THE BOOK OF NIGHTMARES

You may not know this, but back in my college days at Exeter University I majored in classical composition. For my finals piece I created a multi-faceted composition which was based on ‘The Book of Nightmares’ by American poet, Galway Kinnell. The piece was called ‘The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible’ and was created for string quartet, 6-voice choir, synthesizer (SH-101), a narrator, several actors and percussionists performing on car parts.

Fast forward 30 years or so and we now live in an incredible age when I can ask Chat GPT to summarise the content of ‘The Book of Nightmares’ and from that create a series of prompts to generate artwork using the incredible Dall•E-3 Ai Engine.

Now, regardless what you think about AI art, this is a pretty incredible image. What I’m learning through my experiments in this medium, is that it’s opening amazing worlds of possibilities. Similar developments are happening in the world of music creation, and they are inevitable, so as creatives we need to understand them and embrace them for what they are. People will always want the ‘real thing’ and that human connection between the artist and the art, and that won’t cease to exist … it’s just worth remembering that ART IS NOT STATIC … it’s always been shifting, changing, evolving. 

And this is just its latest evolution.

For those of you who are interested in the prompt side of things, this is the prompt I used to generate the image.

“Illustration in a detailed, fantastical style reminiscent of early 16th-century Northern Renaissance art, with an emphasis on symbolic representation of a dreamscape from Galway Kinnell’s ‘The Book of Nightmares’. The scene depicts a cosmic tree with sprawling roots entangled with the essences of life and death, overseeing a mystical birth. An ancient cityscape in the background, with stones that whisper ancestral secrets and shadows that narrate tales of passion and melancholy. Above, a dynamic night sky throbs with starlight, and a river reflecting the moon’s phases flows through, symbolizing the passage of time. The image blends the tangible with the ethereal, capturing the continuous journey of the soul through transient and everlasting elements.”