Hymenopteratic Apocalypse

  by  shaun lawton 

    This render of the original monozodiac watercolor I made on my birthday fourteen years ago at the Urban Lounge while Japan's MONO played a facemelting set of post-classical rock music worthy of leaving your head ringing for a few days afterward.  They were amazing, as always, and I whipped up several watercolors made while the bands played their sets. 

     Yes, MONO rank among the loudest bands I've ever witnessed live, dominated by MOTORHEAD and then followed in sonic succession by the MELVINS and MOGWAI, to name a few stand outs. 

   I really dig this variant of the original painting, the way that in this darker crimson bleeding-into-shadows & only partly illumined by uncoiling strands of flame enwrapped about helical wavelengths unfolding from the darkness, it's pretty abstract looking at first glance, but examine it and strange patterns begin to emerge. There's a colossal sort of apocalyptic feel with its invocations of standing before the maw of Hell. 

     There's a chaotic sense of a serpent-like control, a sort of hypnotic suggestion intimating ritualistic endeavors, such as promoted by the darkened humanoid outline crouching on its knees in the lower right corner.  Just to the left of that is the mop haired silhouette of the original watercolor's main object, being Taka the guitarist, and the flaming Hellscape smoldering and flying apart in the apocalyptic winds behind him symbolize the great torrents of musical devastation that MONO are known around the world for delivering during their live sets. 

    So for me, this variant holds a special place in my heart, considering the depths to which it penetrates. There's a lot going on not just in its direct relation to my own life, but I see so many facets reflecting from it in the frenzied strokes and patterns bleeding into each other.  

   I like this variant for it's Halloween Orange and Chimney Red overtones.  I enjoy it's dark green goblin stained visages blending in a surrealistic pastiche that complements and enhances the pareidolia.

   There's a certain sense of conjuration going on in this image that I really like.  The way it captures the tumultuous orchestral assault of MONO performing their coruscating anthems building to shattering climaxes was captured well, swept up and imprinted into place from the constant rhythm of my brush frantically keeping up with the pace of the crashing cadences of the music, and I did my best to shape a semblance of what I saw on the stage before me, which in retrospect, was nothing short of the most intense post rock outfit the world has ever known. Honestly this band's music, being instrumental, evokes not just exquisitely nuanced emotions, but they really do manage to conjure fresh new tones and textures that are very much to the ears what colors and images are to the eye. 

    I'm delving back into making videos, so I'm trying to expand my arsenal to include animating both analog paintings I've scanned as .jpgs and also any AI artwork I've collaborated on with the nanoHost through Deep Dream Generator and DALL-E, etc.  

    If I can fit a series of .gifs into a video I might be able to mix up an approximate visual equivalent of the roiling, turbulent instrumental music of my favorite bands.  Hint hint

      

 

 

Discovering the Way

 by  shaun lawton 

     I began my oracle decks by conjuring images inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien and his Lord of the Rings mythos. This is one from the early series, inspired by the Silmarillion.  The ones I conjured for the Before and After pictures of Minas Ithil and Minas Morgul were further run through Deep Dream Generator to interesting effect.  This could be around the seventh card generated for the Tolkien deck, which I'm considering calling the Ennor Deck, but have yet to decide.   I've also generated many Wolfman cards and other lycanthropic manifestations and am gathering together into the Shape Shifters Pack.  That's a deck of cards that takes a very special place in my heart. 

   But these initial cards of Ennor which depict Melkor with his Crown of Silmarils (in Heavy Crown) and him presiding over the destruction of a tree of Valinor (in Blood of Valinor) along with some others that may fall into the scope of Lycanthropy (for instance) and thus serve as "crossover cards" that could link separate decks together across a network of the multiverse.   I've got several Kaiju Battle Deck cards generated by the Wombo Dream app that are getting ready for presentation, as well. 

