Saturday 17 February 2024

London Bridge: A Becoming Non-Place

 


"Everything proceeds as if space had been trapped by time, as if there were no history other than the last forty-eight hours of news, as if each individual history were drawing its motives, its words and images, from the inexhaustible stock of an unending history in the present".

Marc Augé - Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (1995)

How to describe the becoming non-place of my place of birth? How to put into words the feeling of homelessness on finding oneself inescapably funnelled into the habits of a tourist in places you have frequented for over four decades?

Southwark is my home borough. It holds my family home, my first years of schooling, and many of the places I most associate with my childhood and youth. At its Southern tip it grazes the edge of Crystal Palace park, home to the ruins of that legendary 19th century edifice, which more than any other symbolised the coming age of transparency and globalisation. A glass house, originally conceived to hold a trade fair; a house with transparent walls, so that the divisions between inside and outside were dissolved, giving the illusion of total visibility, illuminated by the burning sun of commerce and the industrial spirit of the age.

Southwark's midriff comprises the less storied neighbourhoods of Peckham and Camberwell; the one known for being the home of fictional "dodgy-dealer" Del Boy Trotter, the other containing what was formerly London's murder mile (I believe it lost this crown in the mid-2000s to Clapton-Hackney). At one time I had a dentist based on the crossroads at Loughborough Junction; the dark heart of Camberwell on the frontline of a turf war between various competing drugs gangs servicing the local markets in Peckham and Brixton.

I was sixteen or thereabouts and had to go for a filling. For the first time I was given a local anaesthetic in the gums before the drill went in. Now, this wasn't the first filling I'd had and with hindsight I might have inquired why previous tooth doctors felt able to grind away at my pearly whites without a second thought to my state of suffering. In any case when I emerged into the April afternoon the left side of my face was still totally numb. This didn't however stop me from trying to rid my mouth of the taste of dental detritus by pouring a bottle of warm fizzy drink into it. Cue moment of pure physical comedy as I made a futile attempt to keep the liquid from falling out the side of my flaccid mouth onto my new trainers.

Futile as I say, however, my efforts had not gone unnoticed by two gentlemen conducting a no doubt entirely innocent transaction under the cover of a partially derelict railway arch (these were the days when London railways arches were used to store railway equipment or drug dealers, rather than artisan tequila producers ). In the face of their chortling I tried with my unfeeling-flappy-face to explain my temporary palsy, to no effect but to appear even more sub-normal than before. I gave up and had the ignominious experience of being offered a pity rate on whatever happy pills these two noble souls were about to unleash on the borough. I passed, and scampered back up towards Red Post Hill and the safety of East Dulwich.    

Southwark's Northern region extends from Elephant and Castle in the West out as far as Rotherhithe and Surrey quays in the East. At the centre of this near five mile stretch of riverside real estate lies London Bridge and the area encompassing Borough market and Southwark cathedral. This is the original Olde Southwark, of the bishops prison, the clink, the black friars and the Winchester Geese; of dozens of coaching inns lining the high street, and of course the famous bridge itself, its Medieval predecessor the site of spiked heads of executed criminals and several multi-storey houses along its length. The present bridge dates from the 1970s and replaced the one that was bought by Missourian entrepreneur Robert P. McCulloch in 1968. The area has seen more change over the last two decades than it probably has in the preceding two centuries, and is for me paradigmatic of the becoming non-place of London, a city of transients, where no-one really lives and for even born and bred locals like me the experience of being there seems to have lost all intelligibility.

If the transformation of London bridge into a non-place has particular emotional resonance for me that may be because I have so much personal history bound up there. I have worked and played, lived, loved and lost within that small enclave. But this history and its sudden impossibility is perhaps the signal experience of a becoming non-place, since now I find I can no longer memorialise, nor take stock of the passing time. The places and the faces are no longer recognisable and do not seem to recognise each other. Ironically this transition coincides with London Bridge having become a "destination" and place to have "experiences"; which is to say it has entered fully into the network of consumer and tourist and thus no longer caters for those who linger, let alone those who dwell.

