A promotional card from the 1989 DRK Next Stage! press conference. A prototype rally car made from officially-licensed parts was exhibited on a private course. This was several years before the final version was made available for sale.

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Since I was revisiting some of my attempts to use AI in my work, here's perhaps my very first attempt at combining vaporware with text-to-image generation. It's super messy and not really all that spectacular, but it's pretty cool to think that we've come this far in only two years. I mean, this (VQGAN+CLIP) was already impressive back in 2021, and it looks absolutely weird and incoherent next to even the first official public release of Stable Diffusion (from August 2022). This piece is one of those that I tend to ignore in my portfolio, as it's not all that great on its own, bit in with context, it helps to highlight the march of technological progress and changes to how I approach art in general.

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I believe I posted the revised version of this piece a while ago, but this is the original version. I checked, and it doesn't look like I directly posted this anywhere. There's another version I made using img2img with my dreambooth model that is marginally better. I'm always trying to combine ideas in new ways, and this one was more of a visual metaphor of how the appreciated aesthetics of vaporwave have changed over time. It feels like the indie photobased charm has largely gone away, save for a few places like our Reddit counterpart, r/vaporwaveart. The larger subreddit, r/vaporwaveaesthetics, has an affinity for glossy renders that are often a bit too clean and polished for my taste. I appreciate it when people try new things, and aren't afraid to stick with an art style they like, even if it isn't the most popular thing in the world. Still, vaporware has been around for long enough now that the tru

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Similar to The Gaze, this is a parody of Caleb Worcester's once-steadfast affinity with his formulaic art style that was designed to maximize revenue. Somewhat ironically, it seems that this art style is driving some traffic to this community here on Lemmy. I'm not saying I hate this art style, but I do think it's funny that even the first major public release of Stable Diffusion could nail it without much trouble. I think it goes to show you how unoriginal Caleb's stuff used to be. Heck, I even made a post ages ago on Reddit detailing how he had even failed to properly credit people when he used their CC-BY 3D assets. From what I can tell, though, he's straightened up his act and is really starting to produce some unique stuff, all in Blender.

In any case, this piece was one of a few initial tests I did with Stable Diffusion, even before the weights were made publicly

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My goal is to share basically the entirety of my public-facing art portfolio; I think we might be close to the halfway mark. This is another experiment in minimalism from a few years ago; I believe this was from the summer of 2021. Nothing too crazy here, but I do revisit variations on the theme of flat colors and bold lines now and again.

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I believe this is my most recent piece (as of 7/13/23). A classic mismash of vaporware tropes into a basic composition.

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A piece inspired by the cover of Tatsuro Yamashita's Big Wave album. A fairly low-effort thing I did ages ago to try and add a film effect on top of an image, which itself isn't all that amazing.

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Original Video

The Other Angle was one of the first video art pieces I made.

I made a background from The Other Angle, a view-from-cockpit video, by translating this background around behind an image of a cockpit to make it look a bit like a flight simulator. You can see the full video in my portfolio, which is fully CC0. Obviously, the inspiration for this piece was from Hiroshi Nagai. He has a few paintings of planes passing over cities at dusk/dawn, and I thought it would be fun to try and do a first-person adaptation. Even on its own, though, I think the background is fairly eye-catching.

Here's the cockpit image I used for that video. It's stylized and tweaked

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Not much to say about this one other than it was one of my only attempts to create depth and shading using gradients. Mostly, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

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A bit of a sequel to Friendless Friends. This is one of the few posts I've received significant attention from on r/fakealbumcovers. All of the images I used to create it are obviously in the public domain if you're familiar with my stuff, and the whole piece is as well. This one and everything else can be downloaded for free at the link above.

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A piece from June of 2022. Loosely based on the album art of Navigator by Omega Tribe. From the pre-Stable Diffusion era of my AI-assisted work, where I was experimenting with stylizing photobashed images from Creative Commons. I used this tool, although Stable Diffusion's img2img feature and ControlNet have arguably made it obsolete. It is pretty fast to run on CPU, though, which might make it a fun filter for people with more modest hardware.

I made a few other pieces in this style outside of vaporware for art requests on r/drawforme, although any AI tool usage has been banned for some time there. The sheer irony of moderators dictating how people should be able to spend