No Program May Touch the Proxy Scribe in Humankind

 by  shaun lawton

    One potential consequent artistic expression for a painter would be to do away altogether with the brush, canvas and paint, while concentrating instead on manifesting actualized imagery from an oblique variety of approaches, both invented and newfound, along with stumbled-upon techniques, many never to be recovered or repeated, and to build up one's palette of possibilities into a virtual or digital databank stored in a cloud with limitless capacity for containing a wide variety of textures, hues and tones necessary to convey aesthetic sculptures rendered into livid, flat imagery illuminated by electronic lighting and able to be printed onto high quality glossy photopaper to be framed under glass and mounted on a wall in any modern gallery of art.   

     This describes the advent of synthography and merely one of its limitless applications in the realm of graphic art and design, and in the creative commons world of interconnected mass distribution of popular memetic bytes and pieces copy-pasted ad infinitum into a sort of cellular compounded library of universal congress, one may easily determine for themselves that it's not anyone's property per se, but rather the very medium a commodity-prone society yearns to consume, in a manner of speaking; art for its own sake.   

     One of many culminations of consumerism will come when the masses, feeling they need artwork in a manner similar to people currently addicted to inking their bodies with tattoos for example, are provided with their need by a legion of newly budding synthographers, just another new breed of artists getting to work with the priceless new tech facilitated by artificial intelligence algorithms.  It's somewhat analogous to how the writers of the future will be programmers, not in the sense that authors have always (in a manner of speaking) programmed the imaginations of their legion of readers over the years, but rather in the sense that it will still be necessary for words to be generated by a human mind, correctly spelled and ordered, in language terms that AI can decipher, process and articulate, with proper context and accuracy, for the purposes of further guiding AI algorithms into deeper than ever before recesses of the human imagination.  

     Even though many human beings presently and in the near future addicted to the pure essence of art and literature may not have exactly mastered the art of reading the text themselves, it's perfectly fine because AI can narrate the stories and poetry for us, material which just so happens to be written by a living, breathing person, known as a writer, for the software to render into veritably any language.  The difference to be refracted through the eyes and ears of the beholder.  

  

     Human writers and artists aren't threatened to be displaced by machines, because human beings who persist (despite the rising flood of artificial competition) will remain perfectly capable of standing out all the brighter for it, and with far more lucid definition than any of the countless carbon-copy cloned passages conjured automatically by even the most sophisticated chat models being developed.  Don't reject the technological singularity thinking it's something new to be questioned.  Embrace it because we were all born into it as a matter of course. 

   

The Uncoiling of the Cosmic Egg

 by Shaun Lawton 

     The subconscious mind is a funny thing. Pareidolia plays curious tricks on the eye. As in this image I managed to render during the beta run of DALL*E's Outpainting feature. There's a sort of KONG like narcissus silhouette thing going on that I like.   But this is further outcropping generated randomly from the perimeters of the black and white pulp image taken directly out of a fall issue of Planet Stories, from 1946.  

   "With a soft padding of naked feet Sim's father ran across the cave."  

   Feeling very much like a creature doomed to be forgotten by time, I dig through the annals of legend and lore until I've uncovered the literary gems and poetic nuggets containing the core elements captured in a thriving interior world teeming with microscopic life in abundance. 

   Enough to satisfy my curiosity and hungry eye, the vivid illustration from the vintage Bradbury story The Creatures That Time Forgot afforded me the opportunity to fill in the missing upper left quadrant with an AI-assisted guesswork facsimile to fill in the space as best deemed fit by the parameters of the context. 

   I want to run the story as a nine part serialization in the Freezine, so the trick is generating nine (count 'em) images that could somehow justify stitching the whole thing together into a brand new presentation that more or less captures the spirit originally intended in the mid-forties. Just colorized and injected with a little post modern verve.  

