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Neil Blank

@neil.blank

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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

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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

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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

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Lately I have been fantasizing about turning my studio into a cave. Here, by firelight, I would work late into the night encroached by stone in some inhuman hug. Discreet speakers would whisper low growls of predators. Occassional signs of life, an ant, perhaps, would crawl across the keyboard. Is this office logical? Not at all. What does this strange craving suggest?

Two years ago, we visited the Anahuacalli Museum in Mexico City on my birthday. “Made up entirely of carved rock that originated from the eruption of the Xitle volcano,” it houses Diego Rivera’s collection of pre-Hispanic art. The lower level is meant to reflect the underworld, almost a crypt, where snake mosaics slither across the ceiling, alters invoke the gods of another era, and diffused, orange light enters through windows made of onyx. Diego kept his studio upstairs, closer to the light in the earthly realm - though I wonder if he did his dreaming down closer to the netherworld. I would.

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Bassano del Grappa. Day 2. After a day in Milan, we hopped the train to arrive at the invite of @bbdb_studio to open Edition 15: Dream Recordings, as part of their quarterly exhibitions in the small town of Bassano del Grappa. Co-founder @dariobuzzini slowly walked us along the riverfront, as though we had no agenda or great undercurrents of urgency, and I short-circuited my Americanness for a brief moment to become Insta-Italian and indulge in such liberties.

The thrill was total. Here I was in this new place, with these new people, by invite, to share something that was mine. All because I had asked, quite casually on an IG story last year: “Anyone want to collaborate?”

These feelings followed me across the Ponte Degli Aplini, designed by Andrea Palladio circa 1567, where locals sipped on ‘mezzo e mezzo,’ a regional cocktail not so dissimilar in color to the oxblood wooden footbridge. (Side note: I think maroon may be more brat than chartreuse.) Two blocks up the road we arrived at BBDB’s storefront studio and got to work hanging. Leisurely breaks for gelato and neighborly hellos - including one from a noxiously gassy, though sweet, old bulldog who came by to cool his belly on the terrazzo - kept the prepwork memorable.

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Milan. Day 1. Convinced my jet-lagged legs to hoof it to the Fondazione Prada where gilted facades kept my eyelids open through 90 degree heat which threatened to puddle me. We cooled off with an unknown flavored popsicle in the Wes-Anderson-designed-cafe, which fell flat, quite literally, in almost every ersatz-y way. The highlight: Thomas Demand, who deserves his own post.

#iitravelguide #iiguide #iiitaly #travel #design #arttravel #TravelGram #TravelDiaries #TravelPhorography #Travelogues #CultureHunter #CreativeCulture #ArtTravel #HiddenGems #SecretSpots #Milan #Prada

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The Death By Tube Amp Record Club: Session #59

Allah-Las / Amenra / Archie Shepp / Bappi Lahiri & Asha Bhosle / Beach Fossils / Discos Resaca Collective / Elia y Elizabeth / Eric B. & Rakim / Fishbone / Gabriel Faure / Gang Starr / Garrett Saracho / John Barry / JUNE of 44 / Lake of Dracula / Manu Dibango / Maximum Joy / Merry Clayton / Muddy Waters / Nick Cave & Warren Ellis / Night Owls & Hollie Cook / Power Trip / Prince Buster / Serge Gainsbourg / Shira Small / Silver Apples / Sophia Loren / The Ordinary Boys & Lady Sovereign / Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth / The Ethiopians / The Pretty Things / The Specials / The Style Council / The Village Callers / Two Tons of Love

Playlist from 7/29/23 with selections by @vinyl_g @pkigongo @c90blank @tortilladc @jongranat @djkristinab @neil.blank @_toddanderson

Spotify playlist:
https://tinyurl.com/bdzcecwe
Master playlist:
https://tinyurl.com/4j7vstvc

Album cover from Shira Small's "The Line of Time and the Plane of Now":
https://numerogroup.com/products/the-line-of-time-and-the-plane-of-now

#ericbandrakim #muddywaters #eliayelizabeth #bappilahiri #ashabhosle #manudibango #shirasmall #archieshepp #garrettsaracho @nickcaveofficial @thewarrenellis @allahlas #thespecials #realpeterock #fishbone #gangstarr #theethiopians #lakeofdracula @powertriptx @amenra_official @discosresaca #deathbytubeamp #recordclub #vinylclub I

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People have asked me who I reference for character faces when working in #AI. I always create amalgamations of many individuals, so that no portrait is immediately recognizable as any one person. Nevertheless, one of those inspiration points is drawn from the face of artist Nadya Tolokonnikova - a member of Russian performance and protest group Pussy Riot. Her bravery is astonishing.

Neil and I were fortunate to get access to a showing of Nadya’s exhibit ‘Putin’s Ashes’ here at the Container Gallery in Santa Fe last night. Seemed rare to be able to pair such #AI studies with part of its inspirational source together, in real-time, in a single post.

First and last image are mine, the rest from Nadya’s exhibition. Thank you @helen_kornblum for the invite.

#looseassociations @container_turnercarroll #stablediffusion

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Neil enters his Neilithic period. Wish him a happy birthday.

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