"Self-Portrait in Lunaria" is part of a world I began making in October 2021. I had reached a point of crisis between the narratives of normality and the anarchy of creation. On the full moon of that month, I constructed a ritual of commitment to art, a vow to serve it, protect it, and to be lunatic enough to follow it wherever it lives. This ritual became a music video titled "Lunaria," filmed with the support of my friends in Berlin.
Lunaria is the place that I try to surround with my voice when I sing, to articulate with my hands when I paint, to embody when I present myself in performance. In this Self-Portrait, I use the deep learning model Stable Diffusion to imagine myself into the world of Lunaria.
Starting with photographs of myself from the music video "Lunaria," I used image-to-image translation guided by text prompts to travel into Lunaria. Similar to the way that the Lunaria ritual was a means to resolve my higher self from the noise of expectation, this Self-Portrait resolves the avatar of my evolution from the noise of the diffusion model's latent space.
"Self-Portrait in Lunaria" is both a reaffirmation of my vows and a marker of a new direction where my art is leading me. It presents a vision of what I might be if I were born within the world of Lunaria: how my body might be shaped on the Lunaria planet, and what the fashions might be like in the Lunaria society.