I saw this Controversy at the Colorado State Fair over at Chas Chilfton’s Southern Rockies Nature Blog. Since I provided the material for the post below the art one I think I have license to cross pollinate the blog.
When I saw the image it was a wow moment worthy of a Dune cover. That circle of light is mesmerizing and to think it was done by a machine with human touch up was an arresting thought. It is a classic sci-fi like image as good as any I have seen. It brings to mind some of John Berkey’s work. Berkey did sci-fi and a lot else including illustration for the hook and bullet mags like Sports Afield in the 1960’s. His work for them was often not as refined as Bob Kuhn’s but he could capture mood.
He did two of the best deer hunting illustrations I think I have ever seen above.
It has me thinking about what I could do with this new tech myself. This, of course, has the art world freaking out.
A good discussion of that is here on this excellent blog.
Science fiction is mostly science fantasy but it some cases we are living through it. Fifty years ago, the web and cell phones were an impossible dream. I remember a Star Trek episode 30 years ago where a kid is on a strange planet run by AI. A local asked him to feel a visualization of a subject and the AI created a beautiful sculpture of dolphins in an instant. We are not so far from that now. It amazes me how people become so blase about these tech miracles so fast. The irony of this all running on very limited fuel 100’s of millions of years old also makes me wonder where it ends.