Comprising creative output by Michael Kupietz in visual media. Mostly digital. Some generative. Some degenerative. Some photographic. One enpencilatory.
Saturday, Nov. 30, 2024's #SaturdayMonsterChallenge theme on LinkedIn is "Time Travelling Monsters".
Here's my interpretation: "A Connecticut Sasquatch In King Arthur's Court".
I posted The Contents Of The Rest Of The World’s Dream Do Not Concern Me (or, Why I Didn’t Turn 40) and Day Nights at around the same time, and in making the featured images, used Stable Diffusion XL to create a bunch of images that I'm kind of fond of, all around the themes of time and calendars. Here's the leftovers.
One of the fun non-work-related things that happens on LinkedIn is the "Saturday Monster Challenge", a fun AI art meme where every Saturday this one guy picks a monster-related theme and people make generative art monster images about it. Today, as I write this, the theme was "Mustache Monsters", for "Movember", a global campaign where men grow mustaches to raise awareness of men's health issues.
It seemed like fun. I of course, couldn't stop with just one.
I had a lot of fun making the featured image for the article "Resurrecting the <BLINK> tag". Here's some of the also-rans.
Many years ago, around the turn of the millennium, as I was simultaneously just breaking into and away from the San Francisco underground art scene, some folks I used to run with said elusive phantom stranger John Law had called for a bunch of us to meet up for mysterious purposes, as he was wont to do.
Hopping into some cars that night, we caravaned out along the twisty road into the Marin Headlands, parking some distance from Hawk Hill and walking there under cover of night. Once we arrived at the observation platform on top of the hill, someone produced a shovel and began to dig in the dirt, down a foot or two until hitting a rock. We pulled the rock out, and, to my surprise, underneath was an overturned 5-gallon bucket. We pulled out the bucket, and under that, to my…
Working on a featured image for my writeup on How the Section 174 Tax Code Changes Caused a White-Collar Job Crash, I tried to create an artistic representation of tech businesses being crushed under tax code changes. Along the way, I generated some striking images that didn't quite fit what I wanted for the post, but which I nonetheless liked enough to tuck away in this gallery of leftovers. Here's the also-ran images for that article.
Painted faces, paintings of faces — an exploration of fantastic portraits and fantastic art. (Titled with apologies to the shade of David Bowie.)
Just some photos from my cross-country vacation.
Funny how different vacation photos sometimes are from how you remember things being. Guess I should have used a camera instead of an AI.
Still, some of them really are surprisingly accurate to how things really were.
NOTE: Some of the activities documented in this photo album, like a lot of what goes on in the Black Rock Desert during the off season (when seven different government agencies aren't there standing by to protect you from yourself), fall firmly in the "Don't try this at home" area. Or even in the "Don't do this at all" area. Seriously. Don't do any of what you see here. You will get yourself killed. We had preparations and precautions which are not described here. And one of us almost got killed anyway.
Back in Spring 2003 I got wind that a bunch of folks I'd met through some fin de siècle attempts to revive the soggy corpse of the SF Cacophony Society were heading out for a road trip through northern Nevada, to do some exploration in the abandoned American Flats silver refinery in the hills outside…
For a little while I used to run the Billboard Liberation Front's website (INB4: no, don't even bother asking. I have no idea how to reach them anymore. The Old Man is long since retired, and I stopped talking to everyone else I knew through the BLF maybe 15 or 20 years ago. Maybe try contacting them through their site.)
