Brief/ A month-long project where I worked with Ghan & Company to express my personal style and creative expertise through AI imagery in order to generate the podcast art for the third season of Spacetime Diaries, titled, Waking Up - a 50-minute sci-fi audio drama, set in 2035 Brooklyn, NY.

The themes depicted in the artwork that were used to specify the prompts in Midjourney had to be relevant to the story, allude to the relationship between human and machine consciousness, and had to have an aesthetic that corresponded with the show's score composition.

Role/ Creative Director working with an AI-powered tool

My Approach

I read the show's script which allowed me to gain a more detailed and nuanced picture of the plot and character as well as the producer’s creative brief, which gave me a more thematic and bird’s-eye view of what Waking Up wanted to explore at its core. A piece of information from the brief that stood out to me most was the idea of consciousness being depicted as a vibration, described in the producer's note which was inspired by a passage from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Some of the show's musical compositions explored the movement of two waves vibrating together, which became a driving force and a main visual concept for me to incorporate sound waves when I prompted Midjourney.

The image below from Ghan & Company depicts a graph used as reference for finding melodic shapes.

My Process

During early conversations with Spacetime