Gamma Girls
Gamma Girls – by Michael Gaio, 2023
AI Generated Image-Art, NFT Collection
GAMMA GIRLS
Invoking the Emergence of Collective Imagination with AI: A New Artistic Frontier
Gamma Girls is the first in a series of a unique path of exploration in AI image generation art.
Created by Michael Gaio in early 2023, the Gamma Girls collection is 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.
Parametric Prompting
The prompts used to create Gamma Girls involve a unique combination of a gamma ray television as a medium, a parametric mathematical formula as the pattern on the medium, and a girl’s face between the medium and the applied math pattern. This prompt construction represent an elemental situation of the modern human condition: the juxtaposition of the human being between the background medium of technology (in this case, television technology, and high energy gamma rays) and the applied impression of an intelligent pattern of math (representing artificial intelligence). Here is the parametric math formula:
x(t) = A * cos(a * t) * cos(t) + A * sin(b * t) * cos(t)
y(t) = A * cos(a * t) * sin(t) + A * sin(b * t) * sin(t)
where ‘A’, ‘a’, and ‘b’ are constants, and ‘t’ ranges from 0 to 2π
To understand more about how this math formula, see my blog post “The Magic of Math in MidJourney Prompts: Parametric Paint Strokes“.
Philosophy
Each one of 12 Gamma Girls comes with a quote and philosophical commentary regarding a topic involving human relations with AI.
For example:
“The mind once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Ephemerization is the ability of technological advancement to do ‘more and more with less and less’ until eventually, it can do ‘everything with nothing.’” ~ Buckminster Fuller
“The human spirit must prevail over technology.” ~ Albert Einstein
These quotes and the corresponding statements combined with the image art are intended to draw the observer into deeper inquiry of the profound implications of AI, and human interaction with AI, as it becomes more pervasive in human civilization.
What is intelligence?
What will artificial intelligence become?
What will humans become in our interactions with artificial intelligence?
Anima & Animation
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.
Invoking 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 this 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.
Created by Michael Gaio in early 2023 with Midjourney v5.0
1 of 1 NFTs of the limited collection of 12 Gamma Girls is available here: