Art by Mandelsage
Art created using A.I. tools like MidJourney, Stable Diffusion, Dalle 2, etc, has taken the world by storm, flooding our timelines and our senses with hundreds of eclectically beautiful imagery. Alejandra and I were no less curious than anyone, but we opted for caution, started experimenting slowly, and have released only what we feel is truly worthy to call our own through our A.I.-alternate-identity, Cryptoyevsky.
We believe it is important not to be blinded by the ubiquitous, surface veneer of beauty every above-average A.I. prompt result has, and instead create with purpose.
We want the art we mint to be work we feel extremely proud of - work that really comes from our creative cores and expresses parts of who we are and/or how we relate with the world.
We want to be able to look back at our body of work after many years and be able to say that none of it was a quick cash-grab or opportunistic exploitation of a passing craze.
Don't get us wrong, however: There's nothing wrong with sometimes incorporating a meme in one's work! In fact, meme-culture is undeniably huge and a whole movement of art has grown around it, with some artists working exclusively within it. That's truly fine, of course.
Just as A.I. has brought about a new movement in which almost anyone can start creating art with it (if they have the right tools and/or resources) - art of essentially infinite possibilities - with relative ease.
But it's all about context: Every artist has a story, and a history. If we (Alejandra Her and Mandelsage) suddenly started creating and selling dozens of A.I art pieces with themes wildly different from the work we've created before, or suddenly started including a Pepe frog somewhere in every piece - well, what would you think? We certainly wouldn't feel good about it.
Our work
Mary Shelley's Notebook
With this artwork, we wanted to outline two main parallels between the creation of life as is expressed by Mary Shelley in "Frankenstein" and the creation of art with A.I. On the surface is the idea of a being brought to life through science and chance. The
use of a generative process by the buyer to create a unique creature of their own obviously echoes the main theme of the novel; On a deeper level, however, is the idea of using A.I. to create all the elements of our artwork. In much the same way as Dr. Frankenstein created a unique and frightening creature whose very existence presented challenging scientific and ethical questions, the use of A.I. in creating art is doing exactly the same thing in the world today. You can read more in these two articles:
Mary Shelley's Notebook: An Async Blueprint Made 100% with A.I.
Cyclus Renascentiae
"Cyclus" is our very first art collection made with A.I. and was born out of the frustrating attempts to learn how to use prompts to get what we want. It is about rebirth and often painful transformation especially as felt by creatives all over, learning to adapt to this brave new world. To see each piece up close, see their gallery page.
Read more about its creation here.
Down the Rabbit Hole, with Alice the Rabbit
The idea is simple:
In every piece there is a hole or portal of some kind. Within that portal another world is seen, slightly hidden behind the veiling light. Alice then jumps into the portal, and finds herself in that new world - the new piece. She journeys around, searching for the next portal, always eager to see just how far the rabbit hole goes, and what new worlds are waiting to be discovered.
New Homes
This was a collaboration between myself (Mandelsage) and science-fiction writer Lee Tyrell. I was commissioned to create the artwork that would accompany a branch of his sci-fi story that involves 12 fictional elements. I created the concept art for each element, as well as their corresponding Periodic Table panels.
Our Cryptonian Future
"Our Cryptonian Future" is an AsyncArt Day/Night piece, a distant future cityscape - one dystopian and the other utopian - and it asks a simple question... Which future are we creating, with all our tech?
The only certainty is change: A walk into the future which we discover doesn't exist. In its place, we find, is the present - different from what we knew. An ever-changing landscape of our own design. Since the dawn of blockchains and artificial intelligence, the kind of future we could only imagine is now approaching, faster and more real than ever before. The nature of that future is up to us.
