AI Collage Prompting & Blending
For a lot of reasons I'm not a huge fan of AI art. But I don't have to be a fan of it to realise that my wishing it away won't do anything useful. Part of the reason I struggle with it is that, since I'm currently looking for work, I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, and LinkedIn AI people are, not to put too fine a point on it, bonkers. The amount of shilling and boosterism there is, or at least should be, embarrasing.
But how does the line go? Don't hate a band because of its fans. AI doesn't have to be what a bunch of hucksters want it to be. It's a tool that's getting easier to use every day and is winding up in tools we're already using. AI will change. The way we use it will change. But it's here to stay, in some way or another. So, instead of using it create sexy Marios or cyperpunk sexy assassins and claiming that "content creation has been disrupted" (images that to be fair existed before AI), I've been experimenting with AI and my collage work.
I should note that the images and the processes described in this post are from June, 2023 and January, 2024. With the speed of AI development, parts of this post may be old history soon.
One of the most interesting things Midjourney does is "/describe" an image. You upload an image to Midjourney and it gives you back four prompts that theoretically could create that image. Quoting the Midjourney documentation, "it cannot be used to recreate an uploaded image exactly." It's good that they say it plainly, because it does not. Not at all. But it does produce some interesting results.
For this project I uploaded a half dozen of my collages to Midjourney. Note to those who are (rightfully) concerned about AI databases using work without permission, I have to imagine that by uploading my collages I am granting it permission to use them as training data. So it goes.
Here are the results from the first two.
“Fenster”, found paper, linoprint, gesso, analog collage, 2023, 7cm x 9cm
According to Midjourney this collage is:
1. blue and white mixed media collage on paper, etsy, in the style of cut and paste, text-based mixed media, dissected books, irregular curvilinear forms, giorgione, small brushstrokes, vintage cut-and-paste --ar 138:181
2. collage of newspaper pieces to make a blue collage, in the style of jean arp, minolta riva mini, roy lichtenstein, depth of layers, marianne stokes, dark blue and white, found object inspired --ar 138:181
3. fragmented newsprint with blue frame, white, in the style of cut and paste, tagging-like marks, collage figuration, letterboxing, irregular curvilinear forms, post-punk diy, minolta riva mini --ar 138:181
4. a piece of paper with a blue cut out like a book cover, in the style of collage experimentation, mail art --ar 138:181
Which is really quite something. First of all, it’s utterly unclear to me why Giorgione is called out. This sentence from Wikipedia however is very romantic, “He is known for the elusive poetic quality of his work, though only about six surviving paintings are firmly attributed to him.” Could it be that there is an elusive poetic quality to this collage? If you’re looking for it, I guess.
I love the Jean Arp reference, as I am an unabashed fan. Roy Lichtenstein though? I guess he uses large type in some of paintings, but pop art this is not.
Marianne Stokes is a revelation. She’s a wonderful painter and an artist I'd not heard of, but how exactly are her images comparable? Maybe the obvious brushstrokes and the canvas texture? While the reference makes little sense, I am grateful to Midjourney for the tip.
It’s interesting to me that “minolta riva mini” came up in two descriptions. My guess is that a lot of AI art people are obsessed with making images that look "real" or "polished" and throwing camera names into the prompts helps this. I can’t articulate precisely why, but this is the part of the prompt that makes me the saddest, even sadder than “post punk diy” which feels like the most Hot Topic marketing phrase ever.
From these four options, I edited together one prompt:
blue and white mixed media collage on paper, in the style of cut and paste, text-based mixed media, dissected books, irregular curvilinear forms, in the style of jean arp, minolta riva mini, small brushstrokes, vintage found object inspired, post-punk diy, mail art --ar 138:181
Which returned four images, the best two of which are here, and are, let’s be honest, quite terrible. They’re stumbling towards the naive energy of an Art Brut, or Beautiful Losers vibe, mixed with some David Shillinglaw, but they’re nonsense, primarily because they lack any sense of balance or composition.
Midjourney’s other interesting tool is their /blend option, which allows you to combine one or more images with a text prompt. This was for a long time one of the best ways to try and control composition in Midjourney. Midjourney is, as the kids at one point said, kind of “basic”. It likes to give you nicely centered portraits, expected vanishing points, and the like. Would my original collage help this AI creation?
1. black and white postcards and collaged photos, in the style of calligraphic marks, french landscape, found object, ilford pan f, high-angle, stripes and shapes, handscroll --ar 125:181
2. pictures, postcards, and vintage photos arranged on a paper, in the style of experimental calligraphy, dutch landscape, bold, black lines, stripes and shapes, m42 mount, found object, die brücke --ar 125:181
3. an old postcard with some photographs and writing, in the style of stripes and shapes, symbolic figurative landscapes, stencil-based, nell dorr, high-angle, manuscript, black-and-white --ar 125:181
4. a black postcard on a yellow background, in the style of collaged landscapes, black and white photographs, miroslav tichý, kazimir malevich, manuscript, vintage cut-and-paste, aerial view --ar 125:181
Not a lot, unfortunately. It was time to move onto the next collage.
“IN”, found paper, linoprint, gesso, found photograph, pencil analog collage, 2023, 11cm x 16cm
According to Midjourney this collage is:
Wow, I have to say, these are both pretty great. They’ve got large interesting shapes, small messy details, a ton of value range, and they hang together as cohesive images. They don’t look anything like the starting collage, more like aquatints or lithographs, but I’m a fan.
Now lets see what we get when we take the prompt and blend it with the original collage.
It’s either a French or a Dutch landscape. Not a German or a Peruvian one. Good to know.
Nell Dorr wasn’t a photographer I knew about. I assume the reference has something to do with the palette of the photograph. Even with that, she’s not the first photographer that comes to mind. Still, I’m pretty pleased that over the course of two collages, Midjourney has pointed me towards two female artists who I’d never heard of.
I’d also never heard of Miroslav Tichý who, after the tiniest bit of internet research, comes off as a pretty creepy dude. I do like this quote of his however, "If you want to be famous, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world."
And Malevich is just a stretch, sorry.
Combining those we have:
black and white postcards and collaged photos, symbolic figurative landscapes, stencil-based, nell dorr, Miroslav Tichý, vintage cut-and-paste, ilford pan f, bold, black lines, stripes and shapes, found object, die brücke --ar 125:181
Wow again.
One thing that’s problematic with Midjourney is that it has a tendency to introduce “attractive women” into images when they’re nowhere in the prompt. You ask it to make a bicycle and you’ll get a sexy woman standing next to a bicycle, for example. In the source image the figure, to my eyes at least, looks male, but here it’s a relatively stereotypical female-presenting figure.
Still, these images are evocative. I’m super interested in finding out the stories behind them. The horizontal banding is a great graphic element and there are a surprising number of unexpected tangents and juxtapositions that make it very easy to believe that there’s a human mind behind these images.
If anyone out there needs a book cover for a gothic ghost story, email me. I may have just what you’re looking for!