teuthisdreams:

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teuthisdreams:

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an 1800s royal navy captain attending a pride parade

as generated by neural network AI midjourney using the above text prompt

I’m still thinking about this painting so I am (gulp) actually going to write some real art analysis, because… yeah??

The way the captain is faceless, looking out to sea, and the way that echoes how queer men in the time period in question would have to hide their identity to avoid charges for “buggery,” “sodomy,” and possible execution. The way the style is fairly appropriate to 19th-century pastoral romanticism, but the captain’s coat is patterned in rainbow colors, solemn and strikingly defiant at once, and it is both noticeably anachronistic and entirely plausible. The way the British Royal Navy was simultaneously known as a haven for gay/queer men seeking to avoid family pressures to marry, but was still technically bound to severely punish anyone who was actually caught having same-sex relations. The way the strength of the Navy was also the chief driver of British colonialism, imperialism, and expansion (because think about it, how did a relatively small island in the North Sea exert so much force on global geopolitics?) The way that the captain’s race is ambiguous; we aren’t sure if he’s a white man making a calculated and cynical political statement about “tolerance,” like modern-day rainbow capitalism. Or perhaps he is a mixed-race captain like John Perkins, who rose in the ranks despite prejudice, and is silently displaying the intersectionality of his own identity (queer AND a person of color working within a system that generally hates him and wants to erase him, even as it makes ruthless use of his talents). Not to mention, is that possibly an Irish flag on his right shoulder?? Because that offers a whole NEW level of commentary and anti-colonial symbolism.

It’s an image that is at once one of both openness and secrecy, tolerance and oppression, the upholding and the dismantling of patriarchal imperial power, the comfort of the anonymous safe haven and the courage of exposing who you really are to an unsympathetic heteronormative world. And it was made by a neural network and could have been entirely goofy or anachronistic or otherwise strange, but instead created this absolutely devastating piece of art that actually speaks strongly to the real queer experience at this point and place in history. Bravo.

I, uh, as the person who prompted Midjourney to create this with the intention of shitposting, was awestruck by this appearing in the group of four and decided to post this because multiple people told me they wanted to make this irl…

I am taken aback by this really cool and heartfelt art analysis, thank you so much for writing it!

As an “AI Artist” (quote marks entirely intentional), I’ve been grappling with the idea of artist intentionality when it comes to neural network generated images. My boyfriend often brings up the fact that I act as both director and curator, working with the AI to provide the text prompt and deciding which images to display publically, but I find it hard to describe either myself or the AI as the artist (some related thoughts here).

But because of the historical institutional homophobia and bigotry of that time, I found humour and fascination in these series of pictures. Not to get too personal, but I’m a semi-closeted trans man who patterns my expression of gender off the aesthetic of this staggeringly homophobic and horrible historical military institution, and the fact of that was very much in my mind when I was playing with these prompts.

The other images did end up as “entirely goofy or anachronistic or otherwise strange”, but that lone figure in the bottom right is really striking and I’m glad it seems to resonate with a lot of people, so thank you again for writing this!

OMG, this is gorgeous, striking and meaningful. Well done 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

This is all amazing and perfect.

I shouldn’t add any more, but on the subject of AI art, the human being curator and artist: yes. In that it’s somewhat akin to photography, which is in many ways the art of selection.

I had a head start on this back in the 80s with a BASIC program named Basho that wrote haiku. It wasn’t AI; it just contained very long lists of adjectives, nouns, and verbs. broken into sub lists with syllable counts, and then I had a couple different templates using random number generators to string words together at random.

Originally, all the words were from English translations of Basho (a real Japanese poet). Later, I added my own. I sometimes had to delete words that tended to come out wrong, which was step one of selection.

I got annoyed with a high school English teacher doing literary criticism: I was convinced she was reading into things meanings that poets didn’t intend. (Which is a whole other discussion, but I was a kid.) So I generated about 10 pages of Basho poems, then copied out the best of the lot onto one page in my own handwriting and submitted to her. Sure enough, she analyzed what they meant. I felt vindicated that she was talking bullshit.

But I was wrong. By that time, about half the words on the word lists were ones that I had picked because they sounded nice. And, crucially, I had selected only the poems I thought sounded good. I later realized that I had written those poems in partnership with the computer, and with Basho.

And that is what you’ve done here. You’ve created artwork in partnership with the AI and whatever artists it was drawing from. Essentially, instead of photographing reality, you’re photographing the imagination of humanity.

This is an amazing addition and a great anecdote, thank you! Your bolded part is what I think AI art can and should strive to be - not aiming to replace or overtake, but to record and support, and as a friend says, “it is literally a mirror turned at the collective unconsciousness of human art”.