Commissioned by Morgenmete Journal to contribute to their Always Connected issue, this was a personal project creating real photographs inspired by AI using Midjourney and ChatGPT.
You find yourself at what appears to be a run-of-the-mill diner, the aroma of strong coffee and maple syrup fill the air. However, as you look around, you begin to notice something seems off. Your reality begins to warp and shift, the breakfast around you isn't quite right.
Here at The Convergence Diner, parallel worlds merge, creating a surreal blend of realities. You slide into a booth and a seemingly ordinary meal is haphazardly plopped down in front of you. Without a word of explanation, the waitress rushes away, leaving your unanswered questions hanging in the air. Upon closer inspection of your breakfast, you are drawn into an otherworldly realm where eggs ooze with mysterious whites, pancakes take on mystical shapes, and the waffles have strange patterns.
The surreal fusion of expected and strange at The Convergence Diner is a fitting representation of my recent experience with ai. As creatives, we often find ourselves working alone, brainstorming and generating ideas in solitude. Then, an unlikely collaboration led me to a breakthrough when I started experimenting with Midjourney and ChatGPT. Suddenly, I wasn't alone in a creative vacuum. Ideas were no longer just echoes. They were dialogues of concepts and insights that pushed my creativity further.
This photo series is a tribute to this unexpected partnership. When I first experimented with Midjourney, my goal was simple: to create a classic diner breakfast. But as I gave it directions, things got weird. The AI came up with funny interpretations of common breakfast items: eggs with too many yolks or none at all, waffles with unusual grid patterns, scrambled eggs served in an orange juice glass, and pancakes in strange shapes. I found it amusing and started thinking about what it would look like to create dishes like this in real life.
As the project progressed, it evolved from a funny collaboration to a genuine breakthrough in creativity. I started with my idea of making weird breakfast dishes and turned to ChatGPT for brainstorming. I shared my concept of transforming this diner into a bizarre otherworldly portal, and it began offering scientific theories and sci-fi themes that could make my idea more interesting. Talking with ChatGPT was different than just googling. I could ask specific questions, dive deep into my concepts, and explore how they could work within the overarching theme. My idea quickly grew from just creating weird foods inspired by Midjourney to building a Convergence Diner - a meeting place of different dimensions that played with theories like visual echoes, temporal convergence, and the multiverse. It turned into a strange but wonderful portal, a place for escape.
An even stranger development occurred as I continued working on the project over the weeks. Midjourney, which had initially been creating these strange breakfast interpretations, began to evolve. It started generating near-perfect dishes consistently, without any difference in my prompts. I was seeing the quick progress of AI technology. This project captures a moment in time that's quickly fading, an era of anomalies and mistakes that are already becoming a thing of the past.
This photo series, like the universe's punchline, steps far out of our comfort zone, blending human creativity and artificial intelligence in a way that's equally terrifying and exciting. It challenges us to look beyond the ordinary, to question what we think we know, and to explore the endless possibilities that come with technology and imagination. It offers a sneak peek into the future of creative work, where AI evolves from being just a tool to becoming a collaborator.
