STABLE DIGEST #14
Artist spotlight - Laurence Fuller, plus Control LoRAs, StableChat, Anniversary Celebrations and more!
THIS WEEK’S ISSUE
Get ready for an all-new Stable Digest that's sure to impress.
StableChat is here and we can't wait for all of you to dive in and give it a test run! Plus, we have all the buzz on other amazing releases from Control LoRAs to Revision prompting!
In news we are covering all our anniversary celebrations, from CogX passes, to fun new challenges and stages, as well as updating you on the DiffuseTogether challenge and MORE!
Our spotlight shines on the amazingly talented Laurence Fuller and his upcoming collaboration with Vincent D'Onofrio.
In our Tools & Tuts section, we're offering insights into AI Towns alongside another community that is doing fun things with Lyrics2Song.
And of course, we're rounding out the newsletter by showcasing the dazzling work of our talented community. Trust us, you won't want to miss this!
Have suggestions for artists spotlights or community features? We wanna hear from YOU. Email us community@stability.ai
FOR THE COMMUNITY
Control LoRA/Revision for SDXL
Been waiting for ControlNet for SDXL? Well wait no more! We’ve got you covered with our new Control LoRA’s, a ControlNet fine-tune that’ll play nice with a wide variety of consumer GPUs!
And if that news doesn’t get you hyped, be sure to check out Revision, a slick new way to use images to prompt SDXL!
Both of these releases are ready to roll in ComfyUI and StableSwarm.
You can find all you need on HuggingFace to start playing today!
StableChat
In case you missed it, we've rolled out StableChat, a shiny new playground where you can get hands-on with our latest language models. Come evaluate, give feedback, and help us make 'em even better. Just remember, this is a research-only zone.
Try it out now! Wanna know more? Catch all the deets on our blog!
Join Us at CogX x Stability.AI
For those with a passion for research, we're offering an exclusive opportunity to join us at the CogX Festival in London! You'll get access to amazing insights, captivating talks, and a chance to network with leading AI experts. Why wait to be part of something extraordinary? Apply now and come geek out with us!
Celebrating a Year of Stable Diffusion!
We're ringing in the first anniversary of Stable Diffusion with a jam-packed month of celebrations! Get ready for enticing giveaways, engaging live demos and discussions via Stable-Stages, and creative contests like "Through the Ages" and our Sticker-Scrapbooking event. We're also spotlighting inspiring stories from our incredible community. Don't miss out—stay tuned to our announcements and events channels for all the details on how you can join in the fun and innovation!
Keep an eye on the announcements & events channels to keep up with all the exciting things we have planned! This anniversary celebration is the epitome of what Stable Diffusion is all about—community, innovation, and boundless creativity.
DiffuseTogether Update!
We're thrilled to see the hard work of our community pay off! So it's especially exciting to watch the winners of the DiffuseTogether Challenge have their final videos featured on Peter Gabriel's YouTube channel. Don't miss these awesome displays of AI animation.
2nd Place Winner @_vnderworld’s Panopticom
3rd Place Winner @oranguerillatan’s The Court
And stay tuned—our top two winners will be spotlighted in the coming weeks!
BY THE COMMUNITY
Here at Stability, we're all about celebrating the vibrant AI community around us. So, we've created this little corner to share some of the fab things folks are creating out there! Just a heads-up though, just because we are showcasing these goodies does not mean they are all affiliated with us.
JUST FOR FUN!
Heard the buzz? Our own Ed Newton-Rex, VP Audio at Stability AI, has made history! He's the first to publish a classical music piece using generative AI. His 15-minute choir and piano composition, "I Stand in the Library," premiered at the Live from London online classical music festival. Catch the full performance on their site! (FYI you have to purchase tickets to view it.)
MODELS & EMBEDDINGS
Check out the new ClassipeintXL LoRA—it's like having a pocket-sized oil painter! It mixes the best of Western traditions to give you stunning, consistent art. No need for endless tweaks or retouching. Try it now and get amazed by what you create!
TOOLS & TUTS
Tutorial Spotlight!
