This project began as an art song. I composed the music using a text by my friend Ken Hallowell. The poem depicts the unhappy transfiguration of a beautiful woman into a Gorgon (e.g. Medusa), with snakes for her hair and a petrifying gaze. The performance was by mezzo-soprano Liz Cass.
The animation was rendered by artificial intelligence using Nightcafe (VQGAN and CLIP). Each visual sequence began as a text prompt, which the software attempted to represent as accurately as possible through thousands of iterations. Some of the imagery the computer produced was quite beautiful and relatively faithful to the original concept. As for the rest...well, it tried.
View the full introduction here:
Birth of a Gorgon
A beautiful lady,
Seduced by a god
In a temple,
Should be more careful.
This holy place,
Defiled by your lustings,
Will anger someone.
A once beautiful lady
Is cursed.
The beautiful, waving hair
Turns serpentine.
The eyes so beautiful
Now petrify.
Out of your passion was born a monster:
You.
A beautiful lady upsets Athena.
A Gorgon is born.
Wow amazing
This was some beautiful work some amazing visuals and art style, Something I have wanted to say throughout this review is that you do keep it exciting and entertaining for a movie submission this had its good moments, the music was also so good and fitting for this element, for the most part the good out-weighed everything else overall it was a solid movie here, a beautiful artistic visually beautiful flick
~X~
Thank you!
Post-modernism and surrealism crash head on and this is the result. Amazing. I think Salvador Dali heartily approves from wherever he is in the Afterliife. I say the Guggenheim museum in Venice should see about making this part of an exhibition on modern tech-art
It would have been amazing to see Dali working in this medium. With a mind like his, who knows what he would have come up with?
WOW! What a cool Animation you did here! It's awesome how an AI Can work, and the songs helps a lot with the environment!! You represented so well the Myth!!Great job everyone!
Thank you so much! Yes the software is fascinating, almost just as interesting when it “fails” to represent the idea as when it succeeds.
Certainly Quite the Piece Man...
Thank you!
That was such an interesting experiment guys! Congratulations! The result is hypnotic and absolutely worth watching. It's mesmerizing how it shifts and turns and it's sometimes pleasant, even beautiful, and sometimes disturbing. The song and the poem work wonderfully with it.
Thanks so much!