#synthography sci-fi

[robsheridan]

Screams of Silence on the Shores of Time.

Some new explorations with MidJourney V6 into an aesthetic space I've been building on for a while... I like it here. More to come.

[misanthropic-wolf666]

Colossal

[proximasan]

when anything could happen

[venezart]

CITIES OF THE DOOM | CONCEPT PROMPTS

[anomalyztheseries]

Who is Fedora Zane?

Dr. Fedora Zane is a unconventional scientist, a genius level intelligence, someone not afraid to play fast and loose with the rules.

After secretly continuing research her employer had abandoned, Zane came up with a breakthrough: a “Chronosuit” that allowed its wearer to travel through time. She traveled to a far future where the ecological problems of the present had been solved by weather control technology. She stole diagrams for the weather tech and brought it back to the present, where her employer used it to repair climate change. The company's reward? A big payday... on the condition that she resign and take no credit.

Zane decided that she would keep the time travel tech to herself. After traveling back to the future, she realized that everything had completely changed. A new timeline and a better world had been created. With more brand new, amazing technology to take back to the present.

So she did. Again and again. She sold future technology to the highest bidders in the present day, making the future of humanity even more technologically advanced. And she went back for more and more. Every time, the evidence of her crimes was erased.

Well... maybe not. Because the Sisters never forget.

Images generated by Midjourney AI. Video generated by RunwayML Gen-2 Image-to-Video. Story and concepts by M.J. Romanowski. Copyright © 2023 M.J. Romanowski. All rights reserved.

[ai-or-not-ai]

Things to know:

I do not think AI art is inherently evil and terrible. I believe that if the art is clearly labelled and that if the generators are collecting their data and operating their services ethically that it is a perfectly fine tool to use. Unfortunately, as far as I know, that is not currently the case.

the true problem with certain uses of AI is capitalism

In that vein, I hate when AI art gets shown around completely unlabelled. If you claim AI art is its own art form it is imperative to label it as such at least in your tags to prevent confusion between digital or traditional artwork that was created manually.

So many of these AI images are stolen from the accounts that originally posted them. I’m not sure whether I personally consider that theft or if it is even legally theft, but in the process of reposting the picture they leave out important details like the fact it was AI generated in the first place.

These are all my personal opinions. This blog is not intended to be a place for me to open myself up to a bunch of discourse. I may reblog posts about AI but I will not engage with you if you are rude and incensed. That will get you blocked.

I myself am predominantly a digital artist (and sometimes a traditional artist when the mood strikes me) as well as a student of art history. This is my point of view as someone with knowledge in both historical artistic movements and the creation of art itself.

If you do not want to come across AI art I suggest blacklisting related tags. They will not always be labelled but many are.

Some tools that are called ‘AI’ have been around for years or serve extremely useful functions that do actually reduce the amount of tedious tasks a human would have had to perform previously. Such as generative fill tools in photoshop when used to edit a flaw from a photo, etc. AI has become a tech buzzword applied to any and every technology (usually for the sake of getting investors excited about it). This blog is mainly focused generative AI. Mainly images, but also sometimes LLMs (large language models) like ChatGPT or video/sound generation. I am not talking about the kinds of AI used by game devs to help NPCs function without coding every single one yourself or how in the Spiderverse movies they coded an ‘AI’ tool to help the 2D lines follow the 3D forms. There are many different kinds of tools called ‘AI’ and it has become a functionally useless term in some instances, as there are many varied forms it takes and often the classic idea of artificial intelligence from sci-fi (being a computer that thinks for itself) is not the actual implication.

If you are worried about energy usage involved in AI generation, please direct those criticisms to the organizations operating the models. They are the ones who are most responsible for that and the ones who can actually make a material change (and some indeed have been trying to).

The best thing you can do to ‘fight’ the negatives of AI is supporting independent artists.

We are all human beings who make mistakes (including me! please, I want you to always use your own critical thinking skills!) Give each other grace.

Post labelling

I will do my best to find the original source, including the original poster and what generator was used if I am able.

I will tag the posts with ‘ai image’, their respective generator (if applicable) and ‘synthography’ a term for computer generated art intended to set it apart from other art forms

I may speculate on images used to synthesize the final artwork if something comes across as particularly obvious to me.

Post submission

Send me posts you suspect are AI generated but unlabelled as such

Send me posts that you know are AI generated but reposted and unlabelled

Do not harass the original poster. If they are a reposter, block and report them. If they are an AI enthusiast and you don’t like AI, block them. If they turn out to be an artist posting their actual art for the love of god I hope you didn’t personally accuse them of generating their art and if you did go apologize immediately and profusely.

