

October 2024 - iPod - Pontefract

October 2024 - iPod - Halifax 02

October 2024 - iPod - Holdsworth House

October 2024 - iPod - Holdsworth House

October 2024 - iPod - Halifax

October 2024 - iPod - Halifax

October 2024 - iPod - Various

October 2024 - iPod - Various

September 2024 - iPod - Wakefield

September 2024 - iPod - Wakefield

September 2024 - iPod - Sharlston

September 2024 - iPod - Normanton

September 2024 - iPod - Normanton

August 2024 - iPod - Spring Green

August 2024 - iPod - Pontefract

August 2024 - iPod - Pontefract

Project - A.I. Various - Various 02

Project - A.I. Various - Various 02

When we moved into our second house, most of the photographs were outside in the garden. Very few exist inside of the house. So I thought I’d give it a try and see what A.I. could do. Although there’s a few things here and there that work, everything feels a little too vague to be individually specific enough. Worth a try though.

Since I’d done some travelling around coastal towns, I thought I’d play about with some pirate themed stuff. As a kid I loved pirate themed stuff, of course I did, loads of other kids did. But this is going nowhere for me.

See the one with the guy laid on the sofa? I thought I’d try that again, except this time change him to a knight. I’ve been getting into playing Dark Souls recently, and I always play it after work. So I thought this idea worked pretty well. Nothing much else.

Thought I’d try some urban exploring in the dark images. These weren’t how I wanted, A.I. gets really confused when you ask for darkness because it will do anything to either guess the source of light or add a source of light. Even if it involved a good excuse for a window letting the brightest moon light flood in.

Project - A.I. Various - Dream 04

Project - A.I. Various - Dream 04

This was one of the first AI images I tried and personally I felt it worked pretty well. In this dream, I’m a child in a classroom. Everything’s filthy and dusty. There’s a clear colour scheme of yellow; yellow rubber gloves, plates, cups and containers. I was asked to help clean everything up but I didn’t really want to. Although these images aren’t exactly what I remember, there are plenty of elements within them that are ‘good enough’. Not brilliant, but good enough.

Project - A.I. Various - Dream 02

Project - A.I. Various - Dream 02

In this very early dream, I had fallen down the steps of a Cathedral whilst rushing to retrieve my Easter Egg. I had a laptop which became damaged during the fall. These were early attempts with Bing Image Generator and it struggled to figure out what someone falling ‘looks like’. It seems that it’s taken influence from those mid, late 90’s, 2000’s videos of skaters. That makes sense; stairs = falling, therefore must equal ‘skater’ therefore also America’.

Project - A.I. Various - A Response

Project - A.I. Various - A Response

I woke up one day in a bad mood. I was tired because I hadn’t sleep for long enough but it was more than that. I’d had a dream that left me feeling irritated, that sense of, ‘Oh, this… again? Are we really still revisiting the same themes over and over again?!’ That’s probably not true; although I record a lot of my dreams I don’t recall them all. In fact, I probably end up recalling the ones that pique my immediate interest upon waking up. Sometimes I recall a dream and think, ‘That sounds boring’. This time, this dream irritated and annoyed me, leaving me feeling moody, a bit miserable. Shortly after waking, since it was nice outside, I decided to go for a walk around town. I still didn’t feel completely awake. I had my headphones on and was listening to music. I was kind of dazed, sort of wondering and meandering, I didn’t really have a goal or an aim. I sort of stumbled into something like sleep walking. Half in a daze I started experiencing what I can only really call derealisation; a sense of unreality, as if my visual perspective began to change and things seemed and felt disconnected from myself, the complete opposite of what it is to be grounded. I’d stumbled into this experience out of my awareness. By the time I had become aware, I wanted to stay within that experience to continue feeling it, to try to understand what was going on. My mind kept drifting back into my childhood over and over again, and I kept trying to fight it. It was like a constant array of flashbacks. I don’t remember what caused the though to come to me, but as I experienced one of these flashbacks, I thought to myself, ‘It’s like having an inner child that never grew up, constantly trying to pull me back to these places over and over again.’

And then I thought, ‘It’s almost like there’s different parts of myself. Although in general we’ve all learnt to get on, sometimes they fall out, they get upset and they’ll do anything they can to drag me back… but what if instead of fighting against them, I decided to walk alongside them? If I did that, then I could show them that the places they keep dragging me back to are simply not the same anymore. Time has irrevocably changed them.

Project - A.I. Various - Spaces and Places

Project - A.I. Various - Spaces and Places

These aren’t as ‘photographic’ as I’d like, they sit closer within fantasy genres and are a little bit more painterly than I aim for. However, what I enjoy about these are the scale of the places they portray. The character exists within them, it is the space that tells the story more than the character itself. The darkness sometimes leaves things feeling a bit too ‘gothic’ for me, but on the whole I feel these are really interesting (although admittedly I can’t deny being influenced by the ‘Dark Souls’ genre.) These large places convey scale, making the character seem or feel ‘lost’ within them. Perhaps the darkness is a bit excessive, but I’ve enjoyed experimenting with these as in the darkness, the light becomes amplified, even if the AI doesn’t exactly produce it in realistic ways. These still don’t feel very individual and personal, but they are closer to something that feels more connected to some part of myself.