 

"The general de-temporalization leads to the disappearance of temporal sections and caesurae, the thresholds and transitions which create meaning. The feeling that time passes more quickly now than before is also due to the absence of a pronounced articulation of time. This feeling is intensified by the fact that events follow each other in quick succession without leaving lasting traces, without becoming experiences. Because of the missing gravitation, things are encountered only fleetingly. Nothing carries weight".

- Byung-Chul Han - The Scent of Time

Borough market is one of the great old markets of London alongside Smithfields and Spitalfields, and was once a place where people actually came routinely to buy produce - mostly wholesale - though in the late 90s the market was rebranded for retail, selling high-end meat, fish, cheese and speciality produce. It was expensive but it still felt like a place you might go to buy quality fresh food, perhaps for a special occasion - my mother and I still maintain this tradition buying our cold meat and cheese there before every Christmas. Until recently the surrounding area, however, still had a somewhat grimy, vaguely Dickensian edge to it. The backstreets running West of Borough High street were a mixture of Georgian terraces, derelict warehouses and the crisscrossing of overhead railway lines that ran out in three directions from the station.

The rhythmic thumping of trains passing across the viaducts above the market are on my playlist for classic London soundscape. The old London Bridge mainline station was on a huge raised platform of arches with road tunnels running beneath, in-between which were a number of longstanding shops and attractions, not least the London Dungeon. Whatever they used to pump into that place to give it that musty old smell would leak out into those tunnels, making them a less than salubrious place to be after dark. On a sweltering night in the summer of 2001 two men died beneath the railway arches there after consuming a lethal combination of drugs and alcohol at the SE1 Nightclub.

The London Dungeon, part of a chain of cheap thrills, historically inaccurate horror based attractions, was based beneath the station from the mid-1970s to 2013. Most of it was rather lame waxworks exhibits themed around things like water torture, garrotting and the black death. The Jack the Ripper section - where you were led from crime-scene to crime-scene as if investigating the murders yourself - used a lot more historical documents, including photographs of the victims. In the darkness, surrounded by the Victorian brickwork of the railway arches, the mocked up Whitechapel streets seemed pretty convincing, as was the piped voiceover reading police reports of the discovery of Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman as a spotlight picked out a partially clothed female form slumped in the doorway.

I remember finding that stuff really quite disturbing, much more so than the depictions of Sweeney Todd or ridiculous looking fake medieval torture instruments. I was 14 when I first went there and remember jokingly asking for a Whisky from the fast food kiosk at the end. I've never liked drama shows that made extreme violence and murder of women into their standard plot device, and I think my experience of the London Dungeon might have played a part in that. My mum always refused to take me there - in the end I went with my Godfather - she would say that they made into entertainment things which were still happening in parts of the world. As I got older I came to agree with her and wouldn't recommend a visit at its current location in County Hall. I still associate Tooley street with that smell, with dark alcoves and grim discoveries.

Now it's all gone, even the roads that ran beneath the station which I would frequently traverse on my way between my student halls and the Absolutely Starving cafe to pick up a bacon baguette. The new incarnation of London bridge station has smashed through most of the old railway arches and replaced them with modern supports which has allowed this huge airy space to appear where before there was a network of occluded passages, walkways and covered streets. Now, it's all bright and shiny and smells of disinfectant and fast food. A transparent space, just like the Crystal Palace. I was once slapped by a girl in the bowels of London Bridge Station. Now that place is gone too, and with it the reminder of the lesson the slap taught me.  

 

"Without the monumental illusion before the eyes of the living, history would be a mere abstraction. The social space bristles with monuments - imposing stone buildings, discreet mud shrines - which may not be directly functional but give every individual the justified feeling that, for the most part, they pre-existed him and will survive him. Strangely, it is a set of breaks and discontinuities in space that expresses continuity in time". 

