Wagner James Au / New World Notes

 

Dr. Nettrice Gaskins, an acclaimed Afrofuturist scholar who pioneered the Deep Dream neural network as an art medium back in 2019, is now experimenting with Midjourney, the new AI project that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to generate new imagery.

The results, some of which you can see here, are deliriously stunning. Nettrice's image above, for example, was generated by a line from Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (one of her favorite novels): 

“For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it."

"[Midjourney] tries to understand human language," Dr. Gaskins explains. "It's about the text; the order of words. The cool thing about NLP AI (Midjourney, DALL-E, etc.) is another person can use the same exact text prompts (same order, etc.) and never be able to duplicate the ones I generated. This means every single image is one of a kind / unique."

Here's another that she generated through inputting the text, "Afrofuturistic Black woman botanist in trippy alien utopia":

And here's another built from a passage of the Bible she entered into Midjourney — “And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone”:

Other text inspirations include the songs "Golden Lady" by Stevie Wonder, and "Golden" by Jill Scott.

Since starting to upload her images to social media, she's gotten requests from people who want to buy copies. A print of this one, for instance, "Vitruvia" is available on her site for $70:

Dr. Gaskins is even creating and selling hard copy prints of these images:

All this, as you might imagine, raises the question of whether AI-generated images can even be called art, a topic we recently discussed at length here.

Dr. Nettrice Gaskins' answer to that is straightforward:

"The images I'm generating is unique to me; it starts with my imagination. The machine attempts to understand and match my text with imagery. I don't think anyone who sees my work would say it's not art."

She documents this process and its relation to her Afrofuturism on her Medium blog:

Conceptualized in 1993 by Mark Dery, Afrofuturism has come to encapsulate works of Black creative and cultural production that treat futurist themes concerning Africa and its diaspora. In Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, I wrote about the coming “semantic web” that "(I)ncludes software used to render digital images and objects in new media technologies".

Or as William Gibson is quoted as saying, “The future is already here…” In a short time I wasn’t just writing about or predicting what was to come. I also dived head-first into the fray by creating my own AI artworks, algorithms, and possibly a new Afrofuturistic practice. The characters in my Midjourney botanist series live in a utopia that doesn’t need a specific geography. I used Deep Dream Generator and Adobe Photoshop to remix and layer or composite some of the Midjourney output.

Read it all here.

All images by Dr. Gaskins.