Visual Art » Generative Illustrations
Raving And Drooling: (An Accidental Review and) Lyrical Illumination of Pink Floyd’s “Sheep”

Pings On The Wig: Raving And Drooling: (An Accidental Review and) Lyrical Illumination of Pink Floyd’s “Sheep”

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Introduction: 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…

Visual Art » Generative Illustrations » Interesting Leftovers & Bonus Galleries
Previsions of Johanna — preliminary experiments

Work-In-Progress Postview: Previsions of Johanna — preliminary experiments

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…

Workshop » Works In Progress » Visual Works In Progress
Revisions of Johanna — AI-Assisted lyrical illumination

Gallery: Revisions of Johanna — AI-Assisted lyrical illumination

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…

Visual Art » Generative Illustrations
New Userpic. No Specific Lyrical Reference; Just Very Appropriate General Generative Hitchcockiana, Produced Serendipitously By While Trying To Generate A Psychedelic Portrait Of Eugene Mirman Listening To Shufflmania.

Giving It To A Soft Boy: RobGAN Hitchcock — AI-assisted lyrical illustrations

New Userpic. No Specific Lyrical Reference; Just Very Appropriate General Generative Hitchcockiana, Produced Serendipitously By While Trying To Generate A Psychedelic Portrait Of Eugene Mirman Listening To Shufflmania.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,…