Welcome to the AWAKE -Tarot card deck Creator´s blog. This blog covers tarot topics, from the hated and loved AI digital art that divides people, to compilations of what it was like to create tarot cards with the power of AI.
As for my background, I can tell you that I'm a multidisciplinary cultural professional: an industrial designer, graphic designer, and 3D artist by education and currently working in marketing. I have graduated from an art school and have had numerous online and real-life art courses. Of all the traditional media, I love working with oil paints and charcoals the most. Also when I stopped working as a 3D artist, I slowly drifted into sculpting.
So why tarot cards with the help of AI?
I've been thinking about making a tarot deck for a few years now. I myself have had an Aleister Crowley Thoth deck in use for over 23 years, more or less actively through the years, and when I acquired the deck at the age of 20, it was love at first sight. The precision and understanding that the cards have a strong relation to the person having a reading is something indescribable.
I've been using AI myself for a few years now, ever since it was in children's shoes. This year everything fell into place, the realization that AI had developed to the point where I could easily complete my project. What interests me about AI is its access in seconds to tarot acknowledge, symbols, and graphics from all over the internet. I was interested in what elements it would bring to our cards. Also, its way of "seeing" the world like a toddler without any finished form is intriguing. There are many "mistakes" in the cards that I love. The AIs can't count and don't understand what they see. A hand can turn into a foot and there are always too many fingers and limbs and they join in the wrong places. A good example of this is Major Arcana XII's Hanged Man card. The man is hanging by his leg which is attached to a slightly odd spot. These mistakes carry me to a surrealistic dreamy existence and it´s the thing I love the most.
Working with the AI
While working with an AI may seem like just the push of a button, it's quite a tedious assistant to control. Verbal prompts are easily misunderstood and a single card may require dozens of re-renderings and evolutions. AI programs are not free either; creating a high-resolution image genuinely costs credits.
As a rule, I have given verbal instructions on what I want to see in the picture: a man with a sword picking flowers, a lily pad, maybe some esoteric symbol, but I have also left room for the AI to be creative - only because my own understanding is so locked into reality that a lot of the fun stuff would have been left out of the cards. Unfortunately, it would not have even occurred to me to replace one of the horse's legs with a wooden wheel as the AI did.
So please relate to this tarot deck as a work of art while giving it a chance to guide you into your secret mind. The proportions and construction of the card illustrations are not based on realism and I have deliberately left errors on the cards when post-processing the images.
This deck is a collaboration between woman and machine - I also like to think of all the entities outside our own dimension that may have been involved in the process of energetically influencing the content of the cards. All life on earth is energy and they say the spirit world, for example, can use technology to communicate better with us. When I think about the moment when the idea of AI and tarot cards came into my mind it was a very sudden, random thought in my ear: like a whisper from outside. So there are many layers and many different consciousnesses in this deck. I hope you enjoy the cards as much as I enjoy creating their artificial layers.
Chixi Stone
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