I came upon this site via ETMOOC2 and wondered about it’s potential for play in the classroom. It’s called Animated Drawings and is fueled by an AI engine via Meta (uh oh). It’s very simple to use: upload a drawing, and follow the steps, and get your drawing put into small bits of motion — dancing, walking, jumping, etc.
I did two experiments. One with a large face with small body and one with a saxophone body. I tried one with a starfish drawing but it just didn’t work. It was really weird.
I’ve been doing periodic experiments with inputting parts of or entire poems into Ai Art Platforms, to see what comes out the other side. This one fit nicely with the poem’s main idea — of a dream landscape — that was written from a one-word prompt off Mastodon (“dreamy”). The AI platform I have been using the most these days is Adobe Firefly, since it allows a lot of manipulation of settings.
Simon, my artistic friend, was sharing out some old projects for a new project he is taking on and a spreadsheet story collection from Digital Writing Month from many years ago caught my attention, and I did some remix.
One of the many data-centered art activities in Observe, Collect, Draw!that I reviewed the other day is a series of prompts that lead you to create a data portrait. I followed the directions and emerged with the embedded data art image. I sort of like it has no labels, although it may be confusing to anyone else (and maybe even me, in the days ahead).
This screenshot hints at some of the data points. Basically, shapes and colors and lines and more represent data along the sets of demographics, personality traits, interests and more.
I’ve been sharing a drawing each day (some are better than others, just sayin’) from a set of daily prompts for Flash February and I thought I would gather the first half of the month together into a video format. I’ve been using the Paper app for drawing with my fingers, and you know, it shows. I’ve also not spent a ton of time on any one drawing — my aim is quick and creative and move on. But it has been fun to try to go in different directions from the prompt.
Here, for example, is what I created for today’s prompt of “Figures.”
I enjoy a challenge like this — the FlashFeb is a daily prompt with an “f” word (not THAT word) to spark the making of art on a theme. Today’s prompt is “fold.” I’m not all that talented when it comes to making visual art, but I enjoy the moments of creation, so I will give it a try. For the first week, I will probably use my Paper App on my iPad.
I don’t remember how or when I stumbled upon the collection of Twitter bots by B.J. Best but I suspect it have been during one of the handful of Networked Narrative projects I engaged with (in one session, we all created our own bots and mine is still rolling along as the PeaceLove&Bot). The Artybots collection by Best, a poet and designer, are fascinating, particularly because they were released before this latest wave of AI Art platforms.
Here is my video collection of remixes from the ArtyBot Family:
You can learn more about his project in this podcast interview at Design Notes.
The way the ArtyBots work is that you tweet an image to the bot and then it generates an artistic response, using the original image as the base of its operations. Some of the bots are also programmed to respond to each other, connect within what he calls the Bot Family.
I decided to play with his various bots with a single image. I choose an image that was an interesting zoomed-in shot of some moss on a pavement curb. I then fed the image to the various bots, and took the results, pulling them together into the slideshow. Not all of his bots fed me back an image to use, for whatever reason, but I enjoy seeing the remixed images that did come back fade into one another in the video compilation.
Is this art? Are the computer programs artists? Who knows, anymore. (Best suggests yes, the bots are artists in his podcast interview).
What to say about The Storyteller’s Handbook? It’s glorious, and packed with the most strange and wondrous illustrations, and very few words, and all in the service of sparking stories for the reader. (And an introduction by Neil Gaiman doesn’t hurt to set the stage for something magical unfolding in the pages).
It’s impossible not to look through this collection of art by Elise Hurst and not wonder about what happened before the moment, in the moment and then beyond the moment, and so, as a tool for sparking writing, The Storyteller’s Handbook does a fine job.
Every one of the 52 illustrations has something intriguing, and as I was wandering through, I began to wonder if there were narrative threads connecting some, if not all, of the illustrations together (or maybe it is just that I was mesmerized by Hurst’s artistic vision). She plays with scope and dimensions, of turning the mundane into something extraordinary, of placing the fantastical within a jar to looked at and then released.
All that, and more. See Hurst chat about the book in this short video:
At the book’s website, there is even a detailed Teacher’s Guide to use with the book in the classroom, and it is packed full of interesting ideas, prompts and activities (including a scavenger hunt!).
Peace (and Stories),
Kevin
PS — I am sucker for stories of how books came to be, and Hurst gives an evocative telling of where she came up with the idea for The Storyteller’s Handbook:
