Co.Co.Co. [A Desirable Future]: a collaborative artistic experiment with midjourney
AI is the creative partner to visualize dreams and desires.
The discussion around AI and its relation with old and new creative forms has exploded in the last few months.
The positions in this regard see on one extreme the enthusiasts that see in the AI a potentiality to explore new expression forms, or at least as a way to overcome some personal representation skills limitations. On the other side, the skeptical, typically professionals that see in the AI an enemy that invades their territory of actions, whose reaction ranges from absolute denial to the attempt to tame the AI to use it, often with little success in their daily practices.
The recent relative accessibility of image generation platforms contributes to facilitating/fomenting the discussion, midjourney in the lead, followed by Dall-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and others.
In the middle, there is a fluctuating territory in which practical experimentation generates experiences that can only be decoded in retrospect but are extremely useful for providing an operational and non-ideological interpretation of the AI phenomenon and learning how to interact with this new language.
THE EXPERIMENT
Among these experiences Co.Co.Co (Co Conceptual Collective), has taken place during the Roma Art Week 2022 (RAW) in the art gallery Pian Dei Giullari where the duo Paolo Ferigo +- Claudio Moderini [f+-m], supported by a team of collaborators, have produced and printed in real-time 30 original images as a result of the mediation between public participating to the event/performance and the AI platform midjourney.
The event's theme was [A Desirable Future]: a multi-level investigation at the individual, collective, global, and cosmic scale, whose main objective is to make a dream, or a desire, visible through a mediation/synthesis done by Human Mediators that translate the participants' input into the AI language (textual prompts), which returns them as images.
AN HYBRID TEAM
A highly motivated team made of people and digital entities is involved actively in the event, each occupying a specific role in the co-creation process:
- A group of Animators/Interviewers, whose aim is to guide participants in exploring the proposed theme and, at the same time to elicit input for the AI software. Often descriptions and desires are expressed in a highly abstract manner or with terminology that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to translate them into a visual image. The "conversational" modality helps remove this potential blocker and to put participants at ease so they can concentrate on the content.
- The Artistic Mediators at the Creative Consolle - a bit maieutic for their ability to extract and synthesise the imagination of the participants; somewhat explorers of new territories where unknown languages are spoken; somewhat wizards for their ability to use magical skills and tools (AI).
- Midjourney, the guest artist, which sometimes amazes you by presenting unexpected images, and sometimes makes you nervous when it stumbles and doesn't want to react sensibly to the prompts entered.
COLLABORATIVE CREATIVE ACTION
The action revolves around four main phases:
- A first conversation/interview with one of the Animators/Interviewers permits to capture the individual's imagination;
- The output is then interpreted and transformed by the Artistic Mediators into a textual prompt language that the AI understands;
- Midjourney elaborates a progression of images, visions, and dreams, from which it is possible to generate variations and choose the one that best represents the idea of the participant;
- The chosen image, printed in high resolution, becomes part of the Event Limited Edition made of 30 original prints on photographic paper, with co-authors and prompts, numbered and signed.
The prints for the Event Limited Edition are generated in real-time, becoming part of the physical exhibition.
WHAT DID WE LEARN
Through this experiment, we have learned many things that we will likely deepen in some future explorations:
Human / AI Creative Mediation
The conversational dimension is of fundamental importance both to break the ice and get participants to reflect on the proposed theme and to extract ideas and reflections that are not influenced by how they interact with the AI software. Consequently, we have circumscribed and defined a specific role called Human / AI Creative Mediation.
How to visually represent an abstract concept such as time. In this specific case, time as a release from constant daily commitments, as an opportunity to take time for oneself, has been interpreted as a space of transition in a domestic context, in which to savor the beauty of nature and be able to enjoy small moments of inner pause.
Playing with Variations
A second relevant aspect concerns the importance of modulating the participants’ expectations during the flow of the experience to prepare them to interact with AI software that often responds in an unpredictable and, at the same time, stimulating way but which requires patience and open-mindedness. In this regard, after the initial processing of the images made by the Mediators, the involvement of participants in the creative process, from variations to the choice of the final image, was very effective.
A girl in a cyberpunk scenario memory of the past experiences of the participant is projected into the future. The choice of a variant and the consequent discovery that some crucial details that are not visible in the low-resolution illustration emerge only during the upscaling image phase generate a particular sense of delight. In this case, the logo on the jacket that recalls the number 5, is specified in the prompt but does not appear in the previous images.
The Surprizing Synthesis
The greater the conceptual complexity, often based on the participant’s personality and culture, the greater the need for the Mediators to synthesize and focus on the key elements to be shared with the AI.
An elaborate and complex imagery reduced to the essence of an ultra-synthetic prompt — An Anthropic Sacred Landscape. The surprise/satisfaction of finding among the images proposed by midjourney the one which includes everything. The AI identifies and presents elements not specified in the prompt as patterns of the collective imagination.
The Artist’s Imaginary
If the participant is an artist, we can assume that he is used to transforming concepts into images or artifacts, so the challenge becomes more complicated. It is not a question of trying to shed light on a unitary image often created with difficulty but of supporting and intercepting a conceptual journey in which images are created and destroyed to make room for new ones. All this within a few minutes. In this context, the quality of prompts and their meaning (more than variations) are the keys to exploring such an active imagination.
From this perspective, we can observe how, in the imagination of an artist like Fausto Delle Chiaie, whose aesthetics and poetry revolve around the ironic use of words, the desirable future is without words as if challenging midjourney to show him a new pathway. In essence a challenge between poetics, whose result can be read only knowing the context and the logic in which the three authors (the artist, the mediators, and midjourney) operate. And here, new scenarios of artistic and conceptual collaboration open up.
IN CONCLUSION
An experiment that has produced interesting results from the point of view of the contents and on the interpretation of the investigation topic — A Desirable Future — and has also shown a practical way for guiding the creative process that can be used both for communicative events aimed at introducing a specialistic public to AI by way of a hand-on experience and for creative/artistic initiatives aimed at producing high quality conceptual and aesthetic output.
Contacts:
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Credits:
Original Concept, curation, coordination and artistic contribution : Paolo Ferigo e Claudio Moderini [f+-m]
Gallerist: Andrea & Carlina Bottai
Guest Artist: midjourney
Animators/Interviewers: Massimo Di Leo, Barbara Marcotulli, Elisa Melodia, Patrizia Piovesan, Gaia Riposati, Alessia Vagliviello
Supporters: Lorenzo Zanoni, Maddalena Vitiello
Contributors: #01 midjourney, #02 Fausto Delle Chiaie, #03 Brigitte Kauntz, #04 Fabrizio Favoloso, #05 Tar Zen, #06 Alessia Vagliviello, #07 Giancarlino Benedetti Corcos, #08 Antonio Mode, #09 Piero Meogrossi, #10 Sergio Silvestrin, #11 Gianni Moderchich, #12 Teresa Gerbasio, #13 Rosalia de Souza, #14 Francesca Irmici, #15 Andrea Valeri & Barbara Di Prospero, #16 Silvio Luogocomune, #17 Fulvio, #18 Maurizio Grioli, #19 Guendalina Della Noce, #20 Gaia Riposati & Massimo Di Leo, #21 Chiara Fortuzzi, #22 Jasmine Habeler & Violante Pieri, #23 Meraf Villani, #24 Patrick Paulin, #25 Giorgio De Camillis. #26 Giacomo Quarta, #27 Barbara Marcotulli, #28 Elisa Melodia, #29 Andrea Bottai, #30 Andrea Salvà
Location: Galleria Pian dei Giullari, Via dei Cappellari, 49, Roma
