John Burridge

I'm discovering that the MidJourney AI has not been trained in classical Greek and Roman mythology, and that it's more likely to pick up modern cultural references to stories rather than the original myths and legends.  It also doesn't seem to know how to render Capricorn, the sea-goat, and instead of producing an image of a goat with the hind-quarters of a sinuous fish, it's more likely to make encephalitic creatures with crab feet and mutant horns.  I suppose I have to learn how to weight descriptors and choose the right ones.  

Also, if you ask the AI to draw librarians, it will render them as women.  Which does raise the question, why did I choose to have the librarian characters be male in the story.

I'm not sure if I'm having better luck using excerpts from various short stories and seeing what the AI does.  It looks like the AI wants to illustrate a Dark Phantasy, because as I cycle through the prompts, people's faces get more lopsided or sinister looking, and objects mutate into molten, multi-eyed parodies.  I might have to tack upbeat words like "wholesome" or "wonder" to the end to keep the artwork light.

It's also possible that my stories are creepier than I realize. 

So far, this has felt like homing in on a specific character in the multiverse.  Sometimes I get closer to the image of the character, and other times the AI goes in a different direction.   I'm not completely sure, but it's feels more satisfying to have another human come up with story images because there's a real sense of connection via an idea when someone else's art resonates with what was in my head when I was writing.  

The latest distraction fun thing I've discovered is the art-generating AI bot "MidJouney."  This has required that I also learn Discord, which I suppose isn't too bad a thing. 

I've been playing around with it over the weekend; the justification for doing so is that I can use it to generate covers for some short stories I've got lying around that I really should publish. 

Working with the AI is interesting.    I've managed to create a few images in the blended styles of  Edward Burne-Jones and William Holman Hunt.  I asked it to render tarot cards in the style of Pamela Coleman Smith, and what came out was interesting, but looked more like Crowley's Thoth Deck and a possible portrait of Ms. Smith.  

The AI doesn't appeared to have been trained on Middle Kingdom hieroglyphs, and I'm thinking that its renderings of the ancient Egyptian god Thoth may be pulling more from the Stargate Science Fiction franchise than actual ancient Egyptian images. I might have to try something specific like "man with an ibis head." (which is has led to depictions which are closer to either to Native American Raven or a medieval plague doctor).

I did a fine job with a flying machine over a medieval city.  It makes pleasing images of the moon and architecture, and I got some interesting portraits with the prompt "The Magician Tarot Card by Pamela Coleman Smith."  MidJourney does have a tendency to blend things together into one image unless one is specific—so far my attempts to have the Lord of the Animals and the Greenman dancing have resulted in a chthonic figure in the uncanny valley; "dung beetle hieroglyphs" resulted in images of a beetle with tiny pseudo hieroglyphs on its body.

There's some commands I can embed in the text that I tell MidJourney to build a picture from, and it looks like I'll have to play around with them some more.  

Er.  I mean.  I'll need to enter in some text from some of my stories and see if it comes up with some good cover art.  Yeah. 

The other day I revisited the interlaced septagram.  I wanted to make the areas between the rays more even, and I ended up doing a double-interlace.

This design suggests to me that it could work as a a meditation guide; I see several skewed perspectives in it, and the curves have a feel of water and bridges to them.  

Perhaps I'll stare at it before going to bed and see if any interesting dreams appear.

Thursday was MET day.  We got up bright and early and managed to get to Dwyer Manse by eight-twenty.  Mark had ordered tickets several weeks ago for our timed entry.  V, The Child, Mark, and I climbed into the car and we were off.  

The latest distraction in my life is a program called iOrnament.  It's a doodle-pad that has some automatic graphic symetry built into it.  Paint a line, and it's instantly reflected, glided, and tessellated into one of seventeen different patterns -- it's kind of like drawing with a kaleidoscope.  

It's very easy to get Moroccan tiles out of it, and I think if I choose the right settings and place curves carefully I can get Celtic knots out of it.

I'd say for the most part it's relaxing, but it runs on my mobile, so I'll have to watch out that I don't get a kink in my neck from hunching over a notecard-sized drawing area while I swipe lines with my fingertips. Like most art tools, I think you get what you put into it.  

I may or may not have gotten a kink in my neck working on the fiddly details of green scarab legs in an Egyptian-inspired design.  

Last night was the Full Moon.  It became visible above the hills and trees around 9:45 PM.  The geography of our back yard means that it can be difficult to site the Moon in the Summer time -- especially if the Moon is hanging out below the ecliptic, which makes a low summer moon even lower.  

Last night was also the night "Jefferson Starship" performed at the county fair, so strains of "Jane," "Somebody to Love," and "We Built This City" kept floating over the hill and ricocheting off of the neighbor's houses.  Luckily for the mystic vibes, by the time the moon rose high enough in the sky to be visible, the concert was finished.  

I wasn't in the mood for a Full On Solitary Neo-Pagan High Ritual, so I set up the Four Cardinal Patio Tables, got a chair, and quietly harped in the shadows and dappled moonlight.  Many of the tunes I play are traditional ballads in the key of A-minor, and I tried to focus on songs in C-major instead.  There was a lot of improvisation, but I did manage to pluck out "Center of the Sun," which I always imagine hearing the old Seattle a cappella group, "We Three" singing, but comes out nicely on the harp.  

The reflective moment was a grounding end to an obnoxious week.

 

 

 

The latest adventure in not writing playing with graphics is a stellated dodecahedron.  Someone posted a picture of a marble floor mosaic from the Basilica of St Mark.  I'd seen it before, and I decided that I could probably copy it.  So I dug out my compass and ruler, constructed a pentagram, and went forward from there.

I switched to InkScape once I saw how the design is basically pentagonal rotations.

and added some etching lines.

