Royally Fudged

This work I started in 2022 was one of many steps in a journey of fashion/gore/sex/horror collisions that directly informed more recent work like my NYFW runway series.

I spent many hundreds of hours last year experimenting with MidJourney on my phone while rocking the baby, following trails of ideas and building upon them, feeding inspiration in and taking inspiration back, finding horrific beauty in all the “wrong” paths, letting the collaborative element of the process inform and evolve my own concepts. The result was hundreds of unfinished series’ of raw material that I was excited about but never had time to go back and edit on my computer to put them into collections that represented my vision and intent (if you think this stuff is fast/easy, you have no idea how much I over-think EVERYTHING). With the tech moving so fast, I sometimes forget to go back and finish stuff from last year, but when I do I’m reminded how much I love the surrealism and grit of older versions of MidJourney, especially V2. AI art has only ever interested me for its weirdness and warped lens, and something is really lost every time it pushes towards “perfection,” especially with regards to “clean” appearance and coherence of form.

Reminder that for now you can still experiment with previous versions of MJ by adding —v 1 or —v 2 or —v 3 to the end of your prompt. There’s a lot still to discover in the gritty, grungy, “ugly” weirdness of those liminal aesthetics.

If you need a chill place to experiment, my Discord server has a MidJourney bot room, open to all.