Mars College AI Art.

Fatso Trump in Alice-in-Wonderland drag, down a rabbit hole, promoting a DMT feverdream of obesity, sponsored by hamburgers

For these images, I used a prompt that contained a quote from the book I'm reading:

"With a stronger dose, a state of fear and anxiety could be induced where the subject could be compelled to trade their cooperation for a guarantee of return to normalcy." (Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties, and Beyond, by Martin Lee (1992))

I edited the quote to make it more suitable for prompin: "(A state of fear and anxiety, induced by a stronger dose). Compelled cooperation, (a promised guarantee of return to normalcy)."

Some of my secret sauce is to use style qualifiers at the back of the prompt (after the quote). Here is what I used for these: "Lysergic forced perspective, DMT linear perspective, tryptamine tilt-shift, dazzling ayahuasca hallucinatory scene, in a style reminiscent of <concept>."

I made these with Eden (app.eden.art), applying different LORAs ("concepts" in Eden), trained on different sets of images: stills from the movie "Holy Mountain" by Alejandro Jodorowsky, synthetic bio-inspired remixes of the "Mars College" logo, patterns of boot-imprints found in the dust on a dry lakebed (Salton Sea, CA), and the Burning Man man-base effigy.

The series (with more variations) can be viewed here:

Two different sets of variations, using "concept-shopping", as part of this week's Sunday Miracles challenge on http://app.eden.art -- trying out different LORA concepts that people have finetuned.

Here are some images I created based on Love Tester, a Burning Man honorarium piece I created (and built with my besties) in 2015. These are created using a "concept" (aka LoRA) in app.eden.art, from about eight photos of the finished installation. The bluish ones use a weak concept strength as well as a prompt that uses the words "cyberpunk", and the last one uses a high concept strength, and kinda resembles the piece we actually built remarkably well.

More compositions based on the Mars College logo concept, these are very microbiology-inspired, but some of them also resemble the vascular cambium of higher plants (which I did not try prompting, but should!!). The first one was inspired by carboxysomes, subcellular microcompartments which self-assemble into icosahedral protein cages packed with the rubisco protein, which help cyanobacteria fix CO2 more efficiently. (I have done a lot of work on carboxysomes in my science research).

Here are more variants of album covers (of experimental post-rock records I am quite fond of), using the "controlnet" function of app.eden.art ("canny edge" option). These sets explore the higher range of controlnet strengths, preserving more of the original image composition.

I really love the way the Sangam ones exploit the different angles of lines that overlay the original album cover, as well as the different positionings of where it makes my likeness appear in the set from Melodien's "Apeiron". The moiré effects of the set from Akasha System get used in some really cool ways.

Here I am exploring the "controlnet" function of app.eden.art, where I use different album covers of records I like, as initial images (as the "init_img") which get used to guide the composition. I show decreasing control strengths of the init_img -- notice how the pictures in the right column are more similar to each other because they are less constrained by the album cover.

It is interesting how the album covers that are purely geometric (Snow Palms & MinaeMinae) do not show any of my likeness at the highest controlnet strength (init80).

I love how the multipanel boxes of the Sonic Youth cover (from the album "Sister") begin to dissolve as the controlnet strength gets relaxed.

Using the "blend" function of app.eden.art to combine the runway looks of Michelle Visage and RuPaul (from episodes of Drag Race UK Season 5).

It is interesting how most of the interpreted prompts detect that these are screenshots from Drag Race. They never seem to identify Michelle correctly, although it does interpret her "queer makeup". I think Ru would be happy to discover that several of these creations resemble Vanessa Williams.

Here are a few of the iconic and amusing (albeit disturbing) dirty secrets that I illustrated using eden.art for my Dirty Secrets Illustrated zine project, for giving out in association with our art installation this year ("Mini Dirty Secret") at Burning Man 2023. We have been collecting these anonymously since 2017.

An interesting thing that I discovered is that the worksafe-features of the SDXL model not only prevent pornographic image creation but also seem to be unable to depict the actual act of violence or cruelty (I couldn't get the kitten to appear trapped underneath a shoe, I couldn't depict the nine-year-old in the act of striking the toddler nor the guy actually laying his fist on his mother) as well as defecation. I think I got the urination picture using an nsfw checkpoint that someone finetuned (hosted at seaArt), but I had to specifically promp that a puddle was at their feet and that a stream of liquid was pouring down their pants leg.