Background/Gift:
My gift was not one thing — as it was my fellow student Robi’s art. She showed several cool drawings on her iPad, all created in Procreate (“digital art studio” app). After a friend had introduced her to the app, Robi spent something like an hour playing around before deciding to buy an iPad and teaching herself to draw. What particularly inspired me was a drawing of a human body’s anatomy, as Robi described learning meticulously how a body moves and occupies space.
Preparation:
I did the breathing and moving exercises as described by Pauline Oliveros. I’m not how much the practice improved or changed my connection to the gift. But it did made me feel more awake
Response:
My original intention was to try and create a drawing in Procreate, to mimic Robi’s art, especially since I’ve been meaning to learn the app for a while. However, I quickly realized how much my effort would be centered on trying to get the practical skills down — as opposed to responding to the actual meaning of the gift. I started thinking about what it was that actually excited me the most about Robi’s gift (besides the art itself, much of it reminding me of cool webtoons) — and that was the idea of evolution. I thought about it from two angles: how Robi has improved her skills step-by-step, literally recreating the human body in more and more detail; and how she builds the world she either sees or imagines, step by step.
Transformation Process & Documentation:
I thought of Adobe Express Beta, a program I stumble upon last week and its text-to-image function. Since I had a clear idea of a picture I wanted to create, I hoped AI would help me where I lacked practical skills.
The first prompt I entered was “a house with one side particles flying out exposing the foundation” . The results seemed actually a lot more disturbing than was my intention.
I decided to the focus on generating an image of a woman/girl creating the world around her, while being inside the world. Below is the progression of the prompts, as well as some of the images generated. The experience was both rewarding and frustrating. On the one hand, often it felt like the AI wasn’t listening to me — there was no easy way for me to “finetune” the image without changing the text — which led to fundamentally different images altogether. At the same time, this felt like a collaboration, as if I was describing images in my head to a forensic artist, who tried to recreate them by description. One thing that felt serendipitous was that although I (purposefully) didn’t specify the race of the person, many of the images presented were of Black and Brown characters [although it’s possible that once I chose an image with a Black character, the algorithm zeroed in on my “preference”]. This felt especially meaningful since Robi (as a Black woman) wanted to create art she didn’t see around and that spoke to her/was representative of her and her friends.
Some of the prompts (in progression entered):
- A human body, one side is building up from skeleton to a full person
- A house with one side particles flung out
- A picture of a classroom a student is drawing it from within the picture
- picture of a girl student creating her classroom with a brush from within the picture
- A picture of a girl making her world appear with a brush from within the picture
- A picture of a girl making her world materialize on the right side with a brush from within the Picture
- A picture of a beautiful girl with a painting brush dreaming of a making her world materialize on the right side with a brush from within the picture
- A picture of a beautiful girl with a painting brush dreaming of a magical world
- A picture of a beautiful girl with a painting brush creating herself inside the picture
- A picture of a beautiful girl with a painting brush creating herself and the room around her inside the picture
- a person whose body is building up from atoms on one side
- a person whose body is made up from atoms on one side
- a person whose body is made up from atoms on one side then skeleton layers of muscle
- a person whose body is copied within the picture at different layers: made up from atoms, then skeleton, then blood and capillaries, then muscle, then clothes.
- Five copies of a body replicated within the picture with different layers: made up from atoms, then skeleton, then blood and capillaries, then muscle, then a full person with clothes.
- Five copies of a body replicated within the picture with different layers: made up from atoms, then skeleton, then blood and capillaries, then muscle, then a full person with clothes.
- A person copied within a picture in different poses
- A person copied within a picture, with each subsequent person being drawn better
- A woman drawn multiple times, the first drawing looks like it was made by a child, with each subsequent drawing being more professional
- A stick figure is drawn next to a picture made by a child, next to a beautiful picture of a woman
- A child’s drawing is side by side with a picture painted by a professional artist
P. S.
In class, we did an exercise where Robi and I responded to each other’s gift. I put in the following prompt into Adobe Express Beta: “my (woman with brown bangs) response to classmate’s gift, who is a curly haired artist”. The third image actually (almost shockingly) came fairly close to the reality.
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