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Karin Fyhrie

@designcurio

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Founder and Creative Director: Sovereign Objects.
☁️Lover: @vast.attic

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Sometimes I miss Sora ssssshhhhhhh by @designcurio

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2 months ago

Just coming off the high of sharing recent work at Google I/O as part of programming for visiting journalists. Taking this as a moment to share two things:

1) Photos from last December, where Flow session artists and filmmakers came together to reveal work and celebrate each other. These people really helped ignite a fire in me.

2) Some ideas I’m circling as I work on a longer talk this year. If you know of a space, community, event or conference that I would be a good fit for, please reach out to me with suggestions.

* Creativity has two modes: pressurized (briefs, deadlines, necessity, constraints) and open (space, no goal, exploratory, free)
* Both modes can yield amazing things…
* Open-mode creativity, however, is an endangered practice
* Sustaining it requires more economic and social structure
* The threat isn’t new; the tools are
* My hope for AI: new creative possibilities > efficiency only
* Stop measuring AI against existing disciplines
* Some of the best work doesn’t know what it is yet
* AI is most interesting where it’s most alien
* If it looks familiar, it’s a failure
* Seek what only AI can do — beyond faster, cheaper.
* Ambivalence is a useful starting point. Curiosity and skepticism can co-exist by @designcurio

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5 months ago

Five years ago I made a perfume called Mad Sea to signal something I couldn't say directly: that I was really angry. I didn't expect Google's full AI suite — handed to me freely as part of a 2025 artist residency — to be what finally sent me back to that chapter. 
The scent combined ambergris (the chemical residue of a battle between giants, the sperm whale and giant squid), plus pungent violet leaf and seaweed. I wasn't sure if it was a shield or a conceptual weapon, but I liked that it could be invisible to everyone except me. 
What I didn't realize was that the perfume had already seeded my art practice. Three years ago I built my first AI dataset and offhandedly labeled it "Green World." Only in this residency did I look back and see those images differently — not just green. Deadly. A concoction of toxic algae and radioactive uranium glass perfume bottles from the 1930s — bottles I'd discovered when imagining how Mad Sea might be packaged. The glowing radioactive green felt like my anger: intense, dangerous, acidic. I had been painting with poison the whole time. 
In this free-associative work, poison stopped being just a subject or a color and became a tool. To sabotage Veo's aesthetic biases from the inside, I built what I called an Aesthetic Poison Agent: a way of introducing dissonance into how prompts get written — where false meaning and stylistic linkages originate. Corruption becomes part of the craft. The process revealed something: the only way to render subjects that felt relatable to my anger was to stop describing them as human. No "women," no "people," no "bodies." Rather: as physics and raw materials. The poisoning of meaning was the path to something more true. 
That became the film: Mad Sea. A conjuring of feelings I didn't know I was carrying. The great irony is that the piece itself is disembodied — analytical and controlled, quite un-ragey, really. But it has shown me a shape, a color, a scent of ideas I'm circling in these early stages of my practice — a that’s enough to keep going. 
Thank you to @flowbygoogle, @briannadoyle, and @nyenver for the space and guidance. And to my husband @neil.blank for the music.
#AI #genAI by @designcurio

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5 months ago

When Google gave me free access to its AI suite, I spent the first half of the residency trying to slingshot past the pull of its aesthetic gravities. In doing so, could I make /find an image from a rare coordinate of the latent space? One that felt novel to my eyes? Try as I might, I didn’t. But in that quest, I learned a few strategies.

This behind-the-scenes breakdown is practice for a substack. I use one artifact, a dream sequence that developed as a byproduct of the residency, to dig into examples of my plight.

Steal techniques. Or share the secrets that help you resist the influence of probabilistic pulls.

Thank you @briannadoyle, @nyenver and @flowbygoogle for the opportunity to explore this infinite, alien space of AI.

For the full video, see previous post. Special shoutouts to @neil.blank for music and @visualfrisson for editing

#genAi #AI #resistingprobability by @designcurio

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6 months ago

When I was 6, I had my first idea for an invention. I wanted to build a dream recorder. Looking back today, I’m not only wondering a) what stopped me from trying… but b) what if I imagined I’d had? Would reconstructing the past elicit an act of reparenting? Might the use of generative technology enable me to retrain my gaze and how I see myself - starting very, very young. Could i look on at little Karin with a certain kind of encouragement, fondness, and curiosity? Would that act of image-making trick my hard-wired brain to see a different kind of young girl, and therefore, a different kind of woman who I’ve since become? It’s an idea I’ve been cautiously circling for a few years now and am logging various experiments in what may become the seed of new project. taken in Los Angeles, California by @designcurio

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7 months ago

In films, I’ve always loved a dream sequence. Last winter, as part of the second Google Flow Sessions AI residency, I was selected as one of a small cohort of artists and given six weeks of open access to Google VEO. I used that time to sneak a two-minute dream sequence into a larger ten-minute story. This interlude takes inspiration from a disturbing, recurring dream I’ve had since I was a child. In it, my head is detached from my body. It isn’t violent; it’s a strangely practical act of decapitation—one that separates the logic of the mind from the body’s more uncomfortable realm of feeling.

