About
Lilies was a show in July of 2024 displaying a series of flowers wheat pasted onto wooden boards. Each flower was generated using Stable Diffusion XL with multiple steps. A reference image of a real lily was input into Stable Diffusion XL with instructions to create a trippy graphical version of it. The model was left to generate for some time, which produced hundreds of lilies. The best ones were picked from the bunch. Each lily had a resolution of 1024x1024, but since we wanted to place them on portrait aspect boards, the images needed to be extended. Each desired lily was outpainted using Stable Diffusion XL to fit the boards. An animation was created for each lily using Deforum Stable Diffusion. Morphing prompts were chosen through reflecting on symbols of rebirth with flowers and skulls.
Using AR image tracking via 8thwall, people could experience the encompassing morphing visual while looking at the physical posters through their phones. In this way the flowers came to life and people were encouraged to enter a trance that shifted their reality a bit.
Artist's Intention
The intention of this project was to cause people to question the nature of their reality and technology a bit. Despite our device being a window into perceptually another world onto our own, we tend to see it just as a window into cyberspace. This is because there is rarely a monetary motivation for this type of experience unless it is explicitly tied to a commodity or economics of scale. This is also because the skills needed to build these tools are often expensive and require multiple people, but I try to find angles where I can do everything myself, which provides ultimate flexibility and abstraction of perceived value.
Gallery
