Cass Hoskins is an established graphic designer and artist starting to experiment with AI art. This is what happened when Cass, Alasdair and AI met in December 2022. This is their MidJourney.

Is AI the end of art?

MidJourney is an app that plugs into the Discord gaming interface, allowing anyone to code AI art through instructions. MidJourney returns four images in response, in sixty seconds. It doesn’t always deliver what you expect.

Computer screen with dark blue background and swirls of random light blue letters that look like a galaxy or an eye with the word Midjourney in the centre and login buttons

Cass says “A couple of artist friends I know have reacted really strongly to AI art, particularly one mural artist. What does this mean for graphic artists? I’m engaging with it because I needed to know what the potential is, how this technology can be used by an artist. It’s like the relationship between photography and fine art at the turn of last century. If the person commissioning you to paint a portrait or a picture of their horse can get a photograph taken instead, what are you going to do? Well, what happens if you’re free not to do that? If you don’t understand it, embrace it, you will get left behind.”

Experiment 1

Cass began by directing Midjourney to one source Alasdair Gray image, the Lanark frontispiece.

Cass also used the instructions ‘Alasdair Gray’ and ‘Glasgow’. MidJourney returned these four images.

Cass says “I wanted to just put in the artist, without saying anything, to let it do its thing. See how it interacts with the image. What came out feels very much of its era, the style reminds me of my parents’ generation.”

Experiment 2

Cass then directed MidJourney to the Hillhead underground mural (a visualisation of the West End), with ‘Glasgow’ as the instruction.

Cass hadn’t specified ‘from above’ so the AI created these street-level images from Alasdair’s more aerial view, probably using contemporary photos of Glasgow.

Cass says “I like this whole quartet, it reminds me of a L.S. Lowry painting. It’s like MidJourney has this knowledge or awareness of this time. There’s machine-learning happening every time you interact with it. Millions of instructions, from millions of people, billions of images. But what is it learning? How is it making these choices? It’s fascinating, but it’s not clear.”

Experiment 3

The next two images are produced from two different sets of instructions, but using a photo of Alasdair Gray in his wheelchair in front of one of his murals. MidJourney has chosen to make one a woodblock, the other a charcoal drawing. Incidentally, this is perhaps our first glimpse of DigitAl himself. But where did the forest come from?

Cass says ‘This process is like Dadaist action painting. Removing the human hand for the art, giving the machine a set of parameters. Paint falling on canvas. It’s a machine to unlock the subconscious. A collectively made subconscious.’

At this point the journey took a darker turn as we contributed some Lanark-specific instructions for Cass to choose from. ‘Unthank, Frontispiece, Mouths, Dragonhide, Face of God, Drowning, Screenprint, The Institute, monumental, Epic, The Clyde, Loch, Acropolis, Mayor of Unthank, Provost’.

Experiment 4

For this set, Cass used Alasdair’s drawing of Faust in his Study.

Complex black and white line drawing by Alasdair Gray. A flayed man, like an anatomist’s dissection, draws himself. Steampunk machinery, skulls, amalgamated creatures and a cityscape weave around each other. — *Faust in his Study* by Alasdair Gray

She input the words ‘Face of God, Glasgow, Clyde, Industrial, black-and-white’. She no longer included the instruction ‘Alasdair Gray’. Notice that the AI is 50/50 on whether God is male or female.

Experiment 5

This set also used Faust in his Study but the instructions were ‘Mayor of Unthank, The Clyde, drowning, mouths, screen print’. The ‘screen print’ instruction probably informed the images on the left, where paintings are held up by AI human hands. (The top two could be Rima and Lanark’s different readings of the Oracle.)

Experiment 6

Then the exact same search terms produced this. Had the AI learned from the last time?

Cass says “What is going on? I mean fuck! What is GOING ON? Where did this come from. What is that THING in the bottom-left image?”

Experiment 7

Cass used the same image and search terms one last time.

Cass says “I couldn’t have imagined or painted something like this, and certainly not in 60 seconds! MidJourney is like taking the helicopter to the top of the mountain. There’s no effort in it. If I’d have drawn it I’d have a relationship with every detail in it, all the decisions, all the steps would be part of the image. It doesn’t feel like my art. It feels like a collaboration. Or like… I’ve commissioned the AI.

Doing this gallery got me excited about the potential for using MidJourney: using it as an inspiration, using it to generate ideas that would then become physical paintings. So using MidJourney as a tool, not an end result. Maybe that’s the answer?

I think Alasdair Gray would have been fascinated by MidJourney, agog at the randomness.”

Maybe we can imagine Alasdair Gray looking over Cass’s shoulder in horrified fascination. Telling her what instructions to try next as he reimagines cities past and future, reimagines art itself. And all the time the AI learns from his art and his instructions.

Explore more…

You can find out more about Cass Hoskins on Instagram.

To play with MidJourney, visit the site (there is a subscription fee). To see what other people have been doing with the AI view their Community Showcase or there are groups on Facebook and Instagram.

Interested in experimenting with your own Alasdair Gray AI Gallery? We’d love to see what happens! Tag us in your work on Instagram or send us your images.

Get in touch

AlasdAIr Gray’s art