Midjourney // Art in age of AI production

Like many creative professionals trying their hand at Midjourney AI, I too made some attempts with some very basic prompts and couple of rounds of selecting preferred trajectory. I purposely avoided using it as a design tool, to create amplified versions of an image of the design instead of design.

If architecture is a chronology of articulated spatial experience arranged in a curated manner, like a physical representation of a film then to flatten that complexity into a single post card image of an aspiration I personally felt could be problematic…or possibly it is indeed a culmination of Instagram driven design, liberated by chains of history, socio-economic or contextual sensitivities and validated by post modern, random pattern and form generation. Maybe in the future I may still use it within my design process, but for now I restrained myself.

Instead I attempted to use it as a story telling tool that could generate beautiful images (it is absolutely impossible to generate images that are ugly or compositionally weak, if you do come across one, it gets eroded in the series of iterations to come to something that you like). So below are some of the images that were created using MidJourney.

Artist Studio (2 images)

Botanist Workshop (1 image)

Aromachologists Laboratory (2 images)

Paleontologist Workshop (2 images)

Lepidopterist Studio (2 images)

Mineralogists Workshop (2 images)

And finally Architects Studio (lol)

These images are workspaces in the form of “workshops, studios, laboratories” (part of prompts) belonging to various professions like “botanists, architects, artists, lepidopterists, mineralogists” (also part of the prompts) as co-imagined by the AI and me (through prompts and selections). Maybe they carry my biases of imagining workspaces as less sterile environments, definitely less social and more focused, monastic, where various individuals’ efforts collect layers of materials, objects, gadgets, archives that form part of their work environment…or possibly it is AI’s understanding of what these professions and their spaces must look like…either ways they are beautiful and inspiring to look at.