Marc Augé - Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (1995)

Let us unto the stews! And what stews did Southwark once have! Not quite as legendary as the houses of ill repute that Shakespeare's prince Hal would visit on Cheapside, but the sex workers of Olde Southwark have left their mark in the poignant space of Crossbones Graveyard and garden of remembrance on Redcross Way, a dank unprepossessing street that also features the wonderful Boot and Flogger wine bar and, ironically, the Most Precious Blood Catholic Church. The graveyard is a paupers graveyard, and during the Medieval period was unconsecrated ground. The women who worked in the area were known as the Winchester Geese as they were granted a licence by the Bishop of Winchester, who held jurisdiction over what was then something of a lawless area, known as much for its bear baiting and theatres as its brothels. Today the patch of land holds a number of memorials created by the Friends of Crossbones to the "outcast dead" buried there, and is also the site of monthly ceremonies of remembrance and an annual Halloween festival presided over by the poet and playwright John Constable, whose Southwark Mysteries cycle of poems did much to publicise the existence and importance of the site. It is one of the few places of ritual and remembrance to remain in the area. A place where the deep history of London still lives through the people who come together to remember and memorialise.

I described the Shard of Glass in an essay on this site in 2019 as equal parts corporate and military architecture, like a watchtower standing in the Green Zone of an occupied territory. The anomic corporate space and identikit retail experience, the sense of being at the intersection of any number of anonymous capital flows; the tower's smooth glass exterior perfectly allegorizes the faceless world of price signals and an international class who are at home everywhere and no-where on the upper levels of the Crystal Palace, far above the captured city and its bewildered population, staring into the screens of their phones.

I mistakenly compared the giant spire-like construction to a Cathedral consecrated to global finance. Now, this might be true from the perspective of the power of the Qatari royal family who effectively own the thing, but as a metaphor it falls down precisely on the point made by Marc Augé in that the Shard, despite its vast size is no monument, nor does it introduce a discontinuity into space that allows the marking of historical time. It is, just as I said in 2019 just the most recent iteration of that model of total transparency and fluid modernity that characterises the paradigm of the Crystal Palace. It doesn't so much dominate the area as thoroughly consume it, undermining the distinction between inside and outside, drawing everything into its orbit. It's also a giant spectacle that invites professional narcissists to visit and snap a pouting selfie on one of the upper levels. This touristic ephemerality can be seen all over the market and the riverside as businesses and the local council turn every possible corner into an opportunity for spectacle and consumption, not least consumption of the self.  As a result of the swarms of tourists dumping food waste the lovely garden surrounding the market side of Southward Cathedral has been closed to the public.

 Since the Shard's construction and the completion of the newly transparent station, the collapse of the 'anthropological place' that was London Bridge has only continued at pace. The emptiness and non-relational quality of that building has seeped into the general experience of the area as a whole. The addition of pop-up street food and tent bar shanty villages like Flat Iron Square, Vinegar Yard, and a little further inland Mercato Metropolitano, have only added to the feeling of a superficial pan-international sludge of spectacle and non-place entertainment clogging up the area. This is what it means when a place becomes a "destination" where people anticipate viewing themselves having experiences which are only marked by the selfie or the video taken on the ever present camera eye of mobile phones.

There are still some little havens of genuine life such as the living community at Crossbones Graveyard, and there is also the Old Operating Theatre housed at the top of the tower of the 18th century church of old St Thomas' hospital where my mum now volunteers. Some still hidden gems like the Boot and Flogger or the Horseshoe Inn remain, but for how long? The latest venture to open is Borough Yards, which opens up yet more of the copious railway arches near the market to yet more chain food outlets and designer clothes stores. Walking through there a few weeks ago I found myself lost and unable to navigate my way through. The artifice of the construction job had, like the Shard and the station, rendered transparent and continuous an area that was formerly full of light and shade, that contained old monumental architecture, some in decay, some not, but it was a place that existed in time. Now it is little more than a hellscape of cleaned up brickwork that leads nowhere and turns everyone who enters into a tourist observing themselves in the endless walls of sheet glass.

The story of London Bridge over the last twenty years is the story of London, of its Disneyfication, its selling off and succumbing to plague tourism, the wilful destruction of its liveable environment and heritage, and its conversion into a vast space of permanent transience that is always busy but no-one seems to stick around. A non-anthropological space as Augé would put it; a non-place, where it is no longer possible to create a form-of-life.

