About @julian_ai_art

What is it?

@julian_ai_art is

  1. the pseudonym for all things I do that are related to creativity and AI.

  2. my Instagram handle where I post images and write about my thoughts. It’s like a personal blog.

  3. a side project where I experiment with AI tools and try to learn something new.

Personal background

I've been a professional photographer and educator for the last 15 years. I studied multimedia production in the late 2000s. I co-founded a company for educational training, and I design and create media for a living.

I teach workshops, mostly for other educators, like “How to shoot video for the web” or “How to document your project so other people understand it”.

I specialize in documentary photography, mostly for educational purposes, and my images are published in non-fiction books.

I’m interested in new technology and tools and how to use them in my job.

When did the project start?

In September 2022.

What is it not?

I’m not a developer, I’m not a trained AI expert, and I’m not a spokesperson for a company or institution. All the opinions and experiences I share are my own.

Motivation to create AI images

Why do I create AI images at the moment? There are three main reasons:

  1. For fun

    No goal, no higher purpose, just play, just for me. 95% of the images I create no one but me ever sees. Only some images I post online, to share them with others who are interested.

  2. As a new creative outlet

    I keep a digital journal with lots of photography ideas. These are hundreds of small or big fictional or documentary mini-concepts I save on my phone. A lot of those ideas are just buried in that folder, and will probably never see the light of day. These new tools enable me to test and try some of those ideas and play around with them.

  3. To learn and understand the new AI tools

    For my job I often need new digital tools. In September of 2022 I found text-to-image generators like DallE, Midjourney, StableDiffusion and wanted to learn what they are about and how they work.

Learning

The 30-Day-Challenge

To learn new things I sometimes create a small challenge for myself: do “the new thing” for 30 days and try to get better at it.

I’ve done so before with silly cartoon birds. I drew a simple comic bird every day and watched what happened. Do my skills improve? Do I get better at coming up with ideas? Does anything change at all?

Thus, I started a new experiment in September 2022: use these new artificial intelligence tools on a daily basis for a while, and watch what happens.

The idea behind this is:

Working on a professional level often leaves little room for experiments and errors. But to learn something, you have to make mistakes. To get to “the good stuff,” you have to allow yourself to also create “not so good stuff.”

And committing to a time and project like this forces me to create something every day, even if it’s not the best thing I’ve ever done.

The learning effect itself is the reward.

What do I look for when I learn new creative methods?

I want to see if I can incorporate them into my workflow. I want to know: What are they good for? What are the limits? Do I need them?

For this, I started this Instagram channel, which is a good tool to see visual progress. You can quickly see if you're getting better at something you do every day.

For example, if you want to learn to draw, you could draw a picture every day and compare picture 1 and picture 30 after 30 days. There will probably be a rewarding difference.

Why did I choose AI tools for this side project?

My question was: Does this also happen with AI tools? Can you get "better" at using them?

To create these images you have to - among other things - “prompt”. Type text to describe the image the AI should create for you. So … can one get better at “prompting”? And if so, what does that look like? And is there more to it than “just” prompting?

What tools do I use?

Midjourney, StableDiffusion, Photoshop, Astria.ai, FaceApp, Wonder.AI app… Basically every tool I can get my hands on that seems interesting. I cannot code, so I’m a normal user.

The Girl With The Glowing Earrings

The exhibition

At the moment, an image I created with AI tools and Photoshop is hanging in The Hague at the Mauritshuis Museum in the same room where one of the most famous paintings in the world normally hangs - the "Girl with the Pearl Earring."

My image is one of 175 in the museum's current exhibit called #MyGirlWithAPearl. The images are created by people from all over the world, using all kinds of tools and methods.

The background

How and why did this happen?
Let me explain.

The Mauritshuis in The Hague is a museum that usually exhibits paintings by the old masters. Rembrandt, Judith Leyster, Jan Vermeer and more. In other words, the great ones. The most famous work in the exhibition? The Girl with the Pearl Earring.

Currently, Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum is hosting a major Vermeer exhibition. Basically every Vermeer artwork known has been shipped to Amsterdam from museums all over the world.

This leaves the space of the "Girl" in The Hague empty for a few months, so the museum launched a challenge called #MyGirlWithAPearl. There were no special requirements other than adding the hashtag and account handle @mygirlwithapearl to your Instagram post.

Everyone was welcome to submit their own interpretation of the image, whether it was a photograph, a drawing, an AI image, a sculpture, a knitted item, you name it.

When did I create this image and what for?

I submitted my version, called "The Girl With The Glowing Earrings," which I had created before in my free time just for fun for myself (not for the museum) using #MidJourney and Photoshop. This image was originally not meant for anything other than my Instagram account.

The museum knows this is an AI image, and in my submission I reflect on how these new AI tools will probably change creative processes everywhere (you can still read it here in the original post).

The 175 images and the return of the original

3,500 images were sent in from around the world; 170 are now exhibited by the museum in a digital frame; and 5 were printed as "fine art prints", framed, and hung in place of the original image for a couple of months. My picture is one of these 5.

After the Amsterdam exhibition in April, the original painting will return to its normal place.