I completed a course on AI and art in 2021 and we were able to experiment with DALL-E. Back then, everything came back out of DALL-E looking odd, dark, and wavey. As part of the class guidelines students fed lyrics and poems into the generator, and I used Frank O’Hara’s poem Having a Coke with You. I wanted my final project to feel like a collaboration between my own vibrant style and the wavey grainy videos DALL-E was able to generate. I manipulated the generations in photoshop to incorperate bright colors and evoke the feeling of the poem, rather than the visual the AI created.
Finally I proposed an exhibition showing the resulting visuals on CRT TV’s. It felt very fitting as a medium since such a highly new and cutting edge technology created images that felt odd and somehow managed to evoked a dated form of technology. I also created an exhibition pamphlet with the actual O’Hara poem.
California Institute of the Arts