I play Dungeons and Dragons, and I got the opportunity to DM for a campaign I was a part of. I didn’t have access to a lot of the lore books, and I am a big fan of homebrew content. As a DM, one of your primary goals is worldbuilding for your characters. One aspect of worldbuilding is, of course, the map of the mystical lands your characters will be traveling to over the course of your D&D sessions.
Now worldbuilding is hard, so there are a lot of tips and tricks for that kind of thing, especially in the context of D&D. One such famous tip is the “Pasta Method” for making maps. I don’t have it saved, otherwise I would cite it here. However, it is a popular technique, and I am sure you can find other versions of it all over the internet if you wish. This method involves pasta, a pencil, and some paper. If you want to get fancy with it, you can use different types of pasta or different colors to denote regions. You also don’t necessarily need to use pasta. I’ve seen rice, beans, M&M’s, dice, even, used as well for this sort of thing. All you have to do is throw the pasta on the paper, group and shift the pasta to your liking, then outline the shape of the pasta with a pencil. Once this is done, BOOM. You have a fantastical map that you can place fantastical forests and cities in (which pasta can also help with).
Ok, the point I am making with this example is that this is a form of physical random generation. It takes away the need to think out every detail of every line of your coast, and allows you to create something new. It uses your skill as a pattern-recognizing human and random generation to its fullest advantage. I find that Mark Amerika’s work do much the same type of thing. Just in a much more sophisticated, artistic way.
I am starting to see a consistent theme of AI generated art – specifically the generative ones Amerika seems to like to play with. That is, AI generated and physically generated arts seem to have success because they can create something random from which we can use our specially-trained-ancestrally-passed-down-for-survival pattern-recognizing instincts to create something interesting. Take the 3 word story example from class today. Your brain is making abstract connections and using defined patterns to connect the dots and create a cohesive story. That is an incredible testament to the human mind in conjunction with creativity, and I have a growing theory that pattern recognition and subsequently pattern divergence is a foundation of human creativity.
The wrench in all of this is the big spooky neural networks and machine learners. We are effectively teaching something else this type of pattern recognition, and I can’t say for sure if we have been all that successful. Mark Amerika is successful, however, because he seems to understand this sort of fundamental aspect. He creates these AI works, and the AI acts like the pasta, but Mark Amerika then takes the pasta and synthesizes it into something that has meaning, and that is where the art lives.