STABLE DIGEST #4
Artist spotlight - BLAC.ai welcomes us to a new renaissance of artistic expression
THIS WEEK’S ISSUE
Join us once again as we dive into the world of AI art and culture in the latest issue of Stable Digest!
This issue, we’re joined by a very special AI artist blazing a trail towards a New Renaissance: BLAC.ai stars in our Stable Society deep dive interview!
All your favourite artistic insights into our Mod team, Picture of the Week winners, Dreamer communities and Model highlights return, alongside a look at the completely rebuilt and revamped DreamStudio Next beta!
Thank you for travelling with us through the Stableverse!
BY THE COMMUNITY
MODS MADE THIS
What’s this? More masterpieces from our Discord Moderator Team? Once again the team have created some seriously stunning artwork, and here’s just a sample of it!
Fancy joining the team and becoming part of the Stable Foundation Discord mod team? We’d love to hear from you!
We’re always looking for new additions to our Stable family; Fill out the application form if you’re interested in being part of the crew!
PICTURE OF THE WEEK
This issue’s POW highlight takes us on a journey through the abstract and unknown, in a three-part Picture of the Week series where we explored all things vague and mysterious…
In the beginning, we couldn’t quite put our finger on what we were seeing emerging from the deepest corners of latent space, only that SirVeggie managed to coax out Something stark and spectacular with their winning submission.
Moving along paths paradoxically familiar and unknown, we travelled Somewhere to bizarre and beautiful worlds, taking brief respite on our journey with vcm07’s coffee cup microcosm.
At last we reached the end of our long and winding journey with Someone special by our side, with our winner Legion inspiring us with a vision of an awe-inspiring vista.
Stop by the Community Events Centre over on the Discord and take part in this week’s POW event!
And please welcome our latest addition to our exciting lineup of weekly events: COW!
Take part in the Challenge of the Weekend and try your hand at a whole new kind of competition, where you’ll have to think outside the box to meet the weekly creative criteria in these next-level challenges!
MODELS AND EMBEDDINGS
We’re back for another double feature from our Models and Embeddings share forum!
Head on over to there and take a look at some of the spectacular community-made masterpieces shared there, including these awesome creations by Faiona!
First up, we have Sylva Magic, a textual inversion created by Faiona that gives everything a whimsical fairytale feel, replete with pastel shades, soft lighting and fantastical imagery.
Following on with another by Faiona, we have this FaeTastic model!
This incredibly versatile model can be used to create a diverse range of styles and subjects, from beautiful landscapes to stunning character art!
Come and take a look at the Models and Embeddings share forum for even more, and share your own creations with the community!
DREAMER COMMUNITIES
The Dreamer Communities are an excellent place to browse, share and discuss a huge range of artwork over on our Discord server.
This issue, we’re exploring all things unusual, otherworldly and downright weird in a trip through the strange world of Surrealism.
Take a look at these awesome examples of community-created artwork and comprehend these chaotic creations if you can!
WITH THE COMMUNITY
STABLE SOCIETY DEEP DIVE - BLAC.ai
“There's a path here and it's paved with creativity, ownership, and passion.”
Welcome and thank you for joining us, it’s wonderful to have you here today!
First of all, can you tell us a little about yourself as BLAC.ai, what that name means and the vision it stands for?
Great to be here with Stability again, you all have such a great team and it's an honor to hang out whenever we can!
Absolutely! I've been an Artist and creative for 20 years; as an abstract expressionist painter and designer, and professionally I've been a creative team leader, entrepreneur and startup consultant.
I typically refer to my work as explorations in conceptual contrasts such as good vs. evil, freedom vs. ruin, and reality vs. unreal. I've been fortunate to have my work exhibited IRL in Rome, Paris and LA, and included in several publications in the NFT/Ai-Art community including NFTnow, Aguilar and more.
