Uvula Monster (Mordunkus)
Video, 2023
About the artwork
What a difference a week makes! This piece was made in the first week in October, 2023. I write this now in the second week in October, 2023, and this video looks choppy. Why share? Well, last week this video was awesome! AnimateDiff running in ComfyUI is RIGHT NOW making longer videos than PikaLabs and smoother images than Deforum. The tech is moving quickly, and someone using AI tools needs to move just as fast. I was proud of this last week, and we need to see the piece as a stake in the ground even as we pass it by. A galloping horse still needs to poop along the way. (Okay, so I imagine they stop galloping to do that. But still. Work with me here.)
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