 

I'm not sure which version works the best.  I like the etching lines--especially when the design is viewed from a distance, but I think the solid colors work better because the optical illusion of the triangle placement makes it look like I used more than six shades of grey.  

 ... you're working on creating heart shapes for a Valentine's Day project and the next thing you know, you've created a barn owl.

It's occurred to me that I haven't posted here about my attempt on the Third Day of Christmas to make Harmonic Oscillation Pancakes! 

I've seen pancakes where the batter is dropped onto a griddle to make letters or the Eiffel Tower or a smiley face.  What I wanted to do was load pancake batter into a pendulum, set it swinging over a hot griddle, and have math-artsy pancakes with harmonic curves on them.  

I was aiming for a family-friendly of mad-science-cookery, something that the entire family could eat and appreciate.  So it needed to be gluten-free.  After a failed attempt at making batter from an American Test Kitchen cookbook, I went out and got a gluten-free pre-mix.  

This is my take on Crockett Johnson's Square Root of 2.  (Apparently, not only did he write Harold and the Purple Crayon, but he was interested in math art.)


I wanted to see how different numbers and different scales would work out.  This is an exploration of the square root of 4, 9 and 16.  If you want to find the square of a number n, make a semicircle of diameter n+1; the length of the perpendicular from n to where it meets the arc of the semicircle will be the square root of n.  Somehow this is related to the Pythagorean Theorem, but I haven't quite figured that part out.

When I went to the MET last, I got a book on pop-up paper construction.








It goes through various types of folds and cuts one can make to create three-dimensional sculptures (for lack of a better word) out of paper.








I've been experimenting by cutting and folding blank 3X5 inch cards.








Last weekend when we went to Silver Falls, I thought, "I know, I'll try to make some pop-up designs of the falls."





So I tried.









I think I got some fairly Art-Deco water, which tends to look more like hair or snakes than water.




 And I also think I got something that looks not so much like water cascading over basalt layers but rather a stage set for an absurdist 60's play.


Oh well.

Friday, July 28

Mark, The Child, and I drove to Storm King Art Center (http://stormking.org) .  We got a little lost (our directions were Googly and sent us on a long loop), and wound up on the back roads of Bear Mountain overlooking Westpoint.  Eventually Mark saw signs directing us and pulled into the entrance--about a minute later, Megan and her two boys pulled up right behind us.

I'll confess that every time I encountered the name "Storm King," I thought of the web-comic "Girl Genius."  I was expecting something like a park filled with giant topiary meets Michelangelo's David meets The Enchanted Forrest.

What it was actually was mostly like the orange-red steel girder structures littering the greenways in various Eugene Interstate off-ramps.  Instantly, I heard Doctor McCoy's voice chanting, "It's worse than that it's Art, Jim," followed by Mr. Spock saying, "Well it's Art, Jim--but not as we know it."  Later, The Child added, "There's Artists off the starboard bow."    The place reminded me of Tina Howe's play, "Museum," especially when we found a series of plate steel panels cut into random shapes and painted white.

Mark seemed to really be into it, so I bit my lip and kept my sound-track internal.  The children were not quite so tactful.  Megan really liked a giant Buddha sculpture there.

I did like the giant columns near the visitors' center, which were out of proportion with everything else.  "We should get some and put them in front of our house," I said.  I probably giggled at the thought of thirty-five foot columns towering over our house.

"Go for it," Mark said.  "You could build them; but if they're ugly, I'm knocking 'em down."

"Oh, I think they're funny," I said, imagining them hollow, with a secret staircase, so you could climb to the top and meditate naked like an Old Testament prophet.



We took a tram for a quick overview of the 500 acre park--I'm pretty sure the recording was made by a former commando, probably from the Brutalist Architectural Style.

"Sea Current" was a motorized sculpture of two spiraling rods that was cool, and reminded me of a toy-sized executive desk gizmo.

There was a stone wall that playfully wove between trees, dunked under a lake, and came back up on the other side.   The undulating wall sequestered a grove into little shrines for single or a triplet of trees; in one, all there was was a stump with a saw-dust covered wall arcing around it.







There was a collection of culvert pipes, rusted brown and smooth, which for me was impossible not to see as a cathedral once you learned its title.  I liked it, and it was corporate in scale.  I meant to try to walk under and through it, but somehow that didn't happen.




From a distance, I liked "Orbit," a pole with spinning ribbons of chrome--which wanted to be an armillary sphere or a vertical sundial, but once I got close to it became a high-end garden spinner.











There was a tensegrity structure, "Free Ride Home," which was about twenty highly polished aluminum pipes suspended into a kind of cloud and held in place by the tension of the steel cables running from their ends.



Places like Storm King remind me that my art preferences in general lean toward the pedestrian and specifically to objects that have a high narrative value.  This bothers me a little, because it reminds me that authoritarians don't like art (and label it "subversive" or "decadent") if they can't understand it right away.  But then I put on some Phillip Glass or Laurie Anderson.

I'm never quite sure why what's at Storm King is Art, and it reminds me of the days at Arcosanti when we would have hotdog lunches and I would plunk two hotdogs between two buns on either side, with a knife placed placed diagonally across them onto a plate, call it "American Symmetry" and then make up an artist's statement involving the meat and steel industries, and corporate America's castration anxiety.  I loved lunches when I could make Hotdog Art.  Now if I could only open up an Art Store and sell black and white photos of Hotdog Art.

I think the pieces I liked the best --"Cathedral," "Sea Current," or "Free Ride Home" -- I liked more for their craft than for their art.  Or because they were shiny.  Or because I thought they were hilarious.  In trying to apply this to writing in general and what I do specifically, I guess I like well-crafted stories that aren't too opaque.  And I already know that I like eye-candy too much.