Sunday 14 January 2024

Baconian Strategies, or the Possibility of Originality in AI Art (MidJourney 2)

 

As I discussed in the previous part, a key philosophical question for the future of AI image generation and art is the question of representation. Will future iterations of MidJourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, etc, just become ever more proficient at translating complex prompts into accurate visual representations, with a consequent loss of the wildness and "ghost in the machine" type interventions, which for me are its main selling point? Or will the technology retain, or even begin to coalesce around its own artistic tendencies, ending up less of a tool and more of a genuine collaborator?

One artist who appreciated more than most the impact of new technology on artistic practice was Francis Bacon. In interviews he used the expression "deepening the game" to describe the approach painters needed to take in response to the advent of photography and film, which had during his lifetime thoroughly challenged the role of painting in the visual arts. After all, if photography was now the dominant medium for representing reality, what could traditional painting, and especially figurative painting offer that went beyond mere illustration? Bacon's answer to this challenge was to develop a style and technique of painting that not only produced works of unsettling power, but which also assimilated photography into their mode of production. He made no secret of the fact that photographs - of his friends and lovers, from newspapers and magazines, and even pictures of old masters like Velazquez' portrait of Pope Innocent X - frequently formed the raw material for his own images. While other artists of the time abandoned the figure and moved into abstraction, Bacon took on photography and in a sense made the camera into a collaborator.

Artificial intelligence poses yet another challenge to artistic production on perhaps an even greater scale to photography. It not only takes aim at the skills of the digital artist or graphic designer, but puts into question the very notion of artistic authorship. As such, I've spent a fair amount of my CPU time on MidJourney attempting to apply some "Baconian strategies" to how I use it and the types of images I've tried to make. Some of this has consisted of pictures produced in Bacon's style - with a contemporary twist, while at other times I've attempted to develop a more general approach to image generation in which Bacon's concepts and insights on art are applied.

I should say from the outset that each  version of MidJourney has a different take on Bacon's style which reflects the differing levels of complexity in the coding and the way the developers have trained it. Generally speaking, versions 3 and 4 will give you more abstraction, dissonance and incoherence, whereas the different iterations of version 5 and the recently released version 6 will offer more realism, better figurative representation and more straightforward expressions of compositional coherence. As such, producing Bacon-esque images is not as straightforward as asking for so and so "in the style of Francis Bacon". Indeed as you will see, Bacon's painting themselves must often be brought in to the prompts to provide guidance and set examples for the AI to follow, as well as moving between versions and using counterintuitive phrases to excite more interesting results. Take for example the two images below produced by version 6, both of which use the prompt "Francis Bacon painting of a dog sitting peacefully in front of a large open window", with the addition that the one on the right also includes a jpg file of Bacon's Dog (1952) as part of the prompt.

Neither of these images really captures much of Bacon's style. The most one could say is that some of the "brushstrokes" for the surrounding rooms are vaguely reminiscent of how Bacon would situate his figures perhaps in the 1940s and 50s. I also like the way the flooring from Bacon's painting has been remixed into the picture on the right. But the figure of the dog itself is just too well rendered, too illustrative, and just, well, a bit dull. Switching down to V4 however gives us a very different result. The picture on the left uses the exact same prompt (including the image of Bacon's Dog) as the picture above on the right, but gives us an entirely different style which in my mind much more characteristic of Bacon's compositions and stark framing of the figure. The dog is perhaps still too much of a direct representation but the whole thing is more obviously modernist in execution. The translation of the window, however, has entirely lost its realism, and is now only hinted at with the arrangement of line and colour in the upper half of the picture. 

Finally the image on the right adds a longer description in near-natural language: "Francis Bacon painting of a dog sitting peacefully in front of a large open window, twisted and distorted anatomy. Mirrored reflections of 1940s interior room in the background. Geometric lines frame the main figure. Yellow, black and white colour palette with streaks of red and blue". Now we're getting somewhere. The dog has been messed up a good deal with odd proportions and the surreal inclusion of a lizard-like tail. The requested colours are present, though the background and interesting use of forced perspective lines is perhaps a little busy. But overall I'd say this is a fairly good attempt at a Bacon-like dog, although the extra data in the description - such as the mirrored reflections and 1940s interior - has not directly translated into the image.

