The aesthetic significance of Midjourney

The thrill of automation is always linked with a sense of comfort and being in control. This is the attraction of Midjourney; you type in a few carefully thought keywords, hit enter, lay back and boom! Your faithful servant has produced a masterpiece for you. Like God, you have spoken a new thing into existence! 

The interesting part about Midjourney is that it has a very recognisable physiognomy or signature style. It evokes misty atmospheres, volumetric light rays, ghostly spaces, fuzzy silhouettes - in short, it is sublime. The aesthetic category of 'sublime' is defined as an emotion of awe when confronted with greatness beyond comprehension. According to philosophers like Edmund Burke, Kant and Schopenhauer, the sublime emotion is always associated with a sort of terror of the unknown:

"Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the idea of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling … When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience" – Edmund Burke

For Burke, the triggers of the sublime were darkness, obscurity, privation or vastness. All these descriptors definitely apply to the landscapes generated by Midjourney, which seem to evoke an almost religious fascination; what Rudolph Otto called 'numinous'; deriving from the Latin ‘numen’ which means ‘arousing spiritual or religious emotion; mysterious or awe-inspiring’. Midjourney vistas evoke a mix of fascination and terror; a sense of ascension, immateriality, something akin to the freeing of the immortal soul from the cage of material existence.

The subtext of this aesthetic experience is the misleading association of spiritual ascension with automation or machine use. For optimists it is the hope that we are evolving into god-like beings, or that AI will bring about some glorious Singularity which will allow us to reach 'digital ascension', upload our minds into computers and be free of biology. For pessimists, it is pure nightmare fuel; the emergence of a mysterious entity that will spell doom for human beings. And judging by the popularity of dystopian fiction over utopian ideologies, I would suggest pessimists are by far more creative, fertile minds. 

Artistic creativity is always a participative act; when you relegate it to a set of machine tools and a fixed manner of visual re-presentation based on written keywords, you strip it of its numinous qualities.

Yes, you can later use the AI-generated atmospheres for brainstorming and sparking your own creativity, but this does not solve the main problem, that you are no longer taking an active role in imagining that concept. Thus, the proliferation of AI-generated art inevitably leads to standardisation and easily recognisable mass-produced fantasy landscapes or characters; the signature neon lights, subtle brush strokes; teals and orange, low distant fog, Romantic vistas reminiscent of Turner with a Gothic twist; the recurrence of Steampunk or Cyberpunk motifs, Lovecraftian monstrous beings etc.

Using computer algorithms as a substitute for human design devalues all art and strips it of its numinous traits. This is even more sinister with Midjourney, given that it purports to be the very thing it tries to deny - sublime, numinous and mystical, rather than rationalistic or hyper-realistic. Turning Romanticism into a predictable recipe will eventually make us sick of it. The following quote is about music, but can be applied to visual arts just as easily:

"A piece of music I have passively heard and overheard is familiar to the point of having no life; a piece of music practised and struggled with by a musician is familiar to the point of coming alive. One is emptied of meaning by being constantly represented; the other is enriched in meaning by being constantly present – lived with, and actively incorporated into ‘my’ life" - Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary.

The quote captures the very essence of authenticity. Painting a landscape - real or imagined - is a participatory act. As a living human you must rely on your imagination for envisioning that which you wish to materialise. The numinous is a first person experience; turning it into an automatic process can just as easily be described as mockery or pure negation. One can only hope that after this new fad has exhausted all its possibilities and bored us to death, we will not throw the baby with the bathwater and forget all about classical painting.

If you enjoyed this article and would like to explore further on the topic of sublime, I have written a few additional articles on my blog:

The aesthetic category of sublime - an introduction

Exploration and the Sublime

Art, Beauty, Religious Experience