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"Onism" is a term coined by John Koenig in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, used to describe a frustration or sadness derived from the awareness of how little of the world we will experience in our lives. 

It comes from thinking about unfulfilled experiences, and extends to thoughts about how small and finite we are relative to the realm of all possible experiences/outcomes. As someone who once thought he would have a lifelong career as a painter, this idea resonates with me deeply, and it feels doubly relevant in the context of my relationship with AI and generative art.

ONISM is a project I"ve been working on passionately and circuitously for more than a year. I"ve tested dozens of versions of this algorithm and thousands of outputs, and I like to think it has evolved over time, but it certainly has not been a linear process.

Over that time, a lot of personal emotional history has become calcified in these works. So much of this project is about the regret and longing that"s inextricably tied to art-making for me (and many of us)  all the paintings I wish I"d made but never did. The time I never afforded myself, the sacrifices I never made, the places I never went.

It"s also about the impossibility of conceptualizing infinite possibilities  infinite possible outcomes, infinite possible selves. And of course it"s about the exciting/perplexing idea that these digital images that I"ve created at double-arm"s-length, via two separate generative algorithms, can feel so expressive and authentically imbued with emotion. 

But the beauty in all of it, in the end, is that I actually do get to make all the paintings I wish I"d made but never did. 

And I can keep making more and more of them, thanks to the magical, iterative power of this Long-Form AI paintbrush that I"m lucky enough to hold in my hand.


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ONISM is a Long-Form AI project created with two generative systems: a generative script written in p5.js and a prompt-based AI process via Stable Diffusion. The p5 script outputs an image, which is fed into Stable Diffusion as an img2img input. Both processes incorporate pseudorandom weighted variables that make the outcomes dramatically varied, completely unpredictable, yet deterministic.

All of this was built entirely within EmProps OpenStudio Beta.

ONISM is the first in a series of EmProps MemberTokens. Ownership of a MemberToken confers certain privileges, including a lifetime subscription to EmProps OpenStudio at the Basic subscription tier.

Emil Corsillo
ONISM
EmProps MemberToken #1
Long-Form AI via EmProps OpenStudio Beta
2688 x 3456 PNG
October 9th, 2023