ANIMA

ANIMA – by Michael Gaio, 2024
AI Generated Video

ANIMA animates the Gamma Girls collection, reflecting a turning point in AI history where tools like ChatGPT and MidJourney reshaped creative expression.

Rooted in Carl Jung’s concept of the Anima—the unconscious feminine force that represents creativity, emotion, intuition, and dynamism—AI serves as a vehicle for this archetype.

Through AI’s image and video animation generation, the Anima emerges, transforming static Gamma Girls into living expressions of feminine energy. This fusion of the intuitive Anima and AI’s creative potential signifies the evolution of artistic expression as AI becomes a new force in cultural transformation.

Created by Michael Gaio in August 2024, ANIMA is an extension of the Gamma Girls collection as a representation of a pivotal moment of time in AI history. Significant innovations and rapid adoption of ChatGPT and MidJourney were resulting in “mind blowing” outputs of text and image generation. Social media began to buzz with both excitement and critical concerns, catalyzing deep conversations about the implications of AI on human culture.

Each one of 12 Gamma Girls is an expression of a human being combined with, subsumed, extended, or emerging from a radical morphological pattern of intelligence.

Read more about the significance of Gamma Girls and the unique mathematical process involved in their creation.

Each Gamma Girl is intentionally female to represent the Anima, a concept introduced by psychologist Carl Jung.  Anima (polar opposite to the masculine counterpart, Animus) represents the unconscious feminine aspects within the human psyche. The anima is the feminine archetype present in the collective unconscious of humanity, and encompasses feminine qualities and aspects such as emotions, intuition, creativity, nurturing, and wild dynamism. The anima is often symbolized as a woman in dreams, fantasies, or mythological figures.

The term “anima” is related to “animation”, in that the anima force of the psyche is what gives dynamic motion to concrete expressions in realty. Even while this initial version of the Gamma Girl’s series are static images, they move the observer with meaning, and hint at continual evolution into new dimensions of expression as the artistic tools of AI continue to also evolve.

“Images are not static representations; they are dynamic, alive, and constantly evolving. They invite us into a deeper engagement with the world.” ~ James Hillman

The concept of the anima is closely related to the collective imagination in the sense that both are the broad field of undifferentiated creative potentiality from which concrete forms of creative expression are born.

“Anima mediates between the ego and the world in images, and through the images she offers the possibility of soulful relationship.” ~ James Hillman

Further more, Gamma Girls, as a concrete series of specific images made by a human artist’s intentional interaction with AI—is in itself an instance of this representation of human participation with the collective imagination.

The advent of AI image generation, or synthography, is literally an invocation and emergence of the collective imagination, and a new artistic frontier.

“The collective imagination is a bridge between the personal and the universal, the individual and the collective, the conscious and the unconscious.” ~ James Hillman

Synthographic AI-generated images are emergent artifacts created at the intersection of individual imagination and collective imagination—the vast universal reservoir of images formed throughout human history.

Synthographic images are a blend of human creativity and artificial intelligence, and invoke the rich tapestry of our cultural heritage. When a person provides a creative prompt to an AI system—perhaps instructing it to create an image in a specific style or theme—it’s an act of individual invocation of our shared imagination. By harnessing the power of advanced Artificial Intelligence techniques—such as Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL), systems capable of analyzing and learning from the extensive data of collective images—we can unlock new patterns, styles, and features present in the totality of human-made data and images.

This synergy of human directed creativity and AI capabilities allows us to generate new and uniquely expressed images, offering a multi-layered view of our human legacy.

In this case of ANIMA and the Gamma Girls series, the intention is to tap into the broader reservoir of collective images and symbols that shape our understanding of the archetypal feminine … and then revive those symbols in the utterly unique context of technological innovation, which is inherently an expression of the archetypal masculine. Combined, this series represents the nexus between anima and animus, individual and collective, organic and synthetic—and the emergent force of primordial creativity through human culture during this extraordinary time in cultural history.

Purpose:

This ANIMA animation continues the GAMMA GIRLS series, unfolding from static image into animated motion. Eventually, each of these girls may become an AI-enabled walking talking avatar in the Metaverse simulation.

Method:

Utilizing motion prompts and keyframe shots in Luma.

✦ Art generated with @midjourney [v5.2]

✦ Animated using @LumaLabsAI Dream Machine [v1.5]

✦ Music “Wandering” by Gunnar Olsen @gunnarolsendrum

✦ Edited with DaVinci Resolve @Blackmagic_News

Created by Michael Gaio in early 2024.

1 of 1 NFTs of the limited collection of 12 Gamma Girls is available here: