The experiments conducted during this research can be thought of as a spatial exploration of MidJourney's v6.0's latent space.
Like a photographer travelling and taking pictures of new places they visit, the generated images can be imagined as photographs depicting the different locations, creatures and phenomena encountered inside the model's latent space.
The 'photographs' below represent the 'memories' of one of these travels:
The journey through the latent space began in a visual landscape typical of an adventure within MidJourney's visual creations. It felt like I had stepped into an oil painting, where every detail was crafted from bold and well-visible brushstrokes. Everything that I would get close to became clearly visible, but I struggled to see what was further away in the distance.
Everything in this place seemed to belong on a canvas, where emotions and abstract qualities were vividly portrayed as visual metaphors. The colours were vibrant, the forms exaggerated, and every scene conveyed more than just a physical reality. It conveyed a story, a mood, an underlying emotion. It was a place where the intangible became tangible, and feelings took shape before my eyes.
As I ventured deeper into my journey, I encountered scenes and creatures that felt oddly familiar. Yet, despite their familiarity, their non-visual attributes—emotions, ideas, even sounds—remained visible, still expressed through those ever-present visual metaphors.
As I continued along this path, these metaphors gradually faded, and my surroundings became increasingly similar to the world I knew. Proportions, shapes, and textures returned to a more realistic form, grounding me in a sense of normality.
The colours softened, the exaggerated forms settled into proportionate shapes, and for a brief moment, I was back in a world that made sense and suddenly felt at home.
Just as everything began to look like home, the proportions started to wrap, and strange elements appeared in every direction. Objects that had once seemed ordinary began to twist and stretch in impossible ways, and unfamiliar details started to creep into the periphery of my vision. Although I could still recognise my surroundings, there was something off about them, as if reality itself was beginning to unravel.
Indeed, something was wrong with these strange, distorted encounters. The path led me to the strangest place I had ever experienced, where every concept my mind could conceive seemed to be mixed without any apparent logic. It was as if the rules of the world had been rewritten, and everything that should have been impossible was now possible. The familiar had become unfamiliar, and I was left to navigate a landscape that defied logic and reason.
Upon closer inspection, what initially appeared familiar quickly unravelled into nonsensical, absurd forms. Shapes I thought I knew transformed into bizarre, twisted versions of themselves, and the scenes around me grew increasingly surreal. It was a bizarre experience, leaving me unsure of what to do, but the thrill of exploring so many unfamiliar phenomena kept me moving forward. The more I saw, the more curious I became, eager to uncover the next strange, inexplicable sight.
Soon, even the last recognisable shapes vanished. All that remained were clouds of colour, merging and shifting as I advanced. The landscape had dissolved into a chaotic sea of hues and tones where form and structure no longer existed. It was as if I had reached the edge of existence, where the fabric of reality itself began to fade and dissolve into pure abstraction.
Eventually, everything around me broke down into a chaotic mosaic of pixelated noise. Even the pixels themselves seemed odd, as if they, too, had been corrupted, their colours bleeding into each other, their shapes dissolving into incomprehensible patterns. The world around me had disintegrated into a field of visual noise, and I found myself lost in this overwhelming, disorienting space.
And then, quite suddenly, the last memory from my adventure. A wall appeared before me, halting my journey.