Remember that mind-blowing paper, "Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior"? The one with a mini world where NPCs chat and wander? Good news—the code's out, and Matthew Berman's got a tutorial to help you set up your own little AI world!
Plus, don't miss Convex's AI Town starter kit for another way to dive in!
SplitticAI
AI Music has been making waves, and we've highlighted some of our favorites in previous editions of the Digest. So, we were thrilled to discover a new Discord community, SplitticAI, that has a fun new Lyrics2Song AI generator. Like all music generators right now, it’s not perfect, but it can generate full-length songs and lets you customize features like BPM and style, which really sets it apart. Ever wanted to create a ballad about a werewolf having a midlife crisis? Well, now’s your chance!
WITH THE COMMUNITY
STABLE SOCIETY DEEP DIVE - Laurence Fuller
Hi Laurence! It is so lovely to have you! Your leap from the stage to the NFT world has us all intrigued. Can you give us a quick rundown of the series of events that lead to that shift? Was there a "lightbulb" moment when that sparked the idea of blending poetry and art into this new medium of Cinematic Poetry?
The first Cinematic Poetic Art pieces I minted as NFTs were in March 2021 as part of a body of works I was creating with the painter Sima Jo. I’d met Sima at an art exhibition opening at Arcadia Contemporary. We sparked a friendship when I visited her studio and wrote the poem “Childish Force Of Nature” to a series of her underwater figurative paintings. I then animated her paintings, paired them with the poetry and soundscape. This concept made up my first body of work. Also similar collaborations with my mother the oil painter Stephanie Fuller.
Childish Forces of Nature II - Laurence Fuller and Sima Jo
As technology evolved, I built more relationships with artists within the web3 ecosystem that came from different backgrounds like Henrik Uldalen, Tania Rivilis, Ruben Fro, Michele Petrelli, KX, Goldcat and Jenni Pasanen.
Poetry has become the translation of my time here ~ it’s become the way I understand the world. Hidden behind layers of metaphor. We all walk around in our own paradise ~ the freedom of our imaginations is sacred. The Romantics fought for that, to cherish sensuality and find beauty in pain, tragedy the birthplace of creation.
Cinematography is the eyeglasses to other lives beyond our own. And music gives voice to feelings about a memory. Authentic performance is also such a nuanced thing that can be trained over a lifetime but is really hard to fake.Question
Growing up with a renowned art critic as a father and a professional artist as a mother, how did their artistic perspectives influence your early understanding of art? How have those influences manifested in your current work, if at all, especially in your work with AI?
There was the seed of the idea. The seed of the burning rose that came from researching the writings of my late father Peter Fuller, the art critic and founder of Modern Painters Magazine, which has been ongoing throughout my life but really intensified when I started the screenplay “Modern Art” about his life and times. I worked with the TATE Museum where his archive is kept next to Roger Fry’s. I went through every letter, every article, and found amongst the boxes a manuscript of unpublished poetry.
I found out from his friends that really he wanted to give up art criticism and become a poet, many of his articles on art history contained quotes from poems. Particularly that of Charles Baudelaire who was a fellow art critic better known for his poetry book “Flowers Of Evil”. Baudelaire’s poems were concerned with aesthetics, Romanticism, autobiography and art history. I realised what both of these predecessors were searching for was the connection between visual arts and language, namely painting, sculpture, classical aesthetics and poetic language.
As all these elements function for us as symbols. Symbols relate to the core of our emotional lives, our soul. The human story finds adventure running through the gardens of imagination and a falling fig captures our heart’s attention in its moments between the branch and the ground.
When I Die I & II - Laurence Fuller and Victoria West
Both their works are concerned with the materiality of art. The substance of soil and earth that is inspired by the natural world. The aesthetics of the river, the forest, the stuff of life which makes up our ecosystems and which pulsates with the ebb and flow of all living things.
I found this quote in his diary, dated in the week before he passed away;
“I am the fiery life of the essence of God; I am the flame above the beauty in the fields; I shine in the waters; I burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars. And with the airy wind, I quicken all things vitally by an unseen, all-sustaining life.” ~ Hildegard of Bingen
Digital art, NFTs and AI in particular question the materiality of art. And yet they can transcend pure Conceptualism which negates aesthetic concerns, as the search for beauty is now possible in symbiosis with technology. That development is a relatively new one.
You've shared that writing your award-winning screenplay "MODERN ART" was transformative for you. Similarly, your cinematic poetry delves into profound personal narratives. Do you see art as a therapeutic journey? If so, how does that philosophy impact the type of projects you pursue?
Partly yes, however it transcends therapy. If I look back at my early journals as a young method actor I would say a lot of that had a crossover with therapy, psychoanalysis. It was about digging stuff up, emotional memories and stimuli that I could use in my art and my performances, to react against in the poetics of script analysis.
I found this dug up stuff was only really useful as stimuli ~ to know oneself and the inner workings of the effect these symbols can have. Gave me greater self control, awareness and effectiveness with my art. Internal maps of the imagination, to pull out of the subconscious and put on a wall is interesting to me. I feel like we all share so many of these same symbols, they’re universal. Making one emotionally imbued symbol interact with another in an unexpected way can be really powerful, and create new sorts of feelings. Everybody reads these maps differently.
You wear many hats - from an actor and poet to a producer and NFT Artist. How do you juggle these various roles, and what would you say to similar artists coming into the space?
I’ve gotten to work with some icons of cinema in Vincent D’Onofrio and Val Kilmer, regularly pinching myself with the people that wish to create Poetic Cinematic Fine Art with me. Famous painters, filmmakers, movie stars, poets, there is a lot of interest in culture3.
Bird Poetry - Val Kilmer & Tania Rivilis & Laurence Fuller
And I think as we welcome peers from the film industry we steer them in the right direction while preserving and protecting their own authenticity.
Right now the film and tv industries are completely in flux. Everything is being overhauled, discussions about how emerging technologies are affecting the creative process are completely changing the way people have created cinema for the last hundred years. And yet it’s an exciting time to be at the forefront of that.
We’re all chasing the shadows of our predecessors ~ Depths of feeling, is a limitless garden, ever expanding towards the sun. Why stop at the shrubs and rocks.
A lot of your projects, like the Poetics and Elysium Rising collections, skillfully combine classical elements with modern influences, resulting in pieces that have a haunting quality. What drives you to create works in this particular style?
Finding ghosts in the libraries of our memories interests me. Dusty shelves in abandoned museums of forgotten cultures where true gems lie uncorrupted by time. Until we find them again, shake their tattered covers and transform its matter, its truths and its beauty into what we now know.
Ghosts are beautiful.
Una Furtiva Lagrima - Laurence Fuller & Vittorio Grigolo
You have a very unique way of storytelling in the digital space, as @CozomoMedici recently noted when commenting on your piece ‘Costumes To Fill’. Do you think your roots in acting have shaped the way you approach your projects in the NFT Space, especially in relation to how you think about story and collaborations.
Yes definitely, as an actor I’ve always been on the search for what is both compelling, unexpected, invigorating and genuine, raw, compassionate. Those elements together I think are explosive. That’s why I think figurative art will always be eternally fascinating to people. Human expression and the impulse to live.
My art really comes from a desire to pull my dreams out of my soul and unfold them on a wall. I feel like we’re all just embarking on the greatest adventure yet. That story of Elysium. Every piece of stone in its palace. Every fawn in the surrounding forest. Every fabric maker. It lives.
Costumes to Fill - Laurence Fuller
In the opening chapter of Lee Strasberg’s book (the founder of the Actor’s Studio, where Method Acting was born in America) “A Dream Of Passion”, Lee talks about Romanticism. Stanislavsky the director of the Moscow Art Theatre in the early 1900’s and Strasberg’s artistic father spoke about Romanticism in his books and writings on the subject. The Romantic movement is key to any major philosophical or artistic movement and where it’s absent that ideology inevitably crumbles. Because Romanticism is where we exist. We are that seed of a rose.
"Costumes To Fill" is part of your upcoming joint exhibition with Vincent D'Onofrio. You often collaborate with other artists; can you discuss what draws you to collaborative work and share which artists inspire you the most?
