“It's a very back and forth and a symbiotic relationship with a robot, that is, sort of, a connection to our collective visual subconscious.”
A very special edition of Transmissions today. We sit down with artist, illustrator and Midjourney master, Tim Molloy.
Ever since Dall•E launched in 2021, we’ve had what feels like a brand new concept in the world: AI-generated artwork. That is, a text prompt is fed into a data model trained on millions (if not billions) of images, which responds with a brand new image that is a synergistic blend of both the data model and the prompt.
In the two years since, the technology has multiplied across a range of models like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, and become exponentially richer and more expressive. It has posed some awkward questions for artists and for art itself: what is the ‘art’ bit, the concept or the execution? Where should value and attribution lie? What on earth are we going to do with all these images?
But it’s also been an incredible new boon for creative minds.
Tim Molloy sits squarely across all of this. He is a traditional artist and commercial illustrator. And he’s fully embraced the possibilities of AI-generated artwork, creating a spectacular cornucopia of imaginary worlds, all shared on social media. I was curious to hear his take on this new paradigm, and how he feels this new technology intersects with more traditional forms of creativity.
Marty: Tell me a little bit about your background as an artist, and how would you describe what you do.
Tim: Sure. So I've been making art seriously since I was in my early early twenties. I had been drawing furiously since I was a kid and putting out little comic zines in high school, but it was after a bad breakup and I was staying on a friend's couch where I found a quote, randomly in a Henry Miller Novel that was lying around.
‘We weep at the lines of the old masters because in them we recognise the tender shoots of our own ambition’, to paraphrase. Something electric happened in my soul and I dedicated my life to art, there and then, in an empty room with the universe as my witness. So I guess that’s sort of year zero.
But I've just been making comics. I've been painting. I went to animation school straight after high school to learn how to animate. I thought I was gonna be a big movie director one day, was going to be on the big screen, but the industry beat that out of me within about a year.
So I moved to Melbourne to pursue animation, but fell into a life of dishwashing and rock and roll, and a lot of drinking, and I just kept making comics and painting.
I got to know a guy called Jon Beinart, who runs Beinart gallery in Melbourne. He just put me under his wing, and as he's done for a lot of people, and put me in some shows, and then eventually solo shows. He helped me gain quite a lot of followers online. Then a publisher, Milk Shadow Books, started putting out my Mr Unpronounceable comics.
And yeah, I mean, the work I've been doing the whole time, since I was about 20, has been a sort of collection of things within the comics or paintings, a fictional world of my own devising. It's a weird, surreal dream world. Surrealists and the symbolists are major art movements that influenced me as well as hundreds of other individual artists.
Marty: Your medium is usually pen and ink and pencils?
Tim: Yeah. All the painting I do is with ink and watercolour. I used to draw all my comics with pen and ink. But I moved to doing all that stuff digitally, with the Cintiq or Wacom, and an iPad as well.
So I do a lot of digital illustration as well. I do all of that stuff commercially, too, like, as a professional illustrator for various things.
Marty: And so to think back to it, when you first saw or became aware of AI generated art. What were your initial impressions?
Tim: Well, the first stuff that I saw was like an app. I think it was called Wombo Dream. It’s probably way more sophisticated now than it was back then.
And so looking at this app, I was like, ‘Holy shit’. I'm just generating this infinite, or potentially infinite series of imagery that isn't really anything, hints of shapes and form and color - but it's sparking ideas in my mind. It's like oh, look at this! It's a sorcerer! All of that.
And then Midjourney came along. And it was a total game changer because it had a coherence that was way beyond what I’d seen before.
And I just saw people online using it. I slid into somebody’s DMs and said, can I have an invite? And they were like, yeah, and I'm still good internet friends with that person to this day.
And I've just been totally addicted to producing tens of thousands of horrifying, dreamy, weird imagery ever since.
Marty: Break down your process for me. How do you approach this? What do you do when you sit down and start to create these images?
Tim: It's sort of changed over time. Right at the very beginning it was apparent that you feed it something, and then it gives you something back. But then what it gives you back stokes more and more imagination.
Over time I use it in different ways. I developed a series of fictional television shows. There’s Hasturon's Dilemma, which is a science fiction soap opera, and Legends of the Golden Child (an occult Western children's show), and Harmonia Vrim’s Dream Plague Cycle, where she is a fictional visionary auteur, or a director, who comes from my fictional dream world ‘the lower ethereal hierarchy’. She's in league with extra-dimensional entities, and beaming her movies directly into people's minds. So there are these contexts in which I usually produce these things.
At the beginning, with each of those, you just type in, ‘weird sci-fi’, or this or that, and it'll create some imagery. But then, what you can do with that imagery is, you can feed the imagery itself back into the app. So instead of typing a text prompt, you can feed the imagery back.
