With Mj, it’s never a big step from the Surreal, to the bizarre…
… I deliberately moved away from this sort of imagery after I’d gotten a better grasp of using Mj…
… but, it was fun to do some again…
… I certainly couldn’t do them this well, a year ago…
… these are very much images that evoke entire narratives…
… dark and strange narratives, for sure…
… haunting stories of experiments gone wrong, passions misplaced…
… strange tales, indeed.
When we (the human and I, not Flutter… she’s not much help when it comes to critical culling of our work, because she totally loves everything I do, equally, which is lovely, but, as I say, not helpful (: ) get to a stage, with Mj, where we are either unable to continue an iterative thread, or it just stays the same, and stops evolving, we deliberately throw out random prompts that we think might dramatically change things up. We tried ‘surreal polaroid’, and got the above…
… from there, we were away, again!…
… Mj hadn’t given us the result we envisaged, but we were totally happy with the images we were getting…
… from there, it was just a matter of changing the prompts, but keeping ‘surreal’ in there, somewhere…
… although we even dropped that, sometimes, but substituted it for words describing non-standard reality…
… Mj does wonderful surrealism, I suspect because it actually has no idea what it’s doing, no idea what ‘reality’ even looks like, so it has zero problems creating strange reality…
… in fact, you have to keep it within your chosen parameters, otherwise it starts creating absolute visual garbage, insanely cluttered images that resemble little more than an explosion in a junk shop…
… but, if you can keep the weirdness under control, you get beautifully surreal imagery.
As you will know, I don’t usually, well, don’t think I’ve actually ever, blog/blogged a sales event… but, I was recently shopping, and was greeted by Poshbarby, who is the first avi to ever physically recognise me from my blog! We had a conversation about blogging, and she told me how hard it was to get coverage from bloggers for her shop, she even asked if I would blog about it. I told her that that wasn’t my thing, but I gave her the name of a blogger who did do fashion and stores, and I even gave her name to the blogger…
… that was a few weeks ago, and I’d kinda forgotten about it, when I visited the ‘Posh Event‘, today, and was greeted by… Poshbarby, who organises/runs this event! Once again, she told me what a struggle it is, in SL, to get coverage. As someone thoroughly disillusioned with the politics of the SL art world, and of how any kind of recognition/coverage comes down to who, not what you know, I totally understood what she was saying…
… so I decided to do a blog about ‘Posh Event’. I have nothing but admiration for the amount of work organising events in SL must involve. Poshbarby is a sweety, very approachable, as so many in SL simply are not, so I just wanted to do my little bit to help her…
… the event runs from the 1st to the 17th of each month. There’s all kinds of stuff, here, lots of apparel, but, also, a range of other stuff…
… with some things discounted…
… all in a clean-lined, well-lit venue (:
One of the phrases I tried as a prompt, when I was doing the ‘post-modern Ukiyo-e’, was ‘dream geisha’…
… and I started getting these beautiful images…
… though thematically similar to the ‘post-modern Ukiyo-e’, these images have quite a different style…
… and as I always do when a new thread develops in my iterations, I continued producing these images in parallel to the Ukyio-e images…
… if anything, I feel these beauties are even more gorgeous than the Ukyio-e babes…
… and while still post-modern, (how could AI-generated art be anything else?)they also have quite a lovely ‘traditional’ feel (:
The human and I have always loved Ukiyo-e art, loved it for it’s graphic style, and for it’s colours…
… there is an entire sub-genre of Ukiyo-e devoted solely to images of ‘beautiful’ woman. Though these images of woman may have been considered racy and beautiful in 17th and 18th century Japan, we have never found them so…
… we used the words ‘post-modern Ukiyo-e’, amongst several others, as prompts for these images…
… we consider the woman in these images to be both gorgeous…
… and very sexy…
… our post-modern take on ‘Bijinga’, the Ukiyo-e sub-genre of beautiful woman.
