So this one is fun. Available today in both digital and print versions (including hard cover)!
Amid all the angst and chaos swirling around artificial intelligence and various forms of art these days, I found the process of creating this project to be interesting in so many ways. Mostly it let me spend a lot of time thinking about what art of any form is all about—which I think is a valuable conversation to have simply because art is pretty much always a stand-in for life itself. A life well lived, he says pompously, is an art unto itself.
That’s a long introduction to get to the point—which is that Five Seven Five, a gathering of 100 haiku with science fictional foundations, is now fully launched and available in both digital and print versions. It’s a beautiful little book, too, full of full-color art that I generated by sending my original haiku through the Stable Diffusion AI system.
As I noted in my introduction:
I was quite surprised at how introspective the project forced me to become.
I learned about what I’ll pretentiously call “my art.” How I think about things. What makes something work for me, and what happens when I realize I’m half-assing something rather than digging down into the root of the matter. A haiku is about a feeling, right? If I dashed off a 5-7-5 that worked but didn’t make me feel anything, was it a worthy effort?
No, it was not.
I learned about illustration, too, and how the two forms of art play together.
Sometimes the image I pulled out of the AI made me reassess the haiku itself; other times having to select between several disparate ideas that the AI came up with—each of them often wonderful—made me dig deeper into the meaning of the poem. There were times that looking at the art from the AI helped me see alternative meanings in the work.
What is it about a piece of text that can create such different viewpoints?
Anyway, I’ve already gotten some nice feedback from the book, and it was a real joy to put it together. If you’re intrigued by the idea of the interaction of a human and an AI in the creation of an art form, you might enjoy this one, too.