This example demonstrates one of the key attractions of MidJourney, which is its penchant for chance and indeterminacy when interpreting the data fed into it. The most convincing of the prompts above includes a natural language element, with subject-predicate and statement parts, plus an actual image approximating the subject and style desired. Nevertheless, the output image is something quite different, neither exactly what we asked for, nor a complete departure. Getting to that point took me six prompts which each produced a grid of four images, many of which were no-where near the desired outcome. It's this element of chance and accident that brings MidJourney into true Bacon territory. Don't believe me? Take it from the man himself: The following is an exchange between Bacon and the art critic David Sylvester in an interview in 1966.

FB: I want a very ordered image, but I want it to come about by chance.

DS: But you're sufficiently puritanical not to want to make the chance come too easily.

FB: I would like things to come easily, but you can't order chance. Because if you could, you would only be imposing another type of illustration.

DS: Are you aware of the moment when you find you are becoming free and the thing is taking you over?

FB: Well, very often the involuntary marks are much more deeply suggestive than others, and those are the moments when you feel that anything can happen.

Those of you conversant with the history of the surrealist movement will recognise the ethos at work here. Chance encounters, the unconscious, or the marvellous accident, were all themes and techniques developed in various ways by the surrealists (and before them in Dada) as a means to get behind - or beyond - the usual modes of representation in Western art. Bacon's courting of chance and accident in his work in part continues this tradition, but it also formed a key element of his personality, which came out in his often tempestuous relationships and predilection for gambling. But as we can see in the quote above he also wants to remain in overall control and desires "a very ordered image", not an abstraction produced by chance encounters between paint and canvas. Similar tensions are observable in his private life, which despite the reputation for sexual and alcoholic excess was similarly marked by a tendency towards control. I argued in an essay in 2018 that rather than being a simple facet of his character, this constant tension between chance and order constitutes Bacon's Form-of-Life; the wellspring if you like, from out of which came his remarkable paintings.  

Making a picture in MidJourney without an obvious subject can lead in odd directions. One way I like to start is by using the blend function in which up to five images can be fed into the AI which will then attempt to produce a single image which melds the aesthetic qualities of those in the prompt. It does this without any additional word prompting, instead relying entirely on its own internal logic. How exactly it does this, which elements it focuses on and which it ignores, is more than a little mysterious, and again like so many things with MidJourney, the results tend to vary between versions. One thing I've noticed consistently is that it will latch on to any anatomical shapes it can find and centre the image around them. If there is no central figure in the images fed into it, it will sometimes create one by anthropomorphising structures or textural elements. This can lead to a lot of strange results where limbs, faces or composite body parts will appear. This is usually the result of feeding highly non-comparable images into the prompt; but can, if you choose them wisely, lead to a fairly unique starting point to build your composition and improvise around results using additional word prompts or substituting new images into the prompt to take it in different directions. 

The image to the left started out as a blend which included some older Bacon-type images produced by MidJourney, plus some more photorealistic figurative data and "textural" matter. I call input images textural if their composition strongly influences the overall aesthetic style of the output without defining the subject or dictating overall coherence. Such images are often abstract or contain strong colours. After I had the initial blended image I began to push it more deliberately using word prompts in addition to the original images. First I started with “A young woman sits in a gloomy hotel room", before adding a description of her clothing and extra aesthetic filler such as "soft pastel thermal colour palette, variable contrast" and "dark urban skyline, shadowy figures, architectural drawings". Eventually I fed one of the resulting images back into the blend alongside material that suggested more of an urban setting. One of the images in the resulting grid had altered the position of the figure such that it looked reminiscent of a pole dancer. With this "involuntary mark" made I changed the word prompt pushing it more towards such an outcome, before finally switching in a textural image into the prompt, which I knew would have the effect of scrambling the anatomy of the figure (and losing its head!). The result was the image you see here; a unique, unplanned composition, that while utilising the indeterminacy of the AI's training is also ordered, thematic and recognisably figurative.