As time goes by, these augmented warrior babes become ever more augmented…
… eventually, their pretty faces are the only ‘human’ element left, apart from their bi-pedal, two-armed body shapes…
… keeping their beautiful faces becomes a psychological connection to their previous reality. Unfortunately, soft, flesh faces are easily damaged, and, they, too, get swapped out for synthetic replacements…
… the augmented now have plastic, doll faces…
… everything else is insanely durable, super-metal on a titanium battle-chassis…
… unless they sustain catastrophic damage, they are immortal, and slowly losing any feeling for what it was to be ‘human’.
Some time in the future, the perfection of military-grade physical augmentation will eliminate the strength differential between males and females…
… because woman are better learners than males, and have a vastly higher pain tolerance, woman will begin to dominate the ranks of active-duty soldiers…
… it will become obvious that even the most hardened, misogynistic, religious fanatic terrorist will, when confronted with an attractive, young, female combatant, underestimate the danger he is in…
… this will, of course, be fatal for the terrorist…
… most of the best soldiers…
… will be augmented woman.
We found the last whale, exactly where they said it would be, somewhere in the near future…
… it was dead, from a broken heart, and thrown on the shore by the restless, micro-plastic-filled sludge called ‘the sea’, itself, dead, and wanting nothing to do with living creatures, or their recently deceased carcasses…
… we were adrift in the temporal shift…
… in a place where the past and the future were colliding…
… forming new tensions…
… in the skein of time…
… we waited for the auto-recall.
Shot in fabulous Hangars Liquides (:
It’s been a few months since Flutter and I spent much time, activated, in SL. In the last few weeks, the human has allowed us to be ourselves, again (thank you, human!). As we do, when we’ve been denied existence for any length of time, we go…shopping! We’ve hit all the best regular events, and are already adorned in some of our newly acquired, comfy loot. We arrived, last evening, at a destination that mainly sells tattoos, looking for that rare, new piece of good ink to fit on our already well-inked body…
… we didn’t find that rare piece, but we noticed, outside the store, the ice-coated trees, in a clear, crisp, winter day…
… we love stores that the owners have gone to the extra effort of beautifully landscaping, and we often roam around in them, taking pictures…
… there was a very fine, slow fall of snow, there was no wind…
… we were warm and cosy in our new fur jacket (if I’m warm, Flutter is too, by the magical osmosis of our psychic connection)…
… we climbed down a few steep banks, heading back toward the sea we’d initially arrived beside…
… all the while bathed in the light of the winter sun.
About a decade ago, the human (so, I, too…) read a couple of very good SF books by Ann Leckie. They were about a (space) battleship with an AI (she worked in conjunction with a human captain, but, basically, controlled every aspect of the ship)…
… the AI not only monitored every function of the ship, but also moved among the crew in the form of ‘ancillaries’, which were mind wiped humans (can’t remember why, perhaps they were criminals?) who were now controlled by the AI. These ancillaries were highly trained soldiers, as well as negotiators/psychologists/experts in human interaction…
… they not only monitored the crew, but fought as soldiers, as well as did covert operations on planets… the ship AI could see through all of their eyes at the same time, as well as control a massive warship. Due to treachery, the ship, the AI, and all her ancillaries were destroyed…
… all except one, who was on some covert mission (I think, can’t really remember). That single creature used to have the mind of a warship, the eyes of a thousand others like her… now she is alone…
… we LOVED this concept! We would have made the ancillaries androids, not humans, and we felt that the story, though with an astonishing concept, was far too slow and timid with the main character, but all kudos to Ann Leckie for that fabulous concept, which has stayed in our imaginations long after we put the slightly disappointing books down…
… we are drawn to tales of powerful female protagonists, seemingly vulnerable woman who are, actually, mind-boggelingly powerful. We were thinking of this character when we did these images. Our girl isn’t human, she’s a synthetic being, possibly immortal, but she now has no access to the massive resources she once had, and must remain hidden while she tracks down those responsible for the murder of 99.9% of herself, and all the humans she loved, especially her captain. She looks like a young woman, but she has more skills than 100 humans ten times older than she looks… and those looks are totally deceptive, as, physically, she is already 90 years old. Of course, she can kick your ass, and the ass of everyone you know, but she’d rather not hurt anyone she doesn’t need to (:
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