Cryptowave

Second Chippy collaboration

Created on Midjourney. Image one by author. Image two by Chippy. Used with Permission.

Welcome

 Wow! Another month has passed already, and here we are, back for another Eclectic Extras collaboration. This collab, as promised, is with Chippy himself. I was so excited to do this with Chippy, as he’s one of my favorite generative artists and a real inspiration to me.

You can find Chippy in the following places:

Instagram: @chippytheai
Website: https://www.chippys.art/home
Substack: Humans of Generative Art (HOGA)

The collaboration

For those who missed Eclectic Extra’s first edition (You can read it by following the link), here’s a recap of how the 444 collaboration process works.

Below I’ve included a set of images. I’m contributor A and Chippy is contributor B. Image one shows both the collaboration instruction and the choices each of us made. Image two contains each of our prompts and the resulting images.

We published ten images to Instagram—five of Chippy’s and five of mine. You can view all of them here. Chippy’s images are the odd-numbered ones (1,3,5,7,9) and mine the even (2,4,6,8,10).

In step one, we each privately chose four words, then shared them. In step two, we each added four more words which we did not share. We then arranged those words in an order we liked and submitted them to Midjourney to create our images.

The order in which words are presented, as well as the words themselves and how those words are grouped, affect the images created. This time I rearranged the words a few times and submitted different prompts based on those arrangements. The arrangement (mine) you see here is the one I think returned the best images for me.

Images created on Midjourney. Chippy's image used with permission.

The Story

Here’s the very strange story I came up with based on this eclectic set of prompt words.

Cryptowave

They traveled by Cryptowave through an impossible mesocyclone wormhole. At first, there was only one voyager. It bore a message.

“We are coming.”

Silence reigned for half a day while the denizens of dozens of worlds speculated and worried about the ominous pronouncement. Was Armageddon upon them?

Then another voyager arrived. And another. Then many thousands of jubilant, papercut scarecrows began to cross through, causing a scintillation to take over all the worlds, leaving them psychedelic, futurepunk wonderlands—playgrounds for the intergalactic tourists who brought their own entertainment with them, then departed as quickly as they came.

The invaded worlds eventually recovered from the shock, though they wondered ever after if what they had witnessed had been real or only a worldwide mass hallucination. For their part, the scarecrows sent a few scientists to observe the aftermath of an exercise that proved to be an illustration of the effect of a simple teenage lark on developing cultures.

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Afterword

I found this story challenging to write. But as my long-time readers know, I love a challenge.  First came the difficulty of putting together such disparate prompt words to create images. Then it felt impossible (one of Chippy’s words, by the way) to fit Chippy’s second group of four words into a story. As I wrote, however, I found I could weave them into the narrative. The result is a strange, trippy story that I hope tickles your fancy today.

Chippy and I also published ten images to Instagram—five of Chippy’s and five of mine. You can view all of them here. Chippy’s images are the odd-numbered ones (1,3,5,7,9) and mine the even (2,4,6,8,10).