ASKING AI TO "PAINT" IN THE STYLE OF IMELDA ALMQVIST

Unleashing powers greater than myself...

This is Essay #3 in my series exploring AI!

It is my philosophy that AI is here to stay. I am also here, hoping to stay on Earth for many more decades, so I need to educate myself about AI and come to terms with it. I want to build a relationship with it, ideally a positive one of co-existing respectfully and both of us knowing our limits! In many ways AI unleashes powers greater than ourselves. (Until recently that was one definition of gods or deities, something that should give us pause!)

Before reading this piece you may want to read my two previous essays here about AI:

AI OR FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER (Initial research for a presentation on AI and Shamanism)

WAS MY WORK USED TO TRAIN AI (Please hazard a guess before reading!)

The question I want to (attempt to) answer today is this:

Knowing for a fact that all my work (paintings, books, interviews, blogs etc.) has been used to train AI, what happens if I ask AI to “paint in the style of Imelda Almqvist”?

The platform I am going to use for this exploration is Canva’s “Magic Media”. I tried Night Cafe first, but it did not produce anything that would truly compete with my own paintings and drawings . (It produced clumsy scenes with body parts appearing in the wrong place etc.)

Below is one painting from 2008 called: Cathedral in Ice. It appears on an art gallery page of my website titled The Far North and features artwork inspired by time spent in the Arctic.

And here is the vision that inspired the painting:

CATHEDRAL IN ICE

Ilulissat, Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), Friday 22 August 2008   4 am

I sleep like a log until something wakes me at 4 am. The Spirit of Greenland is calling me: "You have always wanted to visit Greenland, but the truth is that I was calling you! On the way from the airport you notice a flock of sea gulls gathered on a melting ice floe in the harbour. You felt tearful as you heard the spirits say: this is an endangered continent. Next I am shown an image of Knud Rasmussen (the great Arctic explorer)  setting out with his dogsled. Here is a man who truly loved Greenland. Who added nothing to the landscape and only took from the land what he truly needed. He took great pride and joy in this continent. His dogsled took him into uncharted territories. This is how Greenland should be visited! Look out of the window at the icebergs in the bay! You will see portals in the ice. There are whole worlds in that ice that no one has ever seen! I walk across the frozen ice sea and enter one of those portals. There is a cathedral deep inside that iceberg: a huge sacred space, half under water and half above. I see polar bears, dolphins, seals, whales and all sorts of polar animals. All are white or transparent. This is where the spirits of the dead animals live  The polar bear cubs that didn't make it through winter, the animals that died a natural death, or gave up their lives in the hunt. Their spirits live on in this sacred enclosure made of ice. A space not visited by humans, not photographed by tourists. A sacred space of eternal beauty: a Cathedral in Ice.

Now this is what happens when I feed AI the instruction of “painting in the style of Imelda Almqvist” and a shortened version of the description above:

Definitely a “Cathedral in Ice” but the animal spirits are missing! I type in a new instruction, specifying the animal species I want to include:

Now we have a “flying seal” and, in the far distance, some human figures who are not supposed to be in there! I was also disappointed by the absence of polar bears so I typed in a fresh instruction:

These four pictures look rather apocalyptic and they illustrate the concept of “global warming” quite effectively. However, my own painting intends to convey the powerful vision that there is place where dead animal spirits live on, still swim and play, Outside Time and away from the mindless destruction of the human realm.

I will leave it up to you to decide whether AI is capable of “painting like Imelda Almqvist”. Which picture would you put on your wall (if any)? Let me know in the comments please!

Oh and make sure to follow me on Instagram, so you can see my (real, AI-free!) artwork there!

Imelda

BIO FOR IMELDA ALMQVIST

Imelda Almqvist is an international teacher of Sacred Art and Seiðr/Old Norse Traditions (the ancestral wisdom teachings of Northern Europe). So far she has written four non-fiction books and two picture books for children. Natural Born Shamans: A Spiritual Toolkit for Life (Using shamanism creatively with young people of all ages) in 2016, Sacred Art: A Hollow Bone for Spirit (Where Art Meets Shamanism) in 2019, Medicine of the Imagination - Dwelling in Possibility (an impassioned plea for fearless imagination) in 2020 and North Sea Water In My Veins (The Pre-Christian spirituality of the Low Countries) will be published in June 2022.

The Green Bear is a series of picture book for children, aged 3 – 8 years. The stories and vibrant artwork, set in Scandinavia, invite children to explore enchanting parallel worlds and to keep their sense of magic alive as they grow up.

Imelda has presented her work on both The Shift Network and Sounds True. She appears in a TV program, titled Ice Age Shaman, made for the Smithsonian Museum, in the series Mystic Britain, talking about Mesolithic arctic deer shamanism.

Imelda is currently working on a handbook for rune magicians (about the runes of the Elder Futhark) and on more books in the Green Bear Series. Imelda runs an on-line school called Pregnant Hag Teachings, where all classes she teaches remain available as recordings which can be watched any time!

Website:                            

http://www.shaman-healer-painter.co.uk/

Substack:                             https://substack.com/@imeldaalmqvist

YouTube Channel:         

Online School:                  https://pregnant-hag-teachings.teachable.com/courses/

Facebook:                            https://www.facebook.com/imelda.almqvist/

Instagram:                          https://www.instagram.com/almqvistimelda/

Twitter: @ImeldaAlmqvist