Anyhow, funny story, for maybe 5 or 6 years after I stopped associating with them, I still was getting cc'ed on their website's comment form submissions, which nobody paid any attention to anymore. In late 2007, a request came through from an arts organization in Belgium, asking if the BLF would come give a lecture at a "Culture Jamming" arts festival called "The Game Is Up", thrown annually at the historic Vooruit Art Center in Ghent, that year's theme being "Art For Sale", a…
Pink Floyd's album "Animals", for me, might stand alone as the most singular achievement of the rock 'n' roll era. I've always argued that Pink Floyd were not a rock band, but the first act of what several decades later eventually came to be called "post-rock"—musicians grounded in the language and conventions of rock but doing their own thing with it—and never did they push the boundaries of rock music further from its beginnings, while still staying true to its basic visceral nature (this is, after all, a genre of music named after a slang term for fucking) than on "Animals".Culminating their epic series of classic 1970s albums, each of which further developed the musical experiments of the last, "Animals" was about as far as they, or anyone, would ever take it without completely untethering from…
Another AI generative art project. I recently was experimenting with creating some work-themed images. I didn't come up with anything I could use on my FileMaker consulting website, but I did wind up generating a couple of interesting galleries. Here's three of them:
Some people really get into their work
II. Your Dream JobWhere do you see yourself in five years?
III. Model EmployeesSurrealist stock photography, basically
Back around 2005-2006, as social media took off, I was a member of an urban exploration chat group, memory fails but it was probably something on Tribe or Friendster. Mentioning my interest in the UC Berkeley Steam Tunnels—a fabled network of sometimes-dangerous underground utility tunnels cross-crossing the UC Berkeley campus, which had once been well-traveled by intrepid explorers but had since been sealed off, with all access supposedly welded shut, although as of this writing I can find no evidence online of this other than an absence of any reported explorations after about 2001, and one or two scattered online claims of later access (which happen to jibe with the experience I'm about to relate)—I was contacted by privately by an old-school liberty-spiked homeless punk kid named Spider, who said he knew a way in.
After a preliminary meeting to…
Robyn Hitchcock used to have an email fan club that I was pretty active in (hence his name coming up a bunch of places on this site; if you're familiar with his songs, it makes sense that he gives people ideas for art.)
Back in, geez, 2003 or 4, I think, he turned 50 so we got together and all contributed a bunch of art to give to him on a CD-rom. This was my contribution, about 12 pages of scanner art (including the somewhat difficult task of getting a good digital scan of a lit candle!) Use the skull, suitcase, and bottle of wine on the right to navigate through the panels.
(Note: at narrower window widths, the navigation icons on the right side of each page below might get cut off and you will need to either widen your browser window, or scroll to the right to see…
Back when I first got to San Francisco in the mid-90s, full of youthful idealism, the first thing I did was seek out the San Francisco Cacophony Society and their best-known offspring, the Burning Man festival and the nascent subculture that surrounded it. Well, no, the first thing I did was spend 3 years of my late 20s cocooned at the Green Tortoise Adventure Travel office & youth hostel, where I lived and worked, venturing out only to cavort in the surrounding North Beach neighborhood with the poets and the blues musicians. But after three years of that—straight out to explore what San Francisco's modern counterculture had to offer, without delay.
But well prior to that, in September 1997, a bunch of us Tortoise employees borrowed a bus from them—great perk of working for an adventure tour bus operator—and went out for a long…
somewhere beneath the Bay Area, Aug 6 2004
Last July, my late* trubbamaking companion was trying to find a shortcut down to the beach when he noticed a hole in a fence across the road, where someone had cut it away to allow a tree limb to grow through. Characteristically unable to resist, he climbed through it to explore, and, in a fantastic piece of luck, deep in the woods behind this fence he stumbled onto the surface entrances of what we only later learned was Battery Dynamite, a sprawling underground military facility dating back to World War 2. Several weeks later he brought me there, camera in hand, to explore the corridors of this creepy subterranean relic...
*Repeat visitors to this gallery will notice the change in epithet. In summer 2005, my former intrepid trubbamaking companion was killed in a freak dating accident. Don't mourn for him. He knew…
9/30/2005
I was wandering the trails through the woods by UC Santa Cruz, taking some pictures of trees and stuff and trying to shake off a cold, when fate brought me by sheer happenstance onto this intriguing tableau:
Click any image to enlarge
Hmmm... a bunch of college students out in the middle of the woods... a hole with a ladder into the ground... me coincidentally carrying a camera... what to do... what to do?
The last in line down the hole invited me to follow them and in a moment I was here... this is the Porter Caves, right there on UCSC's campus.
