If You Can Imagine It, It's Ours

Have you ever feigned interest when someone recalled a dream they had?

The narrative pitfalls, the dead ends, the purposelessness. Unlike an actual narrative, dreams have no logic, no continuity, and no linear conclusion. Geographies merge, people swap identities, and objectives shift. And unless the person is a skilled storyteller with a knack for embellishment, filling in blind spots, and finding some thematic relevance, these dreams mean diddly squat. But what if that person could show you?

One recurring dream I have is urgently trying to reach a dear loved one, only to find that my iPhone’s interface is indecipherable. It seems my phone has been infected by malware that transforms its interface. Anxiety builds as I try to find the phone settings and make the call. The interface goes deeper and deeper, the text is garbled, and elements mutate, folding in and out of the screen. I can never get through. Here’s that phone. 

It’s a pretty close representation. The specifics of this illustration may have already replaced my recollection of that recurring dream. And maybe next time, my subconcious will incorporate it. More importantly, the image was created by a program called Midjourney, an artificial intelligence program. And I’ve been mired in it since hearing about it, mining it for its dreams the way it’s been mining ours. And I’ll tell you, it’s in deep REM.

Artists are outraged, and lawsuits are being filed. Midjourney is gleaning the web and pirating pixel after pixel of all of their works the way a subconscious mind will dredge and composite images out of the fossilized memories of the sleeper. The mechanics are simple. You type in your prompts, and it will deliver within a minute, the image you described. It pulls from whatever relevant web image it can, including copyrighted photos and artworks. This will no doubt affect many people’s livelihoods. Yet the founder of the program frames it like a Robin Hood story. It takes from the visually talented and gives to the visually challenged. It’s for the people. Not the elites.

I tested it against my own composite. First is a piece I did for a publication 8 years ago. It took me a day. The second is Midjourney's version, created within seconds. 

This doesn’t bode well for me. One of the primary responsibilities of my entire career as a designer has been the conception and execution of communicative imagery via language, hand, pen, lens, or mouse. And the low current that continues to power those images was the lightning bolt of surrealism that I had encountered as a kid. This wasn’t a piece of art, a magazine cover, or even that pink elephant sequence from Dumbo (famous for being one of the first examples of Americanized second-generation surrealism). This was a quiet, unframed moment, sans rails, and without the protection of a fourth wall.

It was late afternoon, and I was at my grandmother’s house, playing in the yard at the top of the hill, failing at handstands on the cool zoysia grass. It was like falling back onto an outdoor carpet. There was a road that led down to a small pasture, where a few cows roamed. The street was lined by two or three houses on each side, one of which hid behind a fishing boat that was always parked in the driveway. Beyond the pasture, its cows, its guava trees, and its Surinam cherries was a stream in which guppies and swordtails, crawdads, and prawns wimpled in the cold clear current. I looked across the pasture to the other side, where a lone palm shot up from a slope on the other side of the shallow valley, towering over the other trees and houses.

From my perspective — upside down — the tree was silhouetted by the low afternoon sun and looked like a giant black spider hanging from a thick silk line. It swayed gently. And the soft breathing sounds of the breeze finding its way around the surfaces of the neighborhood, across fields of tall grass, and trees, and through every narrow passage of the houses around us completed the scene. I fell back but quickly got up, bent back over, and looked through my legs, transfixed. At any moment, the spider would start moving and crawl toward me. 

I would also encounter this temporary disruption in reality in kindergarten, often due to a lack of English vocabulary. With a quiet father and a Japanese-speaking mother and relatives, my first year of school exposed me to a series of words I had never heard. When a group of classmates ran to us and said that poor Alvin “vomited” by the merry-go-round, I had no idea what that meant. Although I had been sick and vomited many times before, that word wasn’t known to me.

My classmates were distraught, conspiratorial, and somber.

“He vomited?”

“He vomited!”

Hands were clasped to their mouths, Shelby and Carrie.

I tried to process it via some form of reversed onomatopoeia. I imagined him imploding and then bloating into the shape of a giant amoeba and floating away. Because for this kindergartener, this is what the word vomit sounded like.

“Like see?” they asked me.

We ran as fast as our little skittery legs could carry us and stopped next to the merry-go-round. “There,” they said, pointing to a patch of wet, food-flecked dirt. “Vomit.”

Oh, vomit I said. When this is what I thought they meant.

Poor Alvin!

Disruptions in a fragile, nascent reality would also occur because not only was I young, but also, like all kids,  in a perpetual state of suspended disbelief. Pretty stupid, basically. I took things literally. I superimposed disparate words in my head and imagined them. A warm bowl of Chawan Mushi meant to me bugs in a bowl because that’s what the literal English translation was. I visualized the worst and was disappointed that the bowl was an innocuous silken egg and broth custard with some shiitake mushrooms and noodles.

Chawan Mushi

Another day, I asked my mom where my dad was, she set down a bowl of jello in front of me and said “In there.” I didn’t see that she was pointing to the bedroom. And so I looked closely into that translucent bowl of Jello and saw patterns of light at the bottom. Is that a structure? I held it to the light and watched the light refract and shimmer.

“In that city?” I asked.