Tags to blacklist to avoid AI

Generative Art

AI Generated

AI Art

Midjourney

Dalle 3

Synthography

If I reblog from you….

Sorry

I probably follow you on my main blog

It is not a negative reflection on you if you could not identify an AI generated image yourself. I personally do not just rely on my eyes for these and try my best to find the image source to verify ai generation when possible.

Some AI generated concepts look cool I don’t blame you for reblogging them. I personally just wish people were more obvious about what is AI so that the average person can make better informed decisions about whether or not they want to share it. This is just so you can make that choice.

[sos-escapisme]

I am not a bot.

via

@nightcafes-blogtudio

http://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/VSwqX1KRveKH9BVNK1qt

[sivatherium]

[robsheridan]

“Neon Demons: Genesis” Part II (continued from Part I here). Holoroid photographs from the Laboratories of the Seventh Spire of Hell, circa 1980s earth time, during Satan’s grand experiment to fuse human, demon, and machine.

The architect of the Neon Demons project was an old Fallen Angel known as Malachor, whose bitter rage at his former kingdom fueled a centuries-long obsession with finding a dimensional pathway between the realms of Hell and Heaven. He walked amongst mortals, studying their technologies and ensnaring the souls of brilliant scientists who would serve their eternity in Hell working on Malachor’s legacy: The Seventh Spire.

Although The Seventh Spire achieved heights of cosmic elevation far beyond any previous structure in Hell, it could only manage to graze the very outer spectrum of radiation from Heaven’s Light. Malachor felt he had failed, but Satan saw it as a different type of success, and assigned Malachor a new, even more impossible task: Bioengineer a new breed of demon, transfused with Heaven’s Light: the first demon with the power beauty, the ultimate manipulator of men.

The years (centuries? eons? Time in Hell does not flow so much as it squirms and stretches like the skin of a writhing worm) spent in the laboratory were a strange atmosphere, even for the underworld. The low levels of Heavenly radiation wore at the demons, depleting them gradually. Meanwhile, it nourished and uplifted the otherwise dead souls of the beautiful earth creatures whose bodies would become an essential ingredient of the Neon Demons. Even as their physical forms were dismantled and augmented, they moved through the halls of the Spire with a grace and lightness never before witnessed by Hell’s denizens. For most of the already tired demons, the presence of these glistening nymphs in this unholy realm of infernal misery made them uncomfortable and irritable. But a few demons, in their weakened state, let their guard down and allowed themselves some comfort in the beautiful mortals. But that is another story…

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NOTE: This alternate reality horror story is part of my NightmAIres narrative art series (visit that link for a lot more). NightmAIres are windows into other worlds and alternate histories, conceived/written by me and visualized with synthography and Photoshop.

If you enjoy my work, consider supporting me on Patreon for frequent exclusive hi-res wallpaper packs, behind-the-scenes features, downloads, events, contests, and an awesome fan community. Direct fan support is what keeps me going as an independent creator, and it means the world to me.

[robsheridan]

“Neon Demons: Genesis.” Holoroid photographs from the Laboratories of the Seventh Spire of Hell, circa 1980s earth time.

The top of the Seventh Spire is the highest point of cosmic elevation in Hell, built as far into The Shifting Zones as would still sustain hellfire. There, Hell is the closest it can be to Heaven, and the fringe spectrum of radiation from Heaven’s Light can be detected (and felt by Hell’s Demons, whose flesh will burn if exposed for too long).

Satan had long exploited the power that beauty has over humans, but only by drawing them away from it with sin. Hell, by its nature, is the antithesis of beauty; and although Satan, by his own nature, found a different kind of beauty in pain and torment, he coveted the pure beauty that Heaven possessed. Although he was loathe to admit it, light affects humans far more than darkness, and this infuriated the devil.

When Satan discovered he had access to even trace amounts of Heaven’s Light, he drew plans for a new breed of “beautiful” demons, bioengineered creatures that could flicker between darkness and light like a turning gemstone. In the Laboratories of the Seventh Spire, “volunteer” demons from Hell’s army endured immeasurable agony in experiments to alter the hellfire that coursed through their veins with radiation from Heaven’s Light. The experiments failed; something was missing, something that could bring equilibrium to the darkness and the light: Human souls.

Among Satan’s prized possessions were souls he claimed through deals granting superficial beauty to humans who desired it above all else. These souls were filled with darkness inside, but radiated with the shallow aesthetic exterior beauty that proved the undoing of so many men. By the 1980s, the devil had won himself an extensive collection of these souls as superficial beauty gained more and more power over human culture. Their turbulent dichotomies proved to be the perfect missing ingredient in a new demon for a new era of glamor and depravity: Human, demon, and machine. Beautiful and monstrous. Darkness and light. The jewels of Cyber-Hell. They became known as The Neon Demons.