I currently go by BLAC.ai, which stands for Black Label Art Cult. I created the name a year ago when I first got into all of this, as a blend between my consulting agency name of 'Black Label', with the cadence of the infamous Bored Ape Yacht Club title, focusing on a heavy belief in the value of Art, with a bit of a hardcore vibe sprinkled on top. Black Label Art Cult was the result! At the core of who I am in this space, I believe in Valuable Artistic Expression-- the idea that we all can have abundance in this place of pure creation, growth and community.
You’ve been a key advocate for the AI art scene since the very beginning.
What were your first steps into this strange new artistic frontier where we now find ourselves?
It's been quite the wild ride to be honest. I first came across Ai Image generation via Wombo Dream, an android app, in November of 2021. I thought it was incredible, and knew it was the start of something that would change the creative landscape forever.
I wanted to own that process myself so within a week or two of first being exposed to it, I brought on a developer and we created our own proprietary AI, based on vqgan and vdiff foundations. For about 4-5 months, I worked completely in a silo, without really any knowledge of other incredible artists in this space working with these tools.
When I first came to Twitter in May of 2022, I saw the vast creative AI community and was blown away. I felt like this was the beginning of what could be a movement, and I believe I was right now looking back at it.
I began to get involved in anything I possibly could, I was in the Beta Midjourney, as well as the beta StableDiffusion (!!), and became an early adopter of a lot of these tools as they came out. Since then, I've worked with the community, grown with them, and always strive to add value wherever I can in the effort to push Artistic Expression using AI to the absolute max.
Stylistically, your artwork is extraordinarily diverse and varied, however there is always the notion of a consistent theme running throughout.
Can you give us an insight into the concepts and messages you portray through your art?With AI, we're not limited to a single style as Artists have been for... well.. forever. I think we should embrace that, and so I do. I do however believe that Artists should share the journey, and show that process in order to own their visual identity, even if that's in concept and not in style.
Within my work, I try to always achieve a sense of conceptual contrast. I want to break expectations and I try to shy far away from being obvious. I don't really care what people think of my work, as long as it stops them and makes them think in the first place.
That's not new with AI, my Art throughout my life has followed a similar purpose-- to invoke thought. I want there to be a debate in the mind of the viewer. Is this good? Is it evil? Is this real, is it the beyond? is this a photograph or a digital manipulation? If it makes someone question their own internal narrative, I find that I've been successful.Throughout my work I always put a piece of myself and my experiences within the flow. I have explored my consciousness heavily in my life, meditation, astral projection and more, and I carry some of the internal concepts and themes that have been harder to express in words now into my prompts to create mind-bending and reality shattering visual concepts.
My most recent series, "Explorations of Ultra-Consciousness" as well as my current series "Penumbra", both explore visual concepts based in breaking through the veil of our reality and exploring the beyond in a vulnerable yet enlightening way.
Out of the myriad projects you’ve worked on, which has been your personal favourite, either in terms of the visual outcome or its conceptual representation?
Could you perhaps share a little about the projects you’re currently working on?
My AI journey started to grow when I began flexing on the more black and white photorealism work in my “Allure of Darkness” series; which will always have a special place in the dark side of my creative soul for sure.
But, what really resonates with me are the more existential subject matters. I am really proud of the “Explorations of Ultra-Consciousness” series, which came about from me re-working original prompts I had from my own AI a year ago.
The metaphysical subject matter exploration lead me into my current Series, “pənʌmbrə”. Penumbra takes one step into the shadow of obscurity, to gaze through the looking glass of our reality. A reflection of the world around us, seen through the other side of our dimensional perspective. The narrative explores the journey of wayward astral travels, experiencing glimpses of the familiar from unfamiliar perspectives. I have 11 works planned, and 3 minted currently. One could describe them as dark surrealism, while there is a sense of abstraction.I am just as proud of the process than anything else with Penumbra; I developed these by using actual photographs of my own IRL oil paintings, photographs, sketchbook studies, Stable Diffusion outputs and Midjourney blending, as well as post-process compositing for final execution. I'm extremely proud of these, they hit hardest for me in terms of purpose and narrative, and I find there to be a full story behind it as well which I am looking forward to telling more of.