Bacon also employed a degree of improvisation in his work, gambling - as he saw it - a painting's fate on the next dramatic brush stroke. If it went wrong and could not be recovered he would frequently destroy the painting. But this approach could also yield desirable (though unconsciously produced) results, which for Bacon were a route away from illustration and towards what he described as a more violent return to reality itself. The most famous example of Bacon using this method is his Painting 1946, sometimes known as the butcher shop for its depiction of sides of beef. In an unusually detailed account of how one of his paintings was created he describes the intention of depicting a chimpanzee in grass, before then attempting to paint a bird of prey landing in a field. None of this came to fruition and in his laboured attempts he had produced such a strange mass of marks that it seemed as if the figurations he finally arrived at - the final assemblage of which owes a good deal to Poussin's The Adoration of the Golden Calf -  had formed by an act of his unconscious.

Francis Bacon, Painting 1946

What Bacon describes here - and what I've tried to apply with my image of the pole dancer - is I think one of the best strategies for getting unique images out of MidJourney. Images that do not privilege prompt following or exact representational translation but nevertheless aim at an ordered final result. It's also not random, since in order to get good results the user has to learn the aesthetic and interpretative tendencies of the AI and how to provoke it into making images with the desired artistic qualities and level of compositional coherence. It's also rarely instantaneous and involves a lot of tweaking and remixing of prompts. Sometimes, it leads nowhere worthwhile, and one is always pushing up against MidJourney's more conservative impulses, which are usually kitsch and highly influenced by American popular culture. When this happens, there is no choice but to abandon the thread and start off once again in a completely new direction.

In practice this involves, so to speak, mastering the dark side of MidJourney; deploying dissonance and contradiction, and getting a feel for the kinds of prompts that send the AI away from its basic representational paradigm. For example getting anything vaguely explicit into your compositions isn't easy. MidJourney's interface on Discord is moderated to exclude explicit images or words from prompts. This extends to slang or even phrases that could count as a double entendre. Despite the moderation, which also varies depending on the version you're using (earlier ones are generally more permissive for words, but also can't tell the difference between the Venus De Milo and a pornographic image, go figure) the system will frequently create images with explicit content, usually around the naked human form. In short, MidJourney has a predilection for boobs, and they sometimes pop up when you least expect them. It's just another little morsel of indeterminacy that makes using it fun. And on the plus side you're able to continue Western art's long tradition of fascination with the female form.

 
Testing the limits of the moderation, both around text and images is worth doing as it can be frustrating to have your prompts knocked back for seemingly innocuous infractions, e.g. the phrase "tight white" in any context cannot be used. This being said some surprising things do get through, so roll the dice, you never know what will come out the other end.

The moderation is meant to extend to horror and gore but there seems to be some intelligence to the way it is applied so that photorealistic images of injury or warped anatomy are excluded, but more painterly or cartoonish prompts get through. This is certainly beneficial if like me you want to produce figures with distortions or that generally look a bit roughed up. Combine this with the relative ease in making if not explicit then at least vaguely erotic images, then you have a good set of levers for adding more adult content into your compositions, and this is no bad thing. As I described in the last piece, the majority of content produced on MidJourney would in my opinion fall into the category of infantile. Thus I'm all in favour of pushing it towards a more mature audience. To my mind using cutting edge artificial intelligence to raise the aesthetic standard of erotica is a more venerable project than using it to produce endless Pokémon fan art.

 I've grouped the images I've created using these strategies in to two broad categories: After-Bacons, which try to produce images in Bacon's style but with subjects more in keeping with contemporary life in 2024; and Meta-Bacons (yeah I know it's a lame tag) which apply the conceptual toolkit described above to make images that do not look like paintings by Francis Bacon but nevertheless owe something to the ethos and approach to image-making. 

One example of the former I'm fond of is this picture of a man with a newspaper standing in a modern glass box apartment. Some of the elements, such as his white trainers and the fact he's holding a newspaper - which I recognise is hardly symbolic of the digital first era - were directly stated in the prompt, as was the high setting over the city; but the rest of the composition came about through trial and error, and improvising around marvellous accidents thrown up by MidJourney itself. I especially like the mirroring of the buildings outside the window on the presumably hyper-shiny floor of the flat. The figure is a delightful quandary. He looks anxious and out of place, despite the attempt seemingly to look relaxed with his newspaper, which in the way he's holding it appears as if he were trying to hide something in his hands. The clothing is also amusingly misplaced. Is that shorts over cut off leggings? The trainers are nicely done and draw attention to the shadow on the floor which instead of tracking the figure's silhouette, forms a incongruous rectangle. This is a scene that nicely captures the ennui and out-of-jointness amid superficial luxury that is symbolic 2020s Western culture.  

