Brainstorm Blog. Project 1

I know going into this project I want to create something with an uncanny and/or horrific edge to it, since that is what I believe AI can be excel at. I happened to type the word “Roadkill” into the prompt, which reminded me of a dream I once had. The dream’s narrative was unimportant, but a single image stayed with me the entire time: A large deer (or probably an elk), who had half its face rotting away. However, the rotting did not look natural, and I describe it as looking like bloody, shredded pumpkin guts. Gross! The key thing here is that the gore is uncanny, and I remember the distinct moment of waking up and asking myself: What the hell did I just see?

THE thing, from The Thing (1982)

This, in addition to my toying with the AI generation tools using prompts including “god” and “butcher”, got me turning a vague story around in my head: A group of researchers discovering something they shouldn’t have touched. Opening the carcass of an animal for autopsy only to find something akin to the horror of The Thing (1982). Then, using glitch techniques, I turn the visuals into ‘found footage’, as if the sheer horror of what these people found corrupted the files themselves. 

A GIF made for one of our glitch labs using an ai generated base.

That’s the vision, I hope. Gore and vaguely religious undertones all wrapped in a blanket of digital corruption. The goal is to create a narrative that at its climax, becomes visually incomprehensible–kind of like early AI generation! I plan to collage different parts of generated images while drawing over it myself, going back and forth between glitching certain parts of the image to be illegible and then drawing over it and then glitching over it again.

Overall, I hope to make the audience uncomfortable with what they see so that they ask themselves the same question my dream wrought: What the hell did I just see?