Tezos

Beast #393

Creator

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Description

My life is pretty much controlled by beasts, it always has been. I engage with beasts directly and very physically in my space: cats, dogs, mice, pack rats, horses, birds, squirrels, dragonflies, bees, cockroaches, fire ants. Other interactions are less tangible: parasites, bacteria, viruses. Some beasts are not physical at all. Yet their presence is equally impactful (maybe more so). When I think about my family history and stories of urgent emigration, fleeing war zones with protracted dislocations, I’m reminded of other kinds of beasts, those who impact outer and inner lives. This project explores beasts as both physical manifestations of nature’s generative power and the beasts lurking within, including those within the collective unconscious. I first conceived of Beasts when I was visualizing an expanded world around the Oracles: “Realm of the Oracles”. Those early beasts were more stylized, to fit within an Oracles’ aesthetic. The present beasts have expanded beyond that initial scope. Technically, I was also able to push beyond what I had achieved with Oracles, in both the underlying generative approach and breadth of variation across the collection. Beasts implements a platform use-case (Generative x Generative) I imagined when EmProps.ai was first founded. Coming to AI from creative coding, I felt there could be an interesting pathway connecting a generative code project to a generative AI project. Though I touched upon this idea with Oracles, I fully leveraged the potential with Beasts. Each beast is aesthetically seeded from my Bundles project on fxhash. Forking the Bundles code, I produced a related generative program titled “BeastEgg”. BeastEgg outputs both a complex script and a fully generative image. These are fed into Stable Diffusion producing each beast. By building off the Bundles codebase I was able to create a wider variation across the Beasts’ collection than with Oracles and perhaps any prior generative AI collection. Thank you to Anika Meier and Expanded.Art for the incredible opportunity to bring my work and long-form generative AI into an IRL gallery setting. Thank you to my co-founders at EmProps.ai for supporting Beasts, especially Luis and the dev team for tireless work on the platform. And very special thanks to Robin, Ian, Sophie, Eric and Hilary for always supporting me. In loving memory of a truly remarkable ’Beast’, Jerry Greenberg. Beasts Long-Form Generative AI Edition of 1000 ThreeJs + Stable Diffusion + Upscaler 2784x2784 PNG March 29, 2023