The kids loaned me a spare flashlight, were astoundingly good-natured about the constant firing of my flash, and led me through room after muddy room of this....
While we were down there, one of the guys asked if anyone had been to…
In August 2018 my mom and I decided to take a road trip from my sister's home in an un-named southern city, where I was crashing for a few months, to visit Pearl Fryar's Topiary Garden, in Bishopville, SC.
Pearl Fryar is a folk artist, famous for, in the 1980s, having cleared a three-acre cornfield next to his home and, with no training and using "throwaway" plants salvaged from a local nursery's discards, created a fantastic topiary garden, incorporating his own whimsical found-object assemblage sculptures in places, which has become a regional tourist attraction of sorts. As late as 2018, he was still maintaining it himself as he rounded the corner into his 80s.
While visiting, we had the good fortune to meet and chat briefly with Mr. Fryar himself, who came out to tend to the grounds while we were there. Nice fellow.…
As I worked on my "Revisions Of Johanna" project, I generated a lot of images I really liked, but which didn't fit into the final project. I decided the best of them deserved their own gallery.
This page is a work in progress, I just kind of threw it up to get me started. I have plenty more images to sort through from this, plus I need to pare down these already posted ones to just the most interesting ones. But, still, you can get a good sense of what went on behind the scenes here, and hopefully, an understanding of why I didn't just want these putative rejects to sit unused forever on my hard drive.
One additional note about the content of these images in the context of social awareness: For anyone interested, I addressed some thoughts about sexism and bias in…
I don't draw as much as I used to, these are a couple of things I salvaged from my ancient other site. I'll add more as I run across them.
I have to be honest. I don't know about this one.
I set out to do another set of AI-assisted lyric illustrations, this time all of one song in its entirety... Bob Dylan's "Visions Of Johanna".
I got a little ways into it, and it was going well, when a few times in a row the generative algorithm overemphasized cats I had added as incidental background elements in the prompt, to interesting effect. So I had the brilliant idea: let's illustrate the whole song with cats. I backtracked and started over again.
It was an instructive lesson, one that didn't turn out as well as I had hoped.
It's just hard to get a lot of variety out of the Stable Diffusion XL algorithm when the main subject is cats. Turns out, visually, cats are really not a very expressive medium. And especially…
While working on a featured image for Field Report: Briefing On My Weekend, I had the idea of extending the theme to make a whole set of illustrations inspired by my travels around California's natural areas. I wound up doing a whole mess of them. These are experimental, but I like the idea and the way the experiments worked came out, so I may follow up on this. There's a lot of them, I'm going to sit with this a while and probably then cut this gallery down to a more manageable size.
Because these sprung from an effort to illustrate a post with twilight fantasy elements, you may encounter some unsettling phantoms or backwoods beasties here and there. Just make sure to keep all your fingers inside your browser windows and you should be ok.
Since they're not always clearly displayed on the front page or in every post, for convenience, this is an automated scrape of all original "featured images" (the background or front page image for a post) on the site.
This is a series of generative art images I am paticularly fond of. Originally these were going to be part of my RobGAN Hitchcock project, but they kind of stand on their own. Created with Stable Diffusion.
For a while, I had a Twitter account, @robGANhitchock, where I was posting AI illustrations of Robyn Hitchcock lyrics I created using a Generative Adversarial Network ("GAN"). This was an interesting project, because when it started I knew next to nothing about generative art; as I worked on it I learned more about crafting prompts, and more and better tools emerged, so over the course of the full set, you can see the progression of experience and improved generative algorithms: from the first few in VQGAN, then FreewayML,…
Angel trumpets and devil trombones, and you are invited! Here's some phantasmagorical music-themed generative AI illustrations I, well, generated.
These were, by the way, generated with Dall-E 2.5, which is sadly no longer available. All public instances have been replaced with Dall-E 3 which is much more literal, produces crisp, more concrete and digital-looking or often cartoonish images, and is not good for abstraction or "sloppier" images. I remain hopeful Dall-E 2.5 will become available again, or a future version will allow the use of prompts again that can facilitate generating more obscure, impressionistic, and stylistically varied output.
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