A.I. Art
Ragnarök 2022
My project Ragnarök shows a couple of scenes from the story of Ragnarök: The Final Fate of the God. It was processed with the help of A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) in the program which is called MidJourney. The final goal of this project was to explore the visuals of works from Norse mythology that were not still in existence these days or were not known. This may have been due to the lifestyle of the Northerners who were the raiders who occupied new places. The first pictorial references did not appear until the 19th century. We would not know that if the translation of the old stories from Old Norse to English did not come out. After a while, the artists could begin to process the stories.
As a part of the project, I made a VR video showing the final works created by the A.I. generator. The video retrospectively goes back from the final work through different variants of the works, for which I selected from four different image sources. The works are connected with the texts, which were used as input for the result of the image. At the end, the video goes back to the opening phrase. Speaking of which the first version of the work was created due to the opening phrase. The inscription of the Ragnarök story ends the whole project at the final point.
The intention was therefore to speculate on the visual side of Nordic art from the period and to explore artificial intelligence as a tool enabling the creation of works from a large database of image sources. It was interesting to see how artificial intelligence deals with the names such as Thor, Loki, and Odin... popularized by the Marvel studio in their films about the superhero god. Another variant that seemed interesting was to investigate how the artificial intelligence would deal without the mentioned names and only with the description of the plot and the insertion of the tag of Norse mythology. Eventually, I realized that I, as a born Czech, who has no roots in the culture of Norse mythology, can not be the one who will reproduce works based on Norse mythology motives. Speaking of which, that is the reason why the project becomes my subjective selection of the topic. Moreover, I enable the A.I. generator to create motives from Nordic mythology, as the generator has an extensive database of people of different cultures, so there can be a much better connection with the roots of the Nordic nation.