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NOTE: This alternate reality horror story is part of my NightmAIres narrative art series (visit that link for a lot more). NightmAIres are windows into other worlds and alternate histories, conceived/written by me and visualized with synthography and Photoshop.

If you enjoy my work, consider supporting me on Patreon for frequent exclusive hi-res wallpaper packs, behind-the-scenes features, downloads, events, contests, and an awesome fan community. Direct fan support is what keeps me going as an independent creator, and it means the world to me.

[robsheridan]

VIDEONOMICON (1988), part 2 (see part 1 here). More stills from Maxim Voronin’s cable TV miniseries about a mysterious AV club using Satanic video test patterns to transform unwitting volunteers into demonic flesh vessels.

As the hypnotic powers of the video patterns begin to warp the consciousness of the volunteers, more is revealed about the mysterious cult behind the strange experiments. Unseen by the research volunteers, the “hosts” communicate to them only through various goat heads mounted throughout the facility. Are the human(?) hosts trying to control the evil powers they’re harnessing? Or are they merely pawns in something much more sinister? The answers will only be found by seeing what is beyond; by releasing the prison of the flesh and plunging deeper into the technological hellscape of… The Videonomicon.

To be continued…

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NOTE: This alternate reality horror story is part of my NightmAIres narrative art series (visit that link for a lot more). NightmAIres are windows into other worlds and alternate histories, conceived/written by me and visualized with synthography and Photoshop.

If you enjoy my work, consider supporting me on Patreon for frequent exclusive hi-res wallpaper packs, behind-the-scenes features, downloads, events, contests, and an awesome fan community. Direct fan support is what keeps me going as an independent creator, and it means the world to me.

[robsheridan]

What We Saw Beyond The Sea.

Some recent journeys across dreams.

Previously: Silent Screams on the Shores of Time

More to come.

[robsheridan]

BATTLE SANTAS trading cards were all the rage of Christmas 1988, hyping kids up for a toy line and film franchise that never came to be after Christian protesters halted production.

The cards, produced before the first film was finished, tell the story of a multiverse of cosmic Santas who arrive from across time on an array of Battle Sleighs to help Earth’s Santa save Christmas future from the forces of Hell. On Santa’s lunar battlestation workshop (where he relocated after the North Pole was ravaged in The Santa Wars), his elves built armed vehicles from old toy parts and the re-animated corpses of reindemons, the hellbeasts of the demon army unleashed on Earth after a portal to hell was opened in the North Pole when oil companies drilled near Santa's Earth Workshop (thanks to Reagan’s deregulation of protected lands).

The early release of the trading cards was meant to generate buzz for the film’s funding and toy licensing, but the plan backfired, as the cards revealed a controversial plot point: Mecha-Jesus, the Cybersavior, a towering robotic kaiju Jesus built by the Battle Santas as their last stand against Satan. Mecha-Jesus is piloted by the real Jesus, who the Battle Santas summon back to mortal form. When Christian groups heard about children trading cards that depicted Jesus eviscerating enemies with Nazareth Napalm missiles and shooting Light of the Lord laser beams from his robo-eyes while shouting “The Power of Christ compels you to DIE!” over heavy metal music, a firestorm of protests made the entire BATTLE SANTAS property toxic to investors, leaving the trading cards the only glimpse of a Christmas epic that never came to be.

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NOTE: This alternate reality story is part of my NightmAIres narrative art series (visit that link for a lot more). NightmAIres are windows into other worlds and interconnected alternate histories, conceived/written by me and visualized with synthography and Photoshop.

If you enjoy my work, consider subscribing to my free newsletter to stay up to date on my projects, or supporting me on Patreon for frequent exclusive hi-res wallpaper packs, behind-the-scenes features, downloads, events, contests, and an awesome fan community. Direct fan support is what keeps me going as an independent creator, and it means the world to me.

[robsheridan]

Stills from the 1988 sci-fi horror miniseries VIDEONOMICON, in which a mysterious AV club lures university students into a paid “research program” that isn’t what it seems...

A group of volunteer students, eager for some easy cash in exchange for “providing feedback on a series of audio-video test patterns,” find themselves hypnotized by a bizarre video pattern, becoming addicted to watching it for hours a day under the guidance of a mysterious figure who only speaks through a microphone installed in wall-mounted goat heads. Soon the AV club reveals itself as a front for a demon-worshipping video cult that is using the students as flesh vessels in a Techonocallistic ritual to transfuse demonic spirits through interdimensional video signals, trapping the souls of the students in a netherverse while their bodies become warped meat puppets controlled by demons to conquer earth.

