Jardim Sonoro, the international electronic music festival in Portugal, is back after a two-year hiatus. And it has a lush new natural site - the bucolic Keil do Amaral Garden in Lisbon.
Read Also: The 2022 Super Bowl Halftime Show: 12 Minutes That Made Hip-Hop History (And Could Win an Emmy)
Tasked with designing festival posters, Dentsu Creative enlisted an A.I. to help. The agency's creators have launched Midjourney, an artificial intelligence program that creates images from text descriptions and names the festival's top artists - Todd Terje, Jeff Mills, Jan Blomqvist - as well as words like birds, butterflies, leaves and trees.
The A.I. was left to do the rest, spitting out images that the agency then refined, creating the compelling, confounding posters below:
Gil Correia and Ivo Purvis, creative directors at Dentsu, tell Muse that Midjourney offered up four possible paths for each prompt it was given.
"Then we go deeper and deeper until we reach the final images," thet say. "We wanted to blend the festival's artists with nature, so with time and experience, we improved the phrases that worked and it became easier to get to the results. But it didn't always go as we expected. And that's a good thing."
This element of the unexpected created the kind of "novelty and discomfort that often lead to great work," the pair say. "We knew that we were going to have something fresh and that we would accept what the machine gave us, because we felt that unique and unrepeatable works of art were being created. It surpassed any expectations we had, to the point where most people couldn't believe they weren't made by humans. But they have a random factor, some beautiful errors, that make them even more special."
The creatives say the project taught them about the possibilities, but also the limitations, of A.I. creativity.
"We will certainly see great developments in the near future that will dazzle us all, but it won't replace anyone," they say. "Like other technologies that have emerged before, they are great tools, but they always need someone to guide them in the creation process, and this one is no exception."
