002: Tangled Timelines
Artificial intelligence makes it easy to remix images from different cultures, and across space and time, resulting in powerful and provocative juxtapositions.
Uncivil War
While experimenting with AI earlier this year, I wondered what it might be like to generate images of the American Civil War that included modern weaponry, like AK-47s.
I wrote a simple prompt like “Civil War soldier using an AK-47” and wondered, would the guns feel out of place in this context? Would the men? How might my mind try to resolve such images?
These images don’t strike me as very strange or incongruous, but that’s probably because I don’t know enough about modern guns to appreciate seeing them in an unusual context.
But stick some laptops into a Civil War setting, and things quickly get interesting to me…
But why stop at electric typing machines? Why not throw in some intelligent telephones?
That way, when the wife wants a picture from the front lines, you can snap a “Selfer” and ask for one in return.
Of course, with the advent of smartphones and the internet, social media was soon to follow.
For men in the field, the novelty of “Instant Telegram” provided a connection to home, and a welcome diversion from the horrors of war.
Generals and soldiers alike began to create “personal brands” online, hoping to influence public opinion to support their side in the great conflict.
Nerd note: Some of Stable Diffusion’s biases are showing here. Based on the images that it’s been trained on, the AI believes that social media influencers primarily wear skirts. Meanwhile, it seems that Civil War soldiers are generally men, with rather abundant facial hair. The result is some seriously progressive Civil War drag, complete with bushy beards!
As the 1864 presidential election looms, Abraham Lincoln hires a graffiti artist to design his campaign materials around a message of hope.
Coal-Powered Smartphones
As the war in America comes to a close, the 1900s sees the ubiquity of digital technology creeping into everyday life in America and Europe.
After a quick tutorial from their grandkids, everyone’s Pawpaw and Meemaw goes crazy for The Facebooks.
By 1910, store catalogs are filled with screen-based appliances from laptops and phones to tablets.
(Websites haven’t been invented in this timeline, ok? Just go with it.)
By 1920, the personal computer revolution has started changing office life, giving rise to new methods of working, learning and communicating — or so we can start to imagine, looking at images like these.
Art and Context
I find these “tangled timelines” deeply fascinating.
It’s partly the sheer novelty of seeing things I haven’t seen before, like a “Civil War-era laptop”.
Or, you know, Marilyn Monroe working at a Starbucks.
Seemingly simple juxtapositions like these also have the power to recontextualize our experiences, and reframe things we take for granted.
In the 1950s, would this same person have been healthier and happier with access to Instagram? Or might the demands of the social media spotlight and the comments from anonymous trolls made things worse for her?
The most interesting thing about these “photographs” are the thoughts, feelings and questions they might conjure in you as a viewer.
(Drop me a line at kirkclyne@substack.com and let me know what they make you think about.)
Tripping Through Time
Consumer AI systems have been trained on millions of commercial images, making it trivial to remix imagery of the past, or even envision how things might have been.
For example, if the US had legalized cannabis back in the 1970s, what would that part of the Sears catalogue have looked like?
Stable Diffusion has some pretty good ideas about that, right down to the vintage illustrations and product photography.
By casting today’s social norms back in time, we may be able to see them in a new light. And at the worst, we get a sort of “funhouse mirror” of fake history.
But we can also project certain social norms forward in time, and envision alternate futures.
AI-assisted renderings of flying cars can be cool, but what about using AI to rethink cars entirely? Or to reimagine today’s cities without any cars at all?
Nerd note: Foresight practitioners now have a powerful and accessible tool for the creation of design fictions that can help to convey the possible futures that emerge from their research.
Some artists are using AI to envision how their present-day society might look if it were to embrace a different set of values.
Simply by remixing the imagery we have now, almost anyone can use AI to conjure up new ways of seeing the world.
And by literally envisioning the future in a tangible way, creators may be even able to capture the imagination of the public to rally around a cause.
Still, changing the world can be slow and hard.
Sometimes it’s easier to just ask an AI what it thinks the future holds. That’s kind of fun, too.
// end Lab Log 002
Field Notes
Masterful Monsters
Famed science fiction writers Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens sent me a few chimeras they created using Midjourney.
(You want good monsters? Leave it to the experts.)
Inspired by the Inventing Animals issue of this newsletter, they had barely rendered their first, er, Kittenodactyl before they were hooked.
“Waaaay too addictive!”, they wrote.
(Would you like to see your experiments featured in this newsletter? Email your creations to hello@kirkclyne.com.)