One of the most rewarding projects I've undertaken here is the Artist Incubator I started in Feb. I setup a safe, open space for Ai Artists to have feedback and give community critiques. We have weekly feedback events and I'm currently writing some courses/guides on creating contemporary Art with AI. This has been extremely full-filling, seeing the progress made from valuable feedback with the group.
We were lucky enough to feature the wonderful illustrata.ai in one of our recent interviews!
You’re both members of the AIIA collective; What does the movement stand for, and how can our readers get onboard?
Illustrata.ai is amazing, I have to give her a shout-out here as being one of the first AI Artists I came across when I first joined Twitter. Her work inspired me then, and continues to do so now.
AIIA has grown as far as meaning over time, but at the core it's representative of the AI Art Movement, the culture that drives this unstoppable force of creativity into what I would refer to as this New Renaissance we're all experiencing.
We have two core groups, the more recent is a DAO that is tied directly to membership and the Web3 ecosystem. New members are suggested by internal members and voted on with the DAO.
Outside of that, we work on group collective exhibitions, curating community drops, and working with IRL galleries to expand the reach of AI art into the traditional Art world. This is an initiative I believe in very seriously, and love seeing AIIA take center stage along with other incredible groups that are pushing at the forefront of contemporary AI Art.
As well as your stunning NFT collections, you’ve also exhibited AI artwork in physical gallery spaces around the world!
Can you tell us about these experiences, being at the centre of a collision between the emergent medium of AI art and the traditionally conventional world of gallery exhibition?
The IRL gallery aspect of this ecosystem is a fascinating one. First off I want to say that there are some incredible Web3/NFT galleries that have been working with the community in a large way, and helping promote both AI and Web3 art for a while now, and to those institutions, I applaud you. Mecenate Fine Art gallery in Rome, Superchief in LA/NY+, NFTFactory Paris, are all included on that list for me, and I am proud to have been shown in their galleries.
However, I also have mixed feelings about the general nature of IRL exhibitions, in the sense that while we are creating with AI and existing in Web3, traditional galleries who once turned their head away from both are now embracing them just as recently as the last few months.
I believe that this is overall a good thing, however, as Artists we have to believe in our value and hold true to it as we are really the ones who market ourselves regardless of where our work is listed, displayed or exhibited at. At the end of the day, the galleries are a marketing opportunity, as cold as that may sound, it just is what it is. At this point, it's at best (and rarely) a symbiotic relationship.I see a trend of more and more traditional brands in the Art world slowly coming around to AI and the Web3 community, and I find that this is out of necessity rather than empowerment for the most part. I only say this after seeing the disdain for both AI & Web3 earlier last year and now that they have taken the modern art world by storm, and with such force that cannot be ignored any longer, I personally see those in the traditional realms feeling a sense of 'join in or get left behind' and therefore are opening their arms more and more with each passing event.
Again, this is a good thing, and if those of us on the forefront have to be the ones to push that envelope against the force of the old guard, then so be it. I'm here for it.
As part of The New Renaissance, you host a show alongside the amazing Amli and other figures from across the AI art scene; We’ve even had the pleasure of hosting you on the Stable Stage!
What can you tell us about this venture, and where can we catch you for all the latest?
Amli and I have found a great friendship in this space, and both of us share a common goal of empowerment for creatives here. I'm grateful to have met her and for all the amazing shows we've done together.
We started TNR last year, a Twitter spaces show focused on AI Tech news, and a core topic of discussion. We have grown a great audience and honestly, it's just been a blast with Amli-- we have a lot of fun on the show. We have taken a small break from the last month, just to get some air and find some focus on other things. This was spawned by me hitting a bit of burnout to be completely honest, but Amli is amazing and rolled with me on it.
We are actually hosting a show this week on Thursday for the first time in a month or so and will hopefully get back on track a bit with potentially a new format with streaming video on Twitter!
The AI art scene has many skeptics, with many legitimate concerns and misunderstandings leading to hesitancy in embracing this emergent technology.
What do you believe is the main misconception we need to dispel as key figures in this movement, and what words or advice would you give to address some of the common concerns we’re seeing today?
This has been such a heated debate and I have found myself in the middle of it from time to time. I think that the bottom line is this; Ai image technology is a creative tool, nothing more. Albeit a powerful one, it's simply a new medium.
While I believe AI in general needs to be a subject we discuss as a society, restricting the advancement of things that can help people in so many ways just seems very archaic to me. More than anything else, responding to this technology with fear, hatred, and vitriol goes to only show the worse in people and that in itself saddens me.
After the many conversations I've had with those at every level of this tech and community, I firmly believe there is a constructive approach to take, but we need to do so by being both respectful and firm in our approach. The media has a major role to play in this, and I find them to be responsible for the majority of the hatred and attacks we've seen so many times in this community. Driving fear into the hearts of people, creating chaos and division; something they've become remarkably effective at, is absolutely shameful.
The result is pushing negativity into a community that is really full of people that are simply creating, like people always have. It truly boggles my mind how people can be so angry and hateful towards Artists, of all people.There's a path here and it's paved with creativity, ownership, and passion.
Open source AI has already unlocked the creative potential of millions, affording them the freedom of creative expression where they may otherwise have been restricted in exploring their creativity.
What further heights do you see AI, and the wider world of web3, taking us to within the next few years?
I actually find AI and Web3 to be very very closely tied together in this new wave of progressive Art and disruptive technology. I don't think its a coincidence that the two have emerged together at this time in history.
To be honest, I would love to say I have some idea as to what the future holds, but if I've learned anything in the last year and half its that I have no clue how the next phase of AI or Web3 really have in store for us. I look at the potential as being so vast, so incredible, that it's hard to imagine. If you were to show me my most recent minted piece a year ago, I would never believe it was something created using the same foundational technology I was using at that time.
I feel like I have this same feeling every time a new model or update comes out, so the potential to me is, quite frankly, limitless.My hope is that people begin to see how empowering these tools can be, and wield them for themselves in the name of Art and broader human creative ecosystem.
Thank you for joining us today for this wonderful window into your world!
Are there any friends or collaborators you’d like to shout out and highlight their work?
And to wrap things up with our quote of the day, tell us the first thing that comes to your mind!
There are SO MANY incredible artists in this space. Those who I've worked with closely on projects and/or curations that I find to be both extremely talented as well as passionate are:
@illustrata_ai, @amli_art, @_0_0_0_9_, @DVKtheartist, @delta_sauce, @DehiscenceArt, @ManekiNekoAIArt .... there's so many more! Impossible to list!
“We are, for the first moment in the human experience, creating Art History in real-time. We are creative pioneers driving scalable artistic expression. We are The New Renaissance.”
FOR THE COMMUNITY
DREAMSTUDIO NEXT
DreamStudio has been reimagined from the ground up, reborn as the DreamStudio NEXT beta!
All sorts of amazing new features and functions are available in this massive overhaul of the platform, with even more coming soon!
Featuring fully cloud-based image history, style presets and early access previews of brand new models like SDXL all wrapped up in a shiny new UI!
There’s so much still to come, including inbuilt upscaling, fine tuning functionality and more!
Head on over to the new website and explore the NEXT generation of DreamStudio!
Here we are at the end of another issue of Stable Digest! Thank you so much for joining us on this journey around the Stable community, we hope you’ve enjoyed the spectacular art and insights.
There’s so much more happening every day in our community, and you can be at the centre of it all in our Stable Foundation Discord server.
Join today and become part of a vibrant and flourishing community!
If there’s something or someone you’d absolutely love to see in a future issue of Stable Digest, drop us an email at community@stability.ai, we’d love to hear from you.
Thank you for reading Stable Digest, We’ll see you next issue!
FIRST <3
Fantastic article. The layout is immaculate and provides so much insights.