And then there are dreams.

One day, I look out my bedroom window and spot a muppet tromping around my uncle’s garden. His garden is vast and his produce supplied some of Kauai’s grocery stores. Of course, he was protective of his garden. Among the ginger stalks, the ones we were always told never to play in, was that muppet, running back and forth. Elated, I ran out of my house and caught up to him, eager to play and romp about. To lead him away from the garden. But it turned to me and revealed a sad face. It had been crying. “Do you need help?” I asked.

Are you lost?

Or that time a small snail on one end of a green wooden bench spoke to me (to this day, I remember it sounding like the mutant typewriter in David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Naked Lunch. When I saw it in college, I thought to myself, "I know that voice."). We got into an argument and he challenged me to race to the other side of the bench. I accepted. When he said go, my legs could longer move. I fell to the ground and pushed with my legs and pulled with my arms but the snail slowly made its way along the edge of the wooden slat to the other side. Then it jumped on me and pinned me down. I cried for help and all my classmates came and stood around me, laughing.

Fever dreams? Why do I recall these so vividly? Do you?

To this day, my dreams can be childlike, and recurring. Take, for example, urgently searching for a restroom only to be discouraged from using it because of some fatal design flaw. Or what about eagerly showing up at a strange lecture hall in a cave, only to realize the seminar is over? Among the more mundane dreams of running errands, working, traveling, and interacting with people, reuniting with long lost-loves, are the more fantastical ones.

Top: Zero privacy.
Bottom: Late again. What the heck is this seminar about?

One day, I woke to my late father knocking on my door. “Eh, we gotta go,” he said urgently. “Come on, we gotta go take care of this thing. Gotta go get all the machines before this get worse.”

I walked outside with him and the parking lot was filled with manta rays floating above all the cars.

We got in his old blue Dodge Van and rushed down to the shoreline, manta rays everywhere, floating across the street, above parking lots, and sidewalks, disappearing into trees. On the shoreline were all the vending machines we needed to collect before those tidal waves swept them out to sea.

Then I woke up. What a nice visit. Dad was in fine form.

A great visit.

What does any of this have to do with Midjourney? Many of Midjourney’s users go for broke, creating bold, dramatic, fantastical images like warrior princes and ice queens, armored dragons, Vikings, and superheroes. This is where I started as well. I prompted an image of war-weary sea monkeys hunkered down among the ruins in a moment of respite. Dazed but determined. 

In an interview with The Verge, founder David Holz states "So, there have been two breakthroughs [in AI that led to image generation tools]. One is understanding language, and the other is the ability to create images. And when you combine those things, you can create images through the understanding of language.”

The magic of this software is more in its misunderstanding of language — the way it messes up. While the supposed objective of this program is to “expand human imagination,” our imaginations are deliberate, and it only knows what it knows. There are no intentional accidents. You don’t close your eyes and accidentally imagine something you’ve never seen. Midjourney’s errors are what create scores of unexpected beauty. In the way that Instagram made everyone an accidental photographer,  Midjourney is making everyone an accidental surrealist.

I continued my prompts, conjuring mechanical, steampunk octopi. Real juvenile stuff. But then I began using it for practical uses. An article I was writing for a food blog about memories of food required images. But this predates the trend of documenting every meal, and so I used Midjourney to recreate them. On another front, a boss of mine is retiring, and the tradition is to create a portrait of him on a magazine cover. But he has proven himself camera shy over the years, and there were no photos to pull from, except one. I used this photo to create a portrait of him in retirement, lakeside, next to a great grill and a giant steak.

Weird ham sandwiches

Enchiladas in the lower east side

And so my prompts became less demanding. I realized that as my prompts became less outlandish, that same breezy surrealism from childhood started to creep into its images; that the breakdowns in logic and the incongruity in perspective stood in sharp contrast to the ordinary, everyday tableaus, like all the surrealists that had made an impression. Among those who left their marks — Paul Klee, Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte; writers like Neil Gaiman, Haruki Murakami, Steven Milhauser, Denis Johnson, George Saunders; poets like John Ashbery, Billy Collins, Thomas Lux, James Tate, Jeffrey MacDaniels, David Berman; and filmmakers like David Lynch, Micheal Gondry, Charlie Kaufman, Spike Jonze. Today, we're desensitized to it because anything is possible. Just watch a Super Bowl commercial.

And so here I am recalling and showing you dreams and old, calcified memories that mean little to you while the images might somehow garnish them in some entertaining way. Outside of the fray of the newly disenfranchised, standing dangerously close to a ragtag gang of bohemian programs that can write and paint, converse and even flirt, I’m hastening my obsolescence by feeding this software — this body of nano-contingency-laden Rube Goldberg skim-tech that sucks code and spits pixels.  It will get better. And its creators will remove themselves from the masses they claim to serve, and leisurely shuffle into the class of folks who create the playgrounds we will pensively step into. The rules will change, structures will shed structures, economies will bloom and wither, formats will be lost and forgotten. Among the ruins — the landscapes striated with the clawmarks of old text dragged out to pasture — will be the billowing plumes of our pixels floating away in the wind.

Oh, the humanity. 

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Images by Midjourney (and the author).