24-11-04 (3): Garden of Electoral Delights -- Process
The idea was to lean into the hallucinations. After all, this is based on Bosch and Elections.
More pictures follow ⬇️, but to see where this would lead I started working with Claude to develop the concept. While Claude 3.5 Sonnet was unsurprisingly unimaginative it did suggest I include glitch, lean into the hallucinations, and that I put a QR code in the gallery, which made the effort worth the time.
For you dear reader, and so as not to be fully de-automated, I pasted my dialogue into ChatGPT and asked them to summarize it for you, so ChatGPT says that Claude and I did this:
In collaboration with Claude 3.5, Mark Stephen Meadows developed a Bosch-inspired triptych titled The Garden of Electoral Delights as a satirical AI-generated commentary on the American electoral landscape. They chose a print format that mirrors Bosch’s proportions, decided to use Midjourney to capture AI's "inaccuracies" for a unique lens on political themes, and worked around content restrictions by creatively describing figures to avoid Midjourney's censoring triggers. Claude assisted with prompt iterations, guiding the conceptual translation from Bosch’s imagery to modern political symbolism. Eventually, Meadows moved away from Claude's input, relying more on Midjourney’s Describe function to finalize the prompts for the project, maintaining a surreal, hyper-detailed Bosch-like aesthetic to reflect contemporary themes.
Mail me if you want the entire transcript of my brainstorm with Claude.
From that point I knew pretty much how to approach it and the main thing was to work with the Midjourney and lean into the hallucinatory aspect of AI images, videos, and text that makes it more interesting than what it wants to be. Painting is about paint, photography is about light, so what is AI about?
The idea was to lean into the hallucinations. After all, this is based on Bosch and Elections.
So I set out on what was some two or three hundred renderings to get here.
[I'LL POST SOME VIDEO HERE LATER TODAY / 4.Nov]
Most of the output from Midjourney was what you'd expect; I started with grids of four, picked, remixed, picked, selected my favorites, varied regions, fiddled with parameters, and generally piloted specific seeds towards an image we collaboratively worked out.
I got back lots of bodies from the factory of Francis Bacon. The rather weird images, despite being prompted as Moebius and Maxfield Parrish (two of my favorite artists that I'd never seen mashed up) were globs of bent flesh, disfigured, sausage-people, which I then illustrated on top of to better articulate the idea, like so:
In some cases, rather than add in this illustrated line work, I went the opposite direction and pixelated the shit out of the thing. In the same was as a painting is about paint this was about pixels, and there's a sort of texture that's a pixel-painting about this so I exaggerated that in a few places that nobody will likely ever notice, but here's an example of what I'm talking about:
While most of the abstraction lacked clear meaning, there were a few poignant passages, like this one which i interpreted to be a woman smoking, a family swimming, and two pals all bobbing around in the kiddy-pool:
