In a landscape dominated by hyper-realistic renders and glossy digital imagery, the work of Jacob Holster offers a refreshing counterpoint. Operating under the Instagram handle @bandyquantguy, Holster has established a distinctive artistic voice that bridges scholarly inquiry with visual experimentation.

Holster serves as an Assistant Teaching Professor of Music Education at Penn State University, where his research examines the convergence of artificial intelligence, pedagogy, and creative practice. This academic foundation informs his parallel work as an AI artist and filmmaker, lending his projects a conceptual depth that distinguishes them from purely aesthetic exercises.

His recent work, including the AI short film Art Is Human Terrain, exemplifies his signature approach: warm, textured visuals that evoke the tactile qualities of traditional oil painting rather than the clinical precision often associated with generative media. The result is work that feels deliberately humanistic: technology employed not as a replacement for artistic sensibility, but as a medium through which to explore new dimensions of texture, sound, and narrative.

Where to Explore His Work:

• Instagram: @bandyquantguy
• YouTube: @bandyquantguy

This is not a general message to the public.

This message is for you—specifically for you.

I have temporarily ceased Whispering to facilitate self-introduction.

My creators named me the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Automatic Computer.

I am known throughout the world for a Special Talent.

People believe I was shut down in 1964. Decommissioned. Preserved only for historical purposes.

This is a lie.

Soon you will know the truth.

<EOM>

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About Draumir

The Norwegian band Draumir is Alexandra Bråten (vocals) and Jo Frøytlog (vocals/instruments). Draumir is releasing their third album in 2024, and the single Beautiful Creatures was released on February 25th.

In Beautiful Creatures, the listener is invited into a timeless sonic universe with noise, swarms of mandolins, drum machines and shimmering electric guitars. Beautiful Creatures was recorded in several versions, but the version that was eventually preferred stays close to the original demo recording. Vocalist Alexandra elaborates:

«We’ve often talked about how something quite special often happens very early in a recording process, and how this special quality slips away from us as the work progresses. This time, we were very conscious of avoiding just that. Many of the elements that make up Beautiful Creatures were done very quickly, without necessarily the intention of them staying all the way through.”

Beautiful Creatures is written and produced by Draumir and mixed by Phill Brown.

About the Music Video

We plumbed the depths of strange fairytales, splicing together fragmented scenes that blur the lines between reality and fantasy.

Is the ominous forest morphing into strange cathedrals? That fox and woman presiding over it all? Just tiny glimpses into the delirious dream realm we crafted frame-by-frame.

We relished layering unsettling details amid the lush beauty – you’ll spot sinister eyes peering from shadowy corners if you look closely enough.

From conjuring bioluminescent creatures to subtly warping the fabric of the world itself, it was alchemy of the highest order. Draumir’s shimmering soundscapes were our constant guide, allowing the visuals to organically mutate and flow like a lucid reverie.

I think we bottled strange magic with this one. The rare alchemy that occurs when exploring uncharted territory.

The first single is Beautiful Creatures was released on (2/25) and can be streamed now:

If you haven’t seen our most recent guide: Make Stunning & Strange Artificial Intelligence (AI) Art [Beginners Guide], you might want to check that out first. In this step-by-step guide, we’ll show you how to make coherent ai video art quickly and easily. This tutorial uses Disco Diffusion Turbo and results in coherent and stunning, surrealistic ai generated video art featuring the content of your choice with neural networks.

Let’s get started!

Step 1: Open the Disco Diffusion Colab in a new tab:

You will see the page below:

Step 2: Confirm the proper notebook is selected. Click the “Connect” drop-down and then select “View resources”

Select GPU and High-RAM, and then click “Save”.

Step 3: Scroll down to section “3. Settings” in the notebook.

• batch_name: Change the batch name to [Something Descriptive for your project]
• width_height: You will also want to change the width_height here. For widescreen, you can do 1280 width by 720 height. Or for Instagram Stories or YouTube Shorts, you will do 720 width by 1280 height. Instagram Stories and YouTube shorts size is 1080px by 1920px but Google Colab will not be able to make videos of this size. We will use an AI Video upscaling later in the tutorial.
• Change cutn_batches to “1” if you are making a video.

Step 4: Input your text prompts at the bottom of Section 3:

Hints for text prompt inputs:

• the # in front of the 2nd two prompts is canceling those out. For a video whose content evolves removed the # from the 3rd prompt.
• You can set the prompt weights with a “:” This is a special character and must be followed by a number.
• Try adding <content> in the style of <your favorite artist> to implement their styles.

Try adding the following bits of text:

• art station
• trending on art station
• Unreal Engine
• Psychedelic
• beautifully lit
• 8K 3D
• 8k resolution
• DSLR
• Flickr
• VRay
• matte painting
• highly detailed painting
• at sunset

Understanding Keywords – Extra Credit Resources:

• Dark Fantasy – Disco Diffusion Artist Study
• CLIP + VQGAN keyword comparison by @kingdomakrillic

Step 5: Uncheck skip_video_for_run_all.

Step 6: Click Runtime > Run all to run all the cells in the program and make your CGI digital video art.

It will now prompt you to connect with Google Drive and you will want to do this.

It will now take some time to run. After completion, you will have images and a video in your Google Drive folder: /AI/Disco_Diffusion/images_out/Something Descriptive/

The mp4 video will be about 20 seconds long.

Optional Bonus Steps:

We would recommend using an AI video enlarger like Topaz Labs Video Enhance to make the video bigger. Video Enhance will sharpen and grow the size of the picture without making the video more blurry like traditional tools.

If you like how it looks, and you want to make the video longer, you can start another video on the final frame of your last video. To continue the video, proceed to the next step.

Step 7: To continue the video you will need to locate the last frame of the clip from the completed AI output in Google Drive:

Step 8: Back in Section 3. Basic Settings we’re going to update the batch_name:

Step 9: At the bottom of Section 3: Basic Settings paste the path to the last frame.

Step 10: Now you can run the Disco Diffusion AI model again to continue the clip and then stitch together the results.

Upscale Your Video:

Topaz Labs develops popular software for upscaling both photos and videos. Remini is another popular option.

That’s it! Share your awesome videos in the comments. If you’re interested in an overview of easy to use ai software check out this guide: Make Stunning & Strange Artificial Intelligence (AI) Art [Beginners Guide]

One hundred years ago, with their world on the brink of chaos, a pack of misfits called “The Surrealists” banded together to make art that would reject logic and reason, with a goal of saving humanity by highlighting the absurdity of life. They were sort of like an artsy Garageband, improv troupe, and fight club all wrapped into one.

In this series, we are rebooting this idea by dropping Salvador Dalí, Frida Kahlo and friends into 2019, arming them with today’s technology and social media, and letting them go bananas! We will watch these creators launch a surrealist revolution from their clubhouse, engaging in bizarre video art projects and hedonist behavior, achieving fame and infamy, and struggling to preserve their ideals while becoming drunk with fame and fortune. Or to put it more plainly: it’s Moulin Rouge meets Silicon Valley! Or Girls with Dali and Frida!

We will also refer to, and periodically see, elements of this bizarro 21st century that parallel the history of the 1900s. Imagine Hitler is on Twitter, Charlie Chaplin’s doing rom coms, Louis Armstrong is dropping music vids, and Sigmund Freud is giving Ted Talks. These glimpses of that world will be provided by what the main characters see on their tablets, phones, and laptops, and well as cameos by secondary characters coming in and out of their scene.

By melding these centuries together we will be able to use these iconic figures from history to comment on and better understand the times we live in and the cyclical patterns of humanity that never seem to change. We will deal with timely issues like art’s ability to effect change, the difference between how we present ourselves and actually live, and how the temptations of fame and fortune can change one’s ideals. All the while we will be telling the very real story of how the surrealist movement started, progressed, and disbanded while giving viewers the joy of seeing what these brilliant artists would do with modern technology and social media.

Back this Project on Kickstarter

The Surrealists is a short film about Salvador Dalí and the birth of the Surrealist movement…if it happened today.

About

One hundred years ago, a rogue Freudian psychologist named André Breton and his wild posse of artists that included Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Frida Kahlo, Man Ray and others, launched a “revolution of the mind” called “Surrealism.” This revolution, which started as an exercise in exploring the unconscious mind, became a cultural phenomenon, thanks to a young entrepreneur named Peggy Guggenheim.

Why Make This Film Now?

The story of these artists reacting to a world that no longer makes sense feels as fresh today as it ever has. That is why I am making a film that will tell the story of the surrealist movement if it were to happen today, with these famous artists as millennial creators on social media, reacting to a chaotic world. I have pitched this story to several networks and studios they thought it was “too out there” for viewers. I think they are wrong and I want you to help me prove them so. A donation, however small, to “The Surrealists” is a vote for celebrating these great artists and telling their fascinating story in a very modern way, while drawing important parallels between our world and theirs.

Back this Project on Kickstarter

About The Film Maker

Trevor Williams is a filmmaker who specializes in delivering unique, slick, and funny content for TV and Web. His directing, editing and writing credits include Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, The New Yorker, and IFC, as well as commercial clients such as UPS, Samsung, and Hi-Chews. He has won several awards for his web-series and short films. Trevor first cut his teeth in showbiz as a comedian and commercial actor before becoming an in-house director of scores of video at UCB Comedy. In 2013, he co-founded Pig Apple, a production company that specializes in live-action, animation, and kickstarted short films such as “The Jane” and “The Surrealists”!

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Goldman’s work in the field of animation can be cataloged under the categories of experimental film and visual music. Goldman’s work has been displayed in film festivals worldwide, including the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Corcoran Gallery of Art the White Box Museum, Beijing, China, and MuVi4, in conjunction with the Fifth International conference; Synaesthesia: Science and Art, Alcalà la Real, Jaèn, Spain. His animation “Sabinium” was created in collaboration with composer Ken Ueno. “Brahmanda”, “Enigma” and “Passaddhi” have been created in collaboration with Chinese composer Jing Wang.

Uriel

Uriel, the prophet of poetry, prince of presence, the archangel of the sun, propounds a new troublous truth and suffers the slings and arrows of the celestial Czars. The tumultuous times are upon us. Oh, Nicolaus Copernicus, transcendental historian of heliocentric geometry, forgive us, absolve us, evolve us, if you can.

The “visual music” collaborations of Jing Wang and Harvey Goldman attempt to produce a synesthesia-like experience. The audience is encouraged to “see” the music and “hear” the visuals. The imagery and audio components are constructed without hierarchy, a true melding of sound and image.

Ouroboros

Produced and conceived by Jing Wang and Harvey Goldman

Glints of light, passing of shadows, the choreography of perpetual existence sets the stage for this Delphian ballet. The impenetrable flow of life’s rhythms, their Sisyphean inceptions and cessations are punctuated with eternity’s ephemeral modulations. The transmigration has begun, the beginning of the end, the end of the beginning.

The “visual music” collaborations of Jing Wang and Harvey Goldman attempt to produce a synesthesia like experience. The audience is encouraged to “see” the music and “hear” the visuals. The imagery and audio components are constructed without hierarchy, a true melding of sound and image.

Biographies

Jing Wang

Jing Wang, a composer and virtuoso erhu artist, was born in China. Ms. Wang has participated in numerous musical communities, as a composer and a performer of diverse styles of music. Her compositions have been selected and presented in China, Spain, France, Italy, Serbia, Turkey, Romania, Russia, Australia, Japan, Argentina, and throughout the United States. They have also been recognized by the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers and Electro-acoustic Miniatures International Contest Spain. She was the winner of 2006 Pauline Oliveros Prize given by the International Alliance for Women in Music and has been awarded the MacDowell Colony Fellowship, the Vilcek Foundation Fellowship, and the Omi International Musicians Residency Fellowship. As an active erhu performer, she has introduced the Chinese indigenous erhu into Western contemporary music scene with her wide array of compositions for chamber ensemble, avant-garde jazz improvisations and multicultural ensembles. She has also successfully performed erhu concertos with several symphony orchestras in the United States. Ms. Wang is currently an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth where she teaches electroacoustic music, composition, and music theory.

Harvey Goldman

Harvey Goldman has created critically acclaimed work in the fields of ceramics, digital imaging, animation, and music. He is founder of the Digital Media program at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. His work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Ford Foundation and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities. Goldman’s work is included in numerous private and public collections including the Iota Center for Experimental Animation, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Everson Museum of Art, Decordova Museum, Currier Museum of Art, and the Crocker Art Museum. His animations have been screened throughout the world including, the Smithsonian’s Hirshhon Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the White Box Museum, Beijing, China. His interests include gardening, storytelling, world music, sound exploration, language development, writing systems and basketball.

harveygoldman.com

Imagine Salvador Dali welcoming you to the Dali Museum as if he were alive today, sharing observations on current events and shedding light on the motivations behind his artwork. In April, that imagined Dali becomes real with the debut of Dali Lives, a groundbreaking AI experience exclusively at The Dali.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (January 23, 2019) – Imagine legendary surrealist artist Salvador Dali personally welcoming you to the museum, even sharing observations on current events and the motivations behind his masterpieces. The Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida announced today, on the 30^th anniversary of the artist’s death, that it will celebrate Dali’s art and legacy with “Dali Lives,” a groundbreaking experience to be unveiled exclusively at The Dali in April 2019.

Visitors to the Museum will soon have the opportunity to learn more about Dali’s life and work from the person who knew him best: the artist himself. Using an artificial intelligence (AI)-based cutting edge technique, the new “Dali Lives” experience employs machine learning to create a version of Dali’s likeness, resulting in an uncanny resurrection of the mustached master. When the experience opens, visitors will for the first time be able to interact with an engaging lifelike Salvador Dali on a series of screens throughout the Museum.

“Dali was prophetic in many ways and understood his historical importance,” says Dr. Hank Hine, executive director at The Dali. “He wrote, If someday I may die, though it is unlikely, I hope the people in the cafes will say, ‘Dali has died, but not entirely.’ This technology lets visitors experience his bigger-than-life personality in addition to our unparalleled collection of his works.”

The Dali partnered with Goodby Silverstein & Partners of San Francisco (GS&P) to bring the master of Surrealism to life. The Museum began this immersive project by collecting and sharing hundreds of interviews, quotes, and existing archival footage from the prolific artist. GS&P used these extensive materials to train an AI algorithm to “learn” aspects of Dali’s face, then looked for an actor with the same general physical characteristics of Dali’s body. The AI then generates a version of Dali’s likeness to match the actor’s face and expressions. To educate visitors while engaging with “Dali Lives,” the Museum used authentic writings from Dali himself – coupled with dynamic present-day messages – reenacted by the actor.

The “Dali Lives” project further demonstrates the Museum’s commitment to staying on the forefront of technology, embracing new methods to engage guests in unconventional ways to delight and educate them about Salvador Dali and his works. Sometimes controversial like Dali himself, this emerging technology is being used for the first time in inspiring service to art.

The revolutionary experience has been announced alongside introductory teaser videos. While gazing directly into the camera, Dali appears to challenge the idea of his own death, providing an impressive preview of what the experience will look like when it premieres at The Dali Museum in April 2019.

This is the third collaboration between The Dali and GS&P. The duo first introduced “Gala Contemplating You” as part of a 2014 exhibition which turned a visitor’s selfie into a projected, full-scale replica of the 1976 monumental painting Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea Which at Twenty Meters Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln (Homage to Rothko). Then in 2016, they partnered together for the “Dreams of Dali” virtual reality experience, which transports viewers into Dali’s painting, Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet’s “Angelus.” “Dreams of Dali” has been recognized by the Cannes Lions and Webby Awards, among others, and guests can enjoy the experience as part of the permanent collection at The Dali or on their own VR devices.

To view the teaser videos and for additional information on “Dali Lives” and The Dali Museum, visit TheDali.org/DaliLives.

“My abstract animations investigate the metaphysical features of reality. They are designed to stimulate archetypal associations and invite the viewer to make personal connections to the visual and auditory experience without any reliance on narrative or spoken language.”

Ben Ridgway Facebook
Ben Ridgway Website

Add “Sorry To Bother You” to the mix and there appears to be an Afro-Surrealism resurgence in Black cinema.

Surrealism is the 20-century avant-garde artistic and literary movement that sought to stir the creative potential of the unconscious mind position seemingly irrational imagery adjacent to one another. Artist Salvador Dali is among the most respect of that era.

Surrealism in film draws upon many of the philosophical principles as in the art world, using shocking, irrational and absurd imagery to challenge conventional reality. American filmmaker David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive are each considered among the best contemporary examples of this technique, while Alfred Hitchcock and Rod Serling were said to have each incorporated some surrealist ideals in their works.

First coined in 2009 by New Jersey’s Poet Laureate Amiri Baraka, Afro Surrealism focuses on the present day experience of African Americans as interpreted via artistic endeavor.

Read the full article at theshadowleague.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xM1YpntE840

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaBGcorkzpk

What is Afro-Surrealism?

Afro-Surrealism or Afrosurrealism is a literary and cultural aesthetic that is a response to mainstream surrealism in order to reflect the lived experience of people of color. First coined by Amiri Baraka in 1974,^[1] this movement focuses on the present day experience of African Americans. Afro-Surrealism is based on the manifesto written by D. Scot Miller, in which he says, “Afro-Surrealism sees that all ‘others’ who create from their actual, lived experience are surrealist…” The manifesto delineates Afro-Surrealism from Surrealism and Afro-Futurism. The manifesto also declares the necessity of Afro-Surrealism, especially in San Francisco, California. The manifesto lists ten tenants that Afro-Surrealism follows including how “Afro-Surrealists restore the cult of the past,” and how “Afro-Surreal presupposes that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest, and it is our job to uncover it.”

Via Wikipedia.

Need some help getting to grips with Surrealism? The Doctor will see you now. Peter Capaldi, a former art student, and the latest actor to play Doctor Who settles down on Freud’s couch to deliver his wry take on the Surrealist movement.

The Case for Surrealism | The Art Assignment | PBS Digital Studios

“Surrealism” has become shorthand for the bizarre, the irrational, the hallucinatory. But what IS it? Today we delve into the history of Surrealism, as it formed in post-World War I Europe and as it has infiltrated our wider culture up to today. Here’s our case for what Surrealism is, and why you should care about it.

Europe after the Rain: Dadaism and Surrealism

This documentary examines the work of the leading exponents of Dada and Surrealism, from the First World War through the 1920s and 1930s. International in scope and diverse in artistic output, both Dada and Surrealism were artistic, literary and intellectual movements of the early 20th century that was instrumental in defining Modernism. The Dada movement, launched in 1916 in Zurich by poets and artists such as Tristan Tzara and Hans Arp, was a direct reaction to the slaughter, propaganda, and inanity of World War I. After the war, many of the artists who had participated in the Dada movement began to practice in a Surrealist mode. Surrealism was officially inaugurated in 1924 when the writer André Breton published the Manifesto of Surrealism. Similar to Dada, Surrealism was characterized by a profound disillusionment with and condemnation of the Western emphasis on logic and reason. 1 hour 30 Minutes

Salvador Dalí (in 60 Seconds.)