Videonomicon was the first in a series of original films produced for the obscure premium cable network Zolmax that were also written and directed by Zolmax’s eccentric founder, mysterious auteur turned media mogul Maxim Voronin. After having his films rejected by major studios and networks for being too disturbing, Voronin founded Zolmax, pitching it as “Cinemax for the strange.” A mix of curated cult films and original content, Zolmax’s programming was described as “some of the most bizarre and deranged material to ever find its way onto television.” Black magic, devil worship, sexual depravity, and excessive gore were common sights on Zolmax, “painting a picture of a very disturbed man at the helm of this blasphemous sewer of a network,” wrote TV Guide in 1989.

Unphased by criticism, Voronin continued to produce his own films for his network for eight more years, including two sequels to Videonomicon.

To be continued…

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NOTE: This alternate reality horror story is part of my NightmAIres narrative art series (visit that link for a lot more). NightmAIres are windows into other worlds and alternate histories, conceived/written by me and visualized with synthography and Photoshop.

If you enjoy my work, consider supporting me on Patreon for frequent exclusive hi-res wallpaper packs, behind-the-scenes features, downloads, events, contests, and an awesome fan community. Direct fan support is what keeps me going as an independent creator, and it means the world to me.

[robsheridan]

Members of London’s 1981 electroplasm scene, a fusion of extreme body modification, mortality edging, and electronic music, where specific frequencies generated by custom modular synthesizer hardware were found to stimulate spectral wavelengths enough to generate ecloplasm and control its psychokinetic growth into electronic wiring, creating sounds unlike anyone (living) had ever heard before.

The most hardcore electroplasm musicians, flatmates at a warehouse space they called The Cortex, began fusing their nervous systems to the hardware such that the electroplasm could flow through their bodies, syncing with their biorhythms, turning them into electronic posthuman processors in a chain of spirit-charged flesh modules. As the ectoplasm rewired their brains and warped their forms, they were no longer technically “alive” by standard definitions, but held on the bleeding edge of the mortal plane by the spirits trapped in them, howling supernatural tones they shaped with their body instruments.

As the niche scene grew, more devotees joined the chain of spirit vessels in The Cortex, giving their bodies to the rhythm, building the beat, forming new otherworldly sounds with each new human instrument. These “beat zombies,” as NME coined them, could only continue “living” as long as the sonic frequencies continued through the chain, and so the beat at The Cortex ran 24/7, their “musical life support.” Hundreds of fans gathered to dance at the undead rave, the most unique performance art ever seen; some predicted the sound would last forever, growing so big that one day every human who ever lived would become connected to it, a jam session across all souls, here and beyond.

Unfortunately, the entire electroplasm scene ended abruptly just a few months after it had begun, when the power was cut to the warehouse space, killing all 78 posthuman vessels instantly and releasing all of the spiritual energy trapped within them at once in a psychokinetic blast that razed four city blocks. It turned out that when the musicians gave their minds & bodies to electrically-charged ectoplasmic sound, they never thought about who would pay the utility bills.

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NOTE: This alternate reality horror story is part of my NightmAIres narrative art series (visit that link for a lot more). NightmAIres are windows into other worlds and interconnected alternate histories, conceived/written by me and visualized with synthography and Photoshop.

If you enjoy my work, consider subscribing to my free newsletter to stay up to date on my projects, or supporting me on Patreon for frequent exclusive hi-res wallpaper packs, behind-the-scenes features, downloads, events, contests, and an awesome fan community. Direct fan support is what keeps me going as an independent creator, and it means the world to me.

[robsheridan]

Hacking The Afterlife: A Look Inside Hacker Tombs of the 1990s (Wired Magazine, 1994)

In the late 20th century, a posthumous custom amongst prolific hackers was to have their remains preserved in ornate tombs containing all of their hardware and data, such that their soul would be empowered to hack the afterlife. Friends and admirers would bring offerings of code, uploading programs of tribute to run forever on video screens within the tomb. Once respects had been paid, the tombs - usually installed within industrial freight containers augmented with solar panels - would run a preset program to have the container shipped around the world through an untraceable random chain of global freight carriers, ending in a secret remote final destination, never to be disclosed.

For decades since, determined raiders have searched for the locations of some of the most revered hacker tombs, hoping to pillage them for valuable data; none have been successful.

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NOTE: This alternate reality horror story is part of my NightmAIres narrative art series. NightmAIres are windows into other worlds and alternate histories, conceived/written by me and visualized with synthography and Photoshop.

If you enjoy my work, consider supporting me on Patreon for frequent exclusive hi-res wallpaper packs, behind-the-scenes features, downloads, events, contests, and an awesome fan community. Direct fan support is what keeps me going as an independent creator, and it means the world to me.