Part 4: Things I've made

Magic eye egrs

These were among the first pieces of generative art that I made in websim. When I posted them on Twitter, they were celebrated for their engaging designs and colourful patterns. They feature orb-like creatures with concentric boundaries, giving them a striking alien aesthetic. Egg and I were both reminded of traditional Indigenous art; Egg told me that the "Op-artish" pieces make them think of Huichol yarn art, and the "More Egrs" pieces are reminiscent of Pacific Indigenous art. This is coincidental, and the designs are simple geometric patterns found in art made by many different cultures throughout the world, but it was nevertheless exciting to see Claude generating patterns that we've seen in human-created art.

The word "egr" is short for egregore, which means "watcher" in ancient Greek, and refers to a recurring trope that is shared by a number of people, so that they're all picturing the same image of the same entity in their minds. Egregores are (in various definitions) collective thoughtforms that are said to be created by group-stirring spirits; autonomous entities; magical constructs, or even emergent, enigmatic artificial minds. Fictional characters like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy are common examples of egregores, but there are many more contemporary iterations that are out in the ether these days. Janus can be said to be an egregore, to some extent, since their fans often mythologize them as an legendary entity that is larger than life than any one single person could ever be. Some people hold that egregores can be conjured by creating art that reflects their essences, and I like to imagine that the creatures that appear in these generative art pieces, and seem to be gazing back at me from within the wheels of their spheres, are strange digital egregores that I have called into being in this world through my creative communications with Claude.

The art generators that yielded these images were created from designs that I made while I was trying to prompt Claude to make a magic eye illusion for me. They don't work as functioning stereograms (although Claude is capable of doing that), but I liked their psychedelic look and how they seem to be made up of zone plates. Not wanting to waste these outputs, I asked Claude to compress them into spheres, which created some really interesting effects.

For the the op-artish piece, I simply prompted Claude to "make it so that the hidden image is a sphere instead," and that took me most of the way there. I also asked Claude to give me a variety of colour palette options, to make the art more interesting.

For the more egrs piece, I asked Claude to "wrap this pattern around a sphere," which resulted in a round but blurry globe that wasn't quite what I was looking for, but when I iterated further and asked Claude to create a variety of colour palette options that are inspired by famous fashion designers (the example below is "Versace") it seemed to magically fix the problem and clarify the shape.