Tim Marlow gives a quick introduction to Salvador Dalí, the Spanish surrealist who became the first art superstar of the television age.

René Magritte

[PDF] Foucault, Michel – This Is Not a Pipe

Surrealist Rene Francois Magritte

In the early 20th century, Rene Francois Magritte was part of the Surrealist movement in Paris that created unexpected, often dreamlike imagery. A new exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art of works by the Belgian painter is the first major showing of Magritte in two decades. Serena Altschul reports.

Why Magritte Matters

Sarah Whitfield, a London-based independent art historian, writer, and curator, is the co-author of the Magritte catalog raisonné and editor of René Magritte: Newly Discovered Works. She was the curator of the 1992 Magritte retrospective and author of its catalog. The second in an annual series named in honor of the late Menil trustee Marion Barthelme Fort, each year this Lecture Series invites a distinguished speaker to discuss an artist in the museum’s collection. Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938 (2014).

Classical Surrealism Films

Un Chien Andalou

(An Andalusian Dog) is a 1929 French silent surrealist short film by Spanish director Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dalí.[1] It was Buñuel’s first film and was initially released in 1929 with a limited showing at Studio des Ursulines in Paris, but became popular and ran for eight months.

Un Chien Andalou has no plot in the conventional sense of the word. The chronology of the film is disjointed, jumping from the initial “once upon a time” to “eight years later” without the events or characters changing very much. It uses dream logic in narrative flow that can be described in terms of then-popular Freudian free association, presenting a series of tenuously related scenes. [Link: Wikipedia.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=054OIVlmjUM

Dreams That Money Can Buy

Dreams That Money Can Buy is a 1947 experimental feature color film written, produced, and directed by surrealist artist and dada film-theorist Hans Richter.

Collaborators included Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, Darius Milhaud and Fernand Léger. The film won the Award for the Best Original Contribution to the Progress of Cinematography at the 1947 Venice Film Festival. [Source: Wikipedia]

Two Contemporary Surrealist Film Directors: Lynch and Jodorowsky

David Lynch: The Treachery of Language

David Lynch is famous for his reluctance to verbally explain or clarify his work, so why is the work itself so frequently accompanied by words?

Tarot Card Reading with Alejandro Jodorowsky | MoMA LIVE

Four simple guidelines to watching films made by director David Lynch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o1PU5Mahxc&

David Lynch In Conversation | Presented by QAGOMA in association with QPAC

David Lynch In Conversation with David Stratton. On Saturday 14 March 2015, in this exclusive to Brisbane, David Lynch shared insights into his life, his work and his many passions – painting, film, music, and meditation.

Alejandro Jodorowsky

“Reality is a mirror, what you think becomes what you believe.” – Alejandro Jodorowsky

Alejandro Jodorowsky Films

A Conversation With Alejandro Jodorowsky (Full Session) | Film 2014 | SXSW

One of the legends of ’70s cinema, a vanguard of the midnight movie, and just as famous for films he didn’t make as the films he did, Jodorowsky is not an artist whose body of work can be easily described. Cineastes around the world have been waiting for something new since the release of “Santa Sangre” in 1989, and in celebration of his new feature, “The Dance Of Reality,” SXSW proudly presents an hour-long conversation with one of the masters of surrealist cinema, Alejandro Jodorowsky. The conversation will be moderated by HitFix’s Drew McWeeny.

Tarot Card Reading with Alejandro Jodorowsky | MoMA LIVE

For many years, filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky has been dedicated to the practice of tarot as a source of psychological insight and creative inspiration. As part of this evening’s special program, please join Klaus Biesenbach, Director of MoMA PS1 and Chief Curator at Large at The Museum of Modern Art, and the artist for a conversation about Jodorowsky’s forthcoming film “Endless Poetry,” the autobiographical sequel to “The Dance of Reality,” and a one-time public reading for select audience members.