art
The best science fiction art from Vincent Di Fate, HR Giger, and beyond.
A clay kiwi, a robot in a tomato hat, and why take one won
I made a sleepy kiwi, a proud robot and a cheeky cat out of clay last month, and I never touched any clay. Not a crumb of it. The fingerprints you can see on them are fake too, which is a strange sentence to type on a Sunday. I also made a short video of this, episode one of a Sunday series I call Creative AI Tests. This is the written version, with the bits that didn't fit. Three scenes, all in a handmade stop-motion style. A kiwi with its beak in a coffee mug, just before the toaster goes off. A robot holding up its very first sandwich, proud as anything, with the tomato about to slide out. And a cat nose to nose with a ladybird on a laptop. A bug in the code, basically. It took two steps. Step one is the picture. You type a short line, something like "a clay kiwi asleep in its coffee". The model has learnt from loads of captioned images what clay and coffee mugs look like, so it makes a brand new picture to match. Fair warning: the first picture is rarely the keeper. I made a few for each scene and picked the best. Step two is the video. You hand the model that picture with another short line, like "the toast pops and the kiwi wakes up". The picture becomes frame one, so the kiwi stays the same kiwi, and the model works out the movement. Even the sound, and a line of dialogue. The kiwi mumbles "Five more minutes." The robot announces "Nailed it!" The cat goes with "Not today" and then, after things go sideways, "I meant to do that." (I'm not sharing my full prompts. They're less magic than you'd hope, and I like keeping a bit of mystery.)
By Gautam Atmakuri14 days ago in Futurism
My Last Influencer
That’s my creation revealing itself slowly on the screen before you. See how the light collects along her rosy cheek, how nothing troubles the immaculate mirroring of life in her eyes. I taught her where to stand. How to hold her breath and lift her chin. I gave her morning softened into gold, a mouth without its mother’s sadness, skin from which the evidence of living could be lifted with a thumb. You might have called her beautiful before. But you had not yet seen what I made of her. A classical work worthy of the Renaissance masters.
By Stacey Mataxis Whitlow (SMW)15 days ago in Futurism
Out of the Gravity Well
Syl's lungs burned, not from oxygen deprivation, but from the sheer, crushing weight of three gravities pressing her spine flat into the custom-molded carbon-fiber couch. This was nothing like the cinematic, roaring liftoffs of ancient science fiction. There was no shaking windows or fiery, explosive cinematic drama; instead, it was a brutal, mechanical physics equation being executed with cold precision. The falcon-like ascent profile of the heavy-lift shuttle was a calculation of raw thrust overcoming the stubborn curvature of Earth's gravity well, and every single metric Newton of that force was being transferred directly through her rib cage.
By Syl De'Vilabout a month ago in Futurism
Static Ovah the Kennebec
Linda always said Bowdoinham mornings looked like God forgot to turn the brightness up. Fog rolled in thick and low, swallowing the rivah, the trees, and half the Town Landing like it was tryin’ to erase the place one bite at a time. She stood theyah at 7:12 AM, sippin’ coffee that tasted like burnt driftwood and bad decisions, watchin’ the Kennebec breathe like some big creature sleepin’ under the surface.
By Syl De'Vil2 months ago in Futurism
Stitch: Saltwater Silence
Sara Foxgrove remembered the last normal moment of her childhood as something small and quiet. She sat on the back steps of her mother’s cabin 0n Popham Beach, peeling bark off a stick and pretending it was a wand, the kind that could call storms or open secret doors if she pointed it just right. The tide had pulled back far enough that the sandbar stretched toward Fox Island like a pale, exposed spine. Her mother, Mara, wasn’t home. Neither were her father or her brothers. They had left an hour earlier to drive into Bath for groceries and a part her father needed for the woodstove. They’d promised to be back before the tide turned. Sara had waved as the car disappeared down the dirt road, not knowing it was the last time she’d ever see them. The afternoon felt suspended, like the world was holding its breath. Even the gulls seemed quieter, circling lazily above the water as if waiting for something.
By Syl De'Vil2 months ago in Futurism