My dreams didn’t look like this. I wasn’t trying to recreate them. I used the sequence as a way to stay inside a feeling of disorientation, without asking it to resolve into anything legible. I also wanted to see what I could get away with in VEO, assuming much could be censored. What kinds of symbolic violence were permitted? Where did abstraction become necessary—blood, nudity, fragmentation—and where did it oddly not? Could VEO hold onto the aesthetic logic of my original Stable Diffusion illustrations once motion was introduced?

After creating a 3-tiered prompt structure that introduced layers of chaos, I stumbled onto a particular motion and distortion that felt alive—so I stayed there. There’s nothing “new” here visually—I didn’t crack the technology or reach some distant coordinate of the latent space. But for a moment, it felt like working just outside its gravitational pull, in an orbit that made me want to keep dreaming.

That feeling carried through the edit, shaped by @visualfrisson and paired with one of @neil.blank’s soundscapes still in development. Play with SOUND ON.

More soon: a behind-the-scenes breakdown, and the larger work this sequence lives inside.

Credits:
Director / Creator: @designcurio
Music: @neil.blank
Editing: @visualfrisson

Tools:
Images: Stable Diffusion x Lora fine-tuning, Nano Banana
Video: Google Veo / Flow
Prompting accomplice: Google AI Studio

#AIFilm #AIShortFilm #AICinema #ExperimentalFilm #ExperimentalCinema by @designcurio

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9 months ago

In 2022 I started developing a perfume called Mad Sea. It was an attempt to make a scent that would signal my anger for me. On the outside, I could remain calm. Professional. And on the inside I could fury freely.

This narrative is re-emerging for a project I'm developing as 1 of 10 artists in the second cohort of Google's AI residency (Flow Sessions). I have one more week to make sense of this scent journey and tie it together into a story. Wish me luck! taken in Los Angeles, California by @designcurio

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10 months ago

When I asked a friend and colleague which characters—real or fictional—might play her in a film, she mentioned, among others, a baby deer. From my character studies, this creature appeared.

I love the make-up, the deliberate artifice of it. I pulled the portrait from Stable Diffusion into Runway to give it some movement—the beginning of a play, perhaps A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the age of modern anxieties.

There’s something familiar in the stiffness of her gestures, their action trapped mid-fear. In tense meeting rooms, I recognize my body’s rehearsal for danger—a freeze taking hold. The core goes cold and my organs shiver.

In this tale: what does the deer in headlights do? I wonder if she’ll move.

#aiart #stablediffusion #runwayml #dreamlogic by @designcurio

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a year ago

I've been struggling with the sheer volume of AI experiments on my computer — literally thousands of studies with no stage, no home, no... value? It's hard to tell. They do seem to be drawing me closer to some form of self-expression that I'm craving. This weekend I decided that I'm going to take the existing body of work to create a series of music videos for Neil. He's already got a new album in the works and the freedom of exploring a visual world from a purely emotional perspective — without the need for use-case or narrative — is feeling particularly attractive. What do you all think of a Valentines Day audiovisual performance? @neil.blank may veto ;) by @designcurio

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a year ago

I love the enthusiasm and effort Danaé puts into her new podcast, Pencil Pod. This custom background teaser really adds texture to the nature of our conversation - AND we got to send each other cave inspiration in the making of. Have a listen. taken in Los Angeles, California by @designcurio

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a year ago

[ 🔈Sound On ] I recently had the urge to look at (a sampling!) of three years of free-associative AI sequences in aggregate. This 4m sequence is an accumulation of late nights in the studio, following impressions without a brief or goal — just seeing where they go. Most of what the model produces I never download; the work is in refusing what falls flat and pushing against the model’s defaults in search of something more new, or more true.

The pace of the process is what feels unique: thinking and rendering almost at the speed of thought. Images overwrite each other in real time, dissolving and reforming in ways that seem possible only in this medium. It’s closer to recording a subconscious drift than composing a narrative.

Viewed together, the sequences form a kind of map of patterns I couldn’t have planned for: women screaming, women working together, scenes of alienation, hints of climate catastrophe. Not tidy stories, but recurring signals that perhaps get closer to what I’m feeling and an impressionistic, non-linear language I’m more comfortable in.

Images: @designcurio x Stable Diffusion
Music: looped from Ka Baird’s ‘The Unshown’ by @designcurio

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a year ago

I met Danaé when I gave a talk in LA about my art practice using AI. She came up to me with such openness and enthusiasm and we quickly got to talking about all things design, modern anxieties, and being a woman in the industry. She interviewed me recently for her new podcast, Pencil Pod, where we expanded into other territories - including my most recent cave fascination.

Find the podcast on her IG. by @designcurio

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a year ago