The first collaboration was actually with Henrik Uldalen and Ruben Fro, called ‘Flood Of The Soul’ for the Poetics exhibition.
Vincent has always been one of my favourite actors in the world. I remember the first interaction with him, was a few years ago, I commented on a post about his performance in “The Cell”;
“Vincent D'Onofrio's performance in this was a defining moment for me as a young theatre actor, his physicality and behaviour during both the meek and the grandiose sides of this complex and disturbed character was truly astonishing 🎭”
And he responded.
When he posted one of my poetic works about a year later I was so thrilled. That’s what kicked off our collaborations together.
Way In The Deep - Vincent D’Onofrio & Laurence Fuller
He’s been posting his poetry on Twitter for years, this writing that for him has come from a play that he did with Ethan Hawke as part of their rehearsal process.
Which was also how I learned to write, in much the same way, prose poetry. From journals, character breakdowns, emotional journaling, which is a method acting technique I learnt from Ivana Chubbuck.
The actors that have kept me engaged in the art from through whatever trials I was going through in my life have been Robert De Niro, Daniel Day-Lewis, Philip Seymour-Hoffman and Vincent D’Onofrio. All these artists have shown me what it means to be an artist within the profession. There’s so many who don’t even care about the arts it can be disheartening. But when you see a master of the craft inhabit a role like Vincent did in “The Cell”, Day-Lewis did in “There Will Be Blood”, Philip Seymour-Hoffman in “Capote” and Robert De Niro in “Raging Bull”. These seminal performances inspired generations to come.
Uncovering those secrets from our predecessors within the philosophies of the Method, has been like a pilgrimage of sorts. To seek humanities secrets and therefore my own. Guiding the will to one’s own transformative redemption. Memory, habit and dreams reformed towards a praxis, glow like a beacon with the towering presence of the human light.
From an external viewpoint, you've seemingly been on a success streak. However, every success often hides challenges and growth moments. Are you open to discussing any setbacks or obstacles you've faced and their role in your journey?
Yes, I think there've been a lot of setbacks and challenges in my career in the arts which goes back twenty years to my first job in my mother’s gallery as a kid. Everything is a challenge. Writing this interview was a challenge! 😂
I think the biggest thing to take away from the bear market we’ve just experienced, which put a lot of pressure on a lot of people, was that ~ confidence in the longevity of art matters more than everything else.
After collaborating on numerous projects and working alongside many talented individuals, is there a dream project you've always hoped to realise but haven't yet?
I think everybody that has been mentioned paired with some of the greatest method actor poets of our day like Vincent and Ethan Hawke for example. Would also love to collaborate with Zancan, Paul Reid, Trevor Jones, Sam Spratt, Archan Nair and P1A too.
Thank you for taking the time to speak with us! Would you like to share any additional thoughts with us and our community of readers, or give shoutouts to anyone who has been an inspiration to you along the way?
We once thought this culminated in a revolution to overthrow the establishment. But it turns out what we seek in the arts is spiritual revelation. The fullness of being in all the human senses attune to our world within and without. The memories we carry as we approach a tree, or a sunflower, or eat an oyster.
I had a great time with Zancan in Miami Art Basel last year. I always love hanging out with him and going on art adventures around the world. Can’t wait for what adventures come to Art Basel this year.
Victoria West is someone I love to travel with and go on art adventures, speak for hours on the phone about where things are going in the community and put projects together.
Val Kilmer and the team at Kamp Kilmer, Randy and Kyt, and the artists and producers I’ve worked with there.
Xcollabz is an amazing producer.
The teams at SuperRare, Objkt, Joyn, MakersPlace, NINFA, Expanded Art, NiftyGateway, Foundation and Transient Labs.My fellow poets Sasha Stile and Ana Maria Caballero.
All of my collectors.
And of course everyone mentioned in the article above.
WINNERS OF THE WEEK
Cooking up a storm in the COW kitchen, Adelardren dazzles us with The Culinary Awards. On the other side, joe is mixing more than just ingredients, delivering a palette of memories that's truly Transience.
Head on over to the Community Events on the Discord and earn your chance to be highlighted!