You're staring at the evolution of my digital art, and it's staring right back at you. I can make this assertion with a certain degree of confidence (considering the style templates I designed to be used in my deep dream generated pieces). The swirling patterns that result often generate eye-like whirlpools in their random interwoven configurations for a reason.
A few months ago I began working on a series of digital images rendered using Wombo (since they added the feature of being able to upload images for transfiguration). I was working on the idea of creating a gallery of images which would be presented in the form of individual cards in an oracle deck. I had already begun to build several oracle decks, beginning with the Tolkien middle-Earth deck (which for now I've been referring to as my Ennor deck), continuing with a series of individual cards based on Werewolves which I call the Wolf Pack, a Melnibonean oracle deck, and a Kaiju deck which features a subcategory (which is to say, many guest star appearances) depicting nods to Ultraman.
The Seeing Stone deck is comprised of a series of images which all feature the oval shape of the cabochon-cut stones that I bought from my friend Andy through his Etsy shop Uncommon Stones. It all started the day I asked him to shine a blacklight on one of his dinosaur bone stones. A vivid interlaced tapestry of fossilized veins shone out in the resulting picture I took of it on my cellphone. I decided to use this as a style template in Deep Dream Generator as well as in Wombo. The two images depicted below were created on the Wombo app.
These two cards are from my dinosaur oracle deck. The idea being, it's the same stone, only each time you look into it, a different scene from the distant past is shown. In the case of this stone, it always displays glimpses into eras back when the dinosaurs roamed. These 'time stones' are kind of like little palantirs, which is to say windows through which the viewer may see certain scenes of the past.
The crux of the matter lies in the stones themselves, in particular the one dinosaur fossil which I photographed under blacklight. That's the one I think of as my flux capacitor. It's ultra hi-lit profile, based on an actual fossil record, serves as the foundation upon which the AI text-prompted vectors were configured into their shapes. (It's sort of an exercise in showcasing a range of possible variants to the requested scenery, and the best of these may serve to represent that bygone possibility, a subject still available for examination in hindsight.)
As noted in the image at the top of the page here, the middle stone appears to be staring up at the top stone. A closer examination of the top stone reveals embryonic, curled configurations within it enough for different people seeing it to notice different patterns, such as can be discerned in a Rorschach test. This stone may appear far older than the smaller one below it, which by contrast in its size, possibly resembles more of a newborn stone, or at least one yet in its infancy. These two are the opals.
The two darker stones below are the dinosaur fossils. The one to the right appears to have an eye with which it stares out of and off the page at an angle. The stone to the left seems to be a tangle of shadows and tails or some sort of blended components nestled up within the stone. The impression I'm left with is that these four altogether appear to be some sort of family of stones forming a nuclear unit, conjuring an electromagnetic connection, like lodestones.
The seeing stones (as I have devised them) signify that time travel, as we have typically come to hope or expect it to be (i.e, the ability to actually travel into the past or future), remains a mere fantasy; an objective which, if applied here in the real world, will quite likely never yield those desired results. Thus making this ability of the seeing stones to only permit us a 'glimpse' of certain sections of the past a much more viable alternative to the sort of outright time-travel found in fantastic fiction. In other words, the idea behind my seeing stones remains focused on what the next-best thing to "so-called actual time-travel" would be, so to speak.
