The Flowers of Ukraine
Happy first day of Spring 2022!
In February, I stumbled upon a Twitter Spaces event held by the AI community on Twitter. When I asked, “How does AI art work? Do you have any hand in it? Or does the AI create all the art for you?” And as technologically advanced their way of creating art is, so is their way of answering questions enlightened — to me, at least, who’s used to being mansplained: “How about this: instead of telling you how it works, how about we show you how it works?” At the prompt of ONE phrase that I’ve given them on the spot, they then individually created art as unique as they are as human beings.
After some days, like a small child teeming with enthusiasm for a newfound love, unafraid of grown-up-life imposed limitations, I experimented in making my own AI art. And to my surprise, it not only yielded an aesthetic image, entirely different from the original photo I fed the AI, it triggered in me — more importantly — the urge to write a poem partly based on the image generated by the AI, and largely based on my sentiments about the Russian-Ukraine crisis that had just begun at that time.
And thus, here’s the first NFT poem I’ve ever written based on an AI- generated image that I partially created. It is now minted and available to buy on https://zang.gallery/nft?id=9 at the testing-the-waters price of 2 Matic, which is, at the time of this publication, equivalent to about 3 US dollars. It comes in a limited edition of 10. The original minting of 10 was executed as a growing-pains mistake on a Metamask address that is now lost forever, thus, can never be retrieved.
Though the world may be in turmoil — and we are constantly apprehensive of the effects of the Russian-Ukraine conflict not only on our Ukrainian brothers and sisters, but also the rest of the world, I think on the words of Alexander Pope, “Hope springs eternal…”
