MidStories

A series of short stories and accompanying musical themes inspired by my conversations with the Midjourney ai art generation program

A Note About the Process:

AI as Inspiration

In this series, I'm using ai-generated imagery. In my case, from a program called Midjourney.

There are several ways this new tool can be used. Some strive to create finished pieces: the program is told what to make, and the results, usually after much refining of the prompts, are then considered complete and published as-is. For me, when I "talk" to it, trying to describe what I want, no matter how precise I am, it always ends up returning something very different from what I expected. Instead of trying to fight this, I intentionally try to keep my descriptions vague and see where it takes me. This leads to inspiration and new directions that I wouldn't have thought of on my own. It isn't the end of my process. Only the beginning.

Some of these images end up particularly surreal, like abstract paintings. The more I look, the more I see. This project is about those images. Writing stories or descriptions about what I see, and then going further and creating soundtracks to go with them.

Note that in some of these, I've done some basic photo manipulation to "nudge" some of the elements in order to clarify what I see, but for the most part, I'm trying to leave these as-is to preserve their abstract and surreal nature, which is what inspired me in the first place.

I hope you like them.

The Sands of Kesh-K'thar

House Kesh-K'thar has been traversing this area for generations. Wyrm sightings were rare here because of the nature of the rocks, and when they were sighted, any harvest was so small as to be insignificant, so the corporations just weren't interested. All collection was done by hand, relying on quick reflexes and group effort, with the results leading to a rare trip to the only trading post in the area. Today was one of those trips. The air was dense with sand and other dust, but we knew the way.