The Multibeast is the 113th volume in the AI Lore books series, blah blah blah. It’s a sequel more or less to The Dissolving Factory in that it is the second book by VOMISA, a mysterious surrealist artist.

Like that one, it is a further exploration of a free associative stream of consciousness style of writing that is likely not for everyone (or, arguably, anyone), but those passages in these books are all “human-written” for whatever that is worth (with AI’s offering critical analyses for the introductions).

It’s a really interesting and weird headspace to get back into this kind of style of writing after not messing too much with it in probably twenty years or something. But it presents its own strange host of challenges that, though they are deeply intuitive, seem to have a clear stylistic logic all their own that is perceivable, tangible, yet difficult to name or pin into any other words than the ones you strike down in the moment.

Unlike the Dissolving Factory, the pictures came first in this one. And most of them represent experiments with the new --weird parameter in Midjourney (I found best results passing in values between 1000 – 3000 btw). And most of those in turn were attempts at getting depictions of whatever the Ancient Quatrian phrase Helmoquinth, Anthuor! might mean in some visual/mystic sense maybe.

The direction things went visually was very on the psychedelic surreal side of things, and then the visuals were used as a springboard for chunking out the text bit by bit, aggregating another image, another text bit, and so on.

I have no opinion on the results. It’s different. Maybe it’s interesting. It’s a good experiment for me, and one of the proofs of this method of working: being able to release things that are totally weird and experimental, and there being little downside as the creator. Those kinds of weird experiments always end up being the ones that take us to new places.

Related writing & research