And then I got on this big trip, where I was just feeding images again and again. I was feeding my own imagery, and was combining my own drawings with imagery that I created with Midjourney. I was feeding, like, pictures of industrial pipes, combined with organic creatures, and combining them. It’s a very fast paced repetitive process. It's sparking your ideas constantly. It's a back and forth.
The algorithm that Midjourney uses to create the imagery has progressed multiple times since I started using it. So once version 4 came along, it became really coherent. You could make humans pretty reasonably. And then I was like, okay, now, I can do something like Legends of the Golden Child.
I'm producing the stuff just here on social media as a kind of creative writing project. Really, the writing is sort of primary to me, as the creative part. And sometimes it starts with the writing idea first.
It's a very back and forth and a symbiotic relationship with a robot, that is, sort of, a connection to our collective visual subconscious. That's how I see it.
There's a huge amount of editing, so you're only seeing like 1% of what I'm generating. It's a curation.
The best stuff is where you literally can type a prompt: ’film still from Western Film’, but then the juice that gives that flavour are the prompts that you put in after that.
I do things that are just weird, bizarre phrases cobbled together, phrases like ‘terrible meat’. And ‘disaster of the void.’ And then you can play with things like chaos and style, and various other parameters.
And then I'm just chasing down what looks cool. and and then again using that to feed my brain. So it's most fun for me when I'm actually getting a lot of very novel, bizarre imagery.
Marty: Yeah, I mean, you described it as a symbiosis. Is that the best way to describe it? Is that the way that you think about working with Midjourney? It feels different from a kind of a paintbrush or maybe a more traditional artistic tool. Is it a tool? Is it a partner? Is it like something else that we don't have a word for?
Tim: It is. I mean, I try and use it like it's an avatar for the collective visual subconscious. It's like a gigantic, infinite brain. And I just want to try to use it like I'm feeding the brain experimental psychedelics, and I'm yelling at it. Well, sometimes I'm nice to it, but sometimes I'm just like, “Give me more!”
Marty: If you were to create these images without AI, it's months of work. It's prosthetics, it's lighting, it's sets, it's matte painting. And now it’s seconds worth of work.
Of course, you've obviously spent a fair investment of time training yourself how to use it. But what does that mean for the value of the work that you do? What happens to the sheer number, and quantity of artworks that can be produced in this way?
Tim: I don't know. To be honest, I think it could possibly be a bad thing. But put it this way, I make traditional art. I make little paintings that are actual paintings that people buy and put them on the wall
But until a robot can pick up a brush and do exactly what i'm doing… I don't see how any of this AI changes the value of what I'm still doing all day (with my traditional artwork)
And likewise, 95% of what I'm putting out into the world as my AI art, or synthography, or whatever you want to call it, is a mimicry of film. I'm pretending that it's a film from my fictional world. Film is not a medium that I had access to before, as an artist. Now I do. No one else was going to make the stuff that I am doing with Midjourney, I’m not personally taking up anybody else’s oxygen.
AI is going to be definitely integrated into every facet of our lives.
But it's still hard to make art. I’m saying that as somebody who spends quite a lot of time making AI stuff. But I'm still spending 12 hours a day every day hand drawing comics and painting - because I like doing it. And other people find value there too.
Midjourney is upping my game as a traditional artist, with the comics and with the work I'm doing, and paintings, and everything else like it.
It's a very, very, very incredible tool. It's an infinite novelty generator, essentially.
Marty: So if you had to think about what Midjourney version 10 is like, where do you think we are going?
And I mean, Midjourney 10 is probably totally PG13, and I won't use it.
On one hand it's a window into an infinite realm of possibilities, but it's also moderated and sometimes moderated absolutely horribly. That window can become very, very small.
So I think that Midjourney 10 is probably going to be very different. Amazing, but less powerful in terms of its ability to create novelty. But that’s what a human mind is for. In the end and there will be other AI, and there are already other models that I think that you'll probably just be able to talk to. You'll just be able to say words, or eventually you'll hook it up to your brain and it'll just read your thoughts.
Yeah, and I mean, is that good or bad? I don't know. Probably bad.
There are so many other things coming down the track in the world that the stress around AI impacting the arts just doesn't bother me, personally, that much. In the end, my industry is way more insulated than scores of others, as we rely on imagination as the baseline - and if we can actually, you know create consciousness in a machine, we will have bigger issues and problems to deal with, I think.
Man, I'm just like: this is cool. This is fun. It's interesting.It’s incredibly disruptive, but so was photography, the printing press, digital photography, photoshop - you have to adapt and learn. Strange times.
Tim Molloy’s works can be found on his Instagram.
Regular Transmissions programming will resume next fortnight. If you liked this interview and would like to see more like it, reach out in the comments and me know.
Loved this format Marty - awesome to see the work behind these images - Tim’s phrase “avatar for the collective visual subconscious” is a great way to think about these models