And as an example of a Meta-Bacon the image on the right, which I've titled An Unexpected Visitor, has all the qualities I'm looking for. The prompt developed over a couple of days and multiple iterations during which different colour palettes were tried out and the arrangement of the figure and background played around with. I'd been experimenting with trying to add something of Man Ray's surrealistic black and white photography to the mix and wanted a slightly erotic theme around a woman putting on stockings in a bedroom. the trouble was that most of the versions either produced a too photorealistic representation or the result was just too abstract and unnatural looking. One of the images included in the final prompt featured a classical statue without its head - which I'd included to give a nudge towards the body shape I wanted - but instead this seems to have filtered down into the final picture in the wonderful accident seen above, where the woman's head is unnaturally large and constructed as a kind of glowing neon sign. The head, turned to the figure's left, wears an anxious expression, and the left hand is held up at the throat as if startled by a sudden knock at the door. The dishevelled state of the bed mirrors the degraded framing of the image, as if it were a collage of old photographs. 

The figure itself is beautifully formed, non-symmetrical in appearance (which is something MidJourney often struggles with) and has these suggestive marks that could be either surface damage (in a photo collage) or symbolic of violence. Finally, there's the odd sprite-like entity at the head of the bed, that in its diaphanous appearance seems hardly there. It's an image that's full of intrigue and tension, combining a number of styles into a striking final result. As with the picture of the man in the apartment above, it grew out of a combination of intention and accident, where unintended results could be built upon and improvised around. I had only an outline of the subject I wanted, and the decision when to settle for a final image is somewhat arbitrary, after all, images can be endlessly remixed and new versions produced. In a similar fashion to how Bacon claimed his paintings were "let out", pictures on MidJourney are not so much finished as abandoned.

The jargon around AI such as ChatGPT and MidJourney would have the user known as a 'Prompt Engineer'. One influencer on Twitter even speculated this could be a future job title for anyone whose livelihood was under threat from the new technology. Sadly I think for many that will be the case,  much as previous rounds of automation rendered older skills obsolete, those former hands-on builders and creatives were pushed further away from the product of their labour, and now mostly supervised the machines that actually do the work. The threat now is that the inner logic and tendencies of the AI - which, we should remember, is never neutral, and can only approximate our world, with all its prejudices and darkness included - will come to supplant the inexhaustible creative potential of human beings. Humans do require paying, MidJourney just needs a monthly subscription. Thus you can be sure that company executives across the creative industries are gleefully adding up the possible savings from eliminating those same pesky humans from the production process. If the public gallery on MidJourney is anything to go by, then, MidJourney is well suited to being a workhorse for the mainstream of the culture industry.

But, as I hope I've been able to show, this technology also has artistic potential that can be brought out in collaboration with a user that seeks - so to speak - to meet the ghost in the machine halfway. I think this form of use - which rejects the standard representational paradigm, whereby AI should be a slave to our most asinine dreams - is a real and open possibility. It's certainly no more outlandish than the idea of artificial general intelligence or the notion of the human/AI singularity that excites transhumanists. Art, like cruelty, is one of the quintessential human things, and the leap from the Lascaux cave paintings to Duchamp's Fountain is perhaps greater than what artificial intelligence will do for us. 

My bet is that Francis Bacon would also not have been overly disturbed by AI image generation. There is no possibility of perfect prompt following since the meaning of the words pumped into it can have no objectively translatable aesthetic counterpart. To suggest otherwise is a category error. It's the same category error made by people who claim music can be reduced to maths. Adding image prompts into the mix only compounds this basic truth.  Consequently, this means is that there will always be a fundamental degree of chance and indeterminacy at work; a ghost in the machine, that by way of certain clairvoyant techniques can become the collaborator in an artist's work. If he were around now perhaps Bacon would have used MidJourney much as he used photography; as a source of inspiration, of subjects and new ways to show the figure. It will undoubtedly accelerate cultural production in the most shallow and commercially driven parts of society. But alongside that certainty there is also the possibility of taking up the challenge and deepening the game.