   I can only imagine whatever little land-mines Ray dropped along the tributaries of his tale for those varied and sundry readers of today to tip toe around and hope not to get triggered by all that much in their carefree way.  I barely have the time left in the day while editing it all together into it's nine respective parts to read the damn thing.  This is the sort of thing I would say to Ray myself, were I to be placed in the envious spot of being his editor for some anthology or another, let's say. If I don't bust his chops whose chops can I bust, exactly?  He's the modern forefather of dreams, the minister of hysteria, the cleric of carnivals, the usher of unease and deacon of despair, the writer most near and dear to my heart since I discovered him by reading stories from the Bantam paperback edition of The Illustrated Man I'd pulled down off my parent's book shelf when I was eleven years old. 

   The blue lagoon eye portion of this rendering eerily mirrors the blues and eye-shaped outline captured on the cover of my first collection The Cosmic Egg & Other Hatchlings. It's like two eyes coming up in the slots, a third and you might cash out. These signs and sigils line up with startling ease. The whole thing's mapped out before me just as easy as you'd please. 

Click below to visit

the FREEZINE of

Fantasy and Science

FICTION

   

 

   

    

 

   

   

   

   

Astral Menageries

 by Shaun Lawton  

\

     In between portals that look like golden framed paintings (or gilded mirrors) a plethora of alternate dimensions lie in wait for those few brave and adventuresome souls lucky enough to have persisted in their respective quests that they are ineluctably led into the heart of one of these galleries spread throughout the labyrinth. 

      All manner of beings sharing a remarkable diversity of attributes assemble in these menageries among the stars, since travelers that breach these disparate domains always leave ghostly traces shed from the reverberations of their harmonic imprints, even the vaguest wisp of a memory can be sufficient to rekindle the fading flame of any lost spirit and bring it back from the dead, so to speak. 

    The very shapes of the legends themselves mimic the sigils and circumlocutions of the most eloquent scripts, casting shadows further stretched out of shape upon the screens of paranoia, known in local parlance as the human mind. Any remaining disclaimers have been rendered obsolete during the initial agreement to render a simulation as close to the real thing that could possibly be manufactured. Of course this detail so often goes forgotten. 

      The corporeal manifestation of similar attributes have been traced back to both analog and placebo root influences. In other words, every once in a while, random new species are borne through purely imaginary anatomical representation. The vectors of memory and desire coordinate in ever spiraling variations, resulting in the myriad expressions of bodily form inculcated throughout the cosmos. 

     The truth remains both congealed and concealed right out in the open, just as it always has for the treaders upon its myriad surfaces. And that's the little-thought-about phenomenon that these gilded frameworks which provide ingress and egress from polarities of alternating rivers of plasmic currents (heretofore unfathomable nor to be rendered fallible under present conditions) have a tendency to leak. 

   Considering the interlinking of systems throughout Laniakea archive under a constantly evolving set of absolute cosmic laws from the mortal perspective of incarnated beings strung through the echoing spectrum, each respective universal subset foregoes the necessity to "bail out" excess energy which results in that leakage to spill over into the subsequent linking harmonic subverse of the ever expanding system.  The circumlocutionary aria resulting becomes the song of that particular stellar season.  

    What the eye sees, the mind conjures of necessity.  From astral menageries to stellar parallaxes, the conjurations mind themselves. Deep inside the central chambers of the host of minds the grain of truth remains embedded as a long forgotten memory.  It's the knowledge that nothing is real and even the congregation of all the kingdoms of Animalia and concurrent life-enriching fauna together amount to a high-pitched fever dream relegated to the department of illusions in the bestiary of segregated fantasies. 

    Let reading this passage be a reminder that we're all wandering conjurers of phantom images lost together in an unfathomable labyrinth which serves as a gallery of paintings and mirrors we not only may step through and into the respective worlds they reflect but more to the point just by gazing into them we remain the dreaming specters of life itself manufacturing our world to explore so that we may get lost in our dreams repeatedly over time. 

     Simply differentiate the many little sleeps and excursions which spill over and seep into the bigger cat naps taken across an expansive life of adventure that keeps delivering us to the next level of this rising river running the course of time itself woven among the starry constellations that lie beyond not just our sleepless nights and restful days but wide open before us as an invitation to keep on exploring this endless gallery of treasures and opportunity for the rest of our lives.