AI Art for a Typical Saturday
Above is a piece of art from my new NFT collection Small Gods of Time Travel. The image was generated by artificial intelligence from the words 'I know he is your clone,' which is the 16th chapter of the book connected to the collection. The imagery the AI came up with is somewhat dark, but interesting. The NFT can be found here on objkt for 5xtz.
Today has so far been a typical Saturday. I worked, finalizing the week's news summaries for wanttoknow.info. Then I went to the coffee shop and chatted with friends. @kommienezuspadt just bought a few of my NFTs! He said the experience of buying NFTs with Tezos for the first time was smooth and uncomplicated, which bodes well for future sales.
Later this evening, I'll be going to a potluck with some of my rainbow family friends. I've given up on making it to this year's rainbow gathering in Colorado for financial reasons, so tonight's event is probably the closest I'll get to a rainbow experience this summer. There may end up being a gathering closer to home in the fall, but that hasn't been finalized yet.
The main thing I'm thinking about right now is my next big NFT drop. This one will feature AI adaptations of my series of oil portraits from history. I'm calling it History and the Machine. Each piece will link to the original oil portrait, so I created a webpage for the 19 original portraits and put it up on IPFS. You can check that out here.
It's funny, I've been sitting on these portraits for years and have shared them widely, yet I never felt the need to create a dedicated webpage for the series until this became necessary for the NFT project. Someone at the coffee shop asked me why I didn't just make the images of the original paintings into NFTs. It was a good question, but my answer to is seemed unsatisfactory to this friend.
The simple answer is that I don't believe anyone wants NFTs of my traditional art. All of my experience with NFTs suggests that collectors are more interested in the cutting edge than in the old school. My theory is that many NFT collectors collect largely to celebrate the emerging technology. They'd much rather see something rendered by a machine than worked with human hands.
The more technical answer is that my paintings tend not to photograph well. And there are images of these paintings scattered across the web, which is problematic if I'm trying to make unique NFTs. By generating images especially for an NFT collection, I can tightly control the distribution of these images, ensuring that the highest resolution versions of these are only available as NFTs. Once minted, it's true that anyone can copy/paste the images however they want. But the first instance of those images appearing on the web will forever be in the NFTs I mint.
One thing I'm doing with History and the Machine that I haven't done before is minting a video file as one of the items. This video captured part of the process of the AI transforming my painting of Alan Turing. It's 10 seconds long and super creepy, so I'll probably call it Creepy Alan Turing. I plan to mint just one of these and await offers, rather than putting the item up for sale.
Read my novels:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is available as a web book on IPFS and as a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt.
- The Paradise Anomaly is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Psychic Avalanche is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- One Man Embassy is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Flying Saucer Shenanigans is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Rainbow Lullaby is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- The Ostermann Method is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Blue Dragon Mississippi is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.