Premise
The Cassettes Series is the combination of my cassettes hobby and my experiments using new AI tools and techniques to find new design langauge and expressions.
AI is modern alchemy
AI is like modern alchemy: you try a bunch of things and see what sticks.
It’s hard to design with something you don’t know the overwhelmingly complex “how-to” and its unrealized potentialse, specially when you aim to push for the sweet spot in the uncanny valley. From prompt engineering, inpainting to ControlNet and latent space walking, I imployed a variety of different methods and techniques to bring the ideas and narrative into my cassette j-card designs. Sometimes we lead each other to unexpected places and got me moving onto a different directions, sometimes we lead each other into deadends.
I’m far from happy with the results of most of my cassette designs. But the experiments play a vital role in formulating my thoughts and discourse on AI as a design tool and medium.
Sunny Summer Mix.5
For this tape, I started by creating a mask in which the AI can only generate inside the cutout texts (inpainting technique).
When ControlNet was not giving me the desired playfulness that I look for in this design, I realized that I can use the same inpainting technique to create controlled compositions to tame the AI randomness instead.
After generating different composition blocks and comp them back together using traditional digital tools, I got to the design
Venus Vol.1
Venus is a hi-fi jazz album recorded using my latest hi-end tape deck. Being the name of the planet, as well as being the symbol for female, together with The Birth of Venus and being the first hi-fi tape recorded on my new (old) tape deck, I want the tape design to merge all of these ideas together.
I decided to get hold of NASA's image of Venus' active volcanoes and style-transfered that using Stable Diffusion with prompts that connotates with the idea of the woman.
After many AI generations and trials and errors, I arrived at something that feels "alive" to me.
Intermission Vol.4
Intermission Vol.4 was a brass-heavy Nu jazz (New jazz) tape. So I wanted to draw an "uncanny" horn as the center image.
To get the AI to generate a desired horn with the correct length and overall shape, I quickly "noodled" out a horn using my mouse before input that into the AI to style-transfer it into a "real" uncanny one.
