Seafood Boil (Mordunkus)
Video, 2023
About the artwork
I live near an ocean. I'm about an hour away now, but I've lived mere yards away from it. Seafood was never a luxury food for me. There are stories of prisoners from here in Maine, USA, demanding that they not be served lobster so often. The sea is a mysterious place full of cryptozoological demons with fins. Some fish have poisonous spikes. Some crustaceans can take a finger off your hand. Others just look like you coughed them up. I'm not saying seafood is bad. It can be pretty good. Regardless, you have to admit that a lot of it is just plain weird.
Audio explanation
Listen to Mordunkus discuss this work.
If you have the tools to create any image you want, why would you just want to regurgitate the same art styles you've been force fed for your whole life? If you can tweak your output -- sometimes mathematically, as in "face minus eyes" or "goat plus eyes" -- to build something impossible in nature, why wouldn't you? Yet there are artists TODAY who make Impressionist art ("the filthy thieves with their forger's tools. No originality, so they have to steal!"). It doesn't have to be that way. A hundred years ago an Italian poet, FT Marinetti, wrote words so powerful they inspired painters and musicians. Dada poet Tristan Tzara inspired painters, sculptors, and photographers. Surrealist poet Bréton inspired all of the above plus filmmakers. Today's AI prompters are the poets of the day, using words to inspire visuals.
Mordunkus (because why not third person?) uses AI tools to bring you images unlike those you've seen before: abstract and surreal videos that often tickle your visceral sensibilities. Maybe it looks like a colonoscopy video with plants and machinery? Or is that a face? A chicken foot? Heavy on the WTF, Mordunkus does NOT Want to show you the same old thing. And almost to contradict that last sentence, the vision behind the images has been consistent over the [past two or three] years even as the tools have changed.
But is it "Art"? Marcel Duchamp answered that question already: who cares?
Negative Prompt: Signature, watermark, cartoon, face, skull, eyeball