This video was produced for the track "I Knew You At Once" that was released as a single in November 2023.
This video was created using the text-to-image generator MidJourney, taking a tour through a highly selective history of visual art, including Hieronymus Bosch, Boticelli, Leonardo, Valaquez, Goya, Turner, Picasso and even Richard Avedon. Midjourney is trained on images scraped from the web, which is a rights management nightmare. How much of these images are really at all original and how much has been unknowingly plagiarised?
Midjourney allows you to iterate over images by asking it to make "subtle" changes to anything it generates. It's interesting to see what changes and what doesn't and most of the images here exploit that. The overall scene composition remains consistent, though the details change. For example, in portraits the position of a subject's eyes tend to remain the same along with the basic outline. Some of the differences between images can be striking when you play them in sequence.
