Welcome back, everyone! This week’s entry will be a little lighter on text and heavier on visuals—which, judging by the success of my previous posts on AI-generated art, ought to be a popular decision. But this time I aim to focus on a particular theme. You see, ever since I was a kid, I’ve been irresistibly drawn to places and spaces: the interiors of houses, the winding corridors of starships, the tall grassy slopes of Arcadian hills. I’ve had dreams beyond counting where I’ve roamed through endless, labyrinthine bookstores, or probed the forgotten ways of some quiet wilderness. Most of the time these imaginings are only the stuff of dreams; they can be so hard to translate into words, or even harder, find in the real world.
This is where generative AI can be a godsend. It’s not nearly as good as what a determined human artist can do, but it sure has a knack for capturing moods. With some patience, and an understanding of the software’s limitations, you can achieve incredible results. Let’s go on a trip, shall we?
Midjourney does best with a certain level of abstraction. Its “photorealistic” efforts… generally aren’t, particularly with more speculative subjects. For landscapes I’ve found the most success specifying “oil painting style” or some variation thereof; it has a harder time screwing up the details if the details are, themselves, composed of impressionistic brushstrokes. Mood is the first priority with these, anyway. For a soulless machine, it’s uncanny how its generations can evoke feeling.
We’ll start off with some sci-fi imaginings. The prompt: “Abandoned sci-fi spaceport on a distant planet, hazy alien moon hanging in the sky, strange vegetation, oil painting style.” These are the initial generations:
There’s promise, to be sure, though I’m not immensely happy with any of them in particular. Midjourney seemed to struggle with my request for a moon; note the moon in #3, on the bottom left, which appears to be hanging in front of the clouds. But #2, on the top right, seems like it could go somewhere. Likewise with #4. Here are the results after some tweaking and experimentation:
Both of those took plenty of iteration, and even then I’m not perfectly happy with them. Very occasionally, though, the AI will spit out a banger without any tweaking, or even a particularly strong prompt. On a whim I once typed in “Walking on lost ages,” and got this:
Truly we have constructed a technological terror, if this thing can spin such an evocative image from four words. The accumulated visual output of humanity, fed1 into an enormous data-crunching algorithm, has developed something uncannily like intuition.
Let’s try a few others. “Barren rocky landscape with ruins, in the style of Thomas Cole”:
A beaut! Who is Thomas Cole, you ask? Only my favorite painter of all time. He was a 19th-century American artist specializing in landscapes, but with a flair for narrative. I have prints of his five-part The Course of Empire2 series hanging above my desk. Between the tumbled stone ruins and the dramatic cloudscape above, I’d say Midjourney did a pretty fair job of mimicking his style.
Some more ruins:
Post-industrial decay sure is an aesthetic—and I’m always chasing aesthetics. It’s the pretentious artist in me, I suppose. Might as well pick up a smoking habit and rent a dilapidated loft in Paris.
I think we’ve established now that crumbling concrete and stone fascinate me. But so, too, does ice—there’s something so clean about it, so otherworldly. Antarctica and its research bases have long been a favored destination, at least in my imaginings. Some highlights I’ve come up with:
10/10. Would happily hop in there for the months-long Antarctic winter. It’s a cozy prospect, no? Doing science in your nice, warm, well-stocked home away from home, surrounded by one of the most hostile environments known to man. Maybe it’s a cold night and the winds are howling outside, but you’re nevertheless whiling away the hours at your workbench, scrutinizing the samples you drilled from a deep subglacial lake, jotting messily in a notebook—even as your eyelids grow heavy, and sleep threatens to overtake you.
I will leave you all for today with one last generation: a radar mast towering above a craggy outlook, with tumultuous clouds roiling in the sky behind it. Thanks for reading this one! If you’d like to see more of me messing around with Midjourney—and a host of other things, besides—be sure to hit that subscribe button.
- In probable violation of copyright laws, mind you. Artists are not amused. ↩︎
- I also used one of them as the cover image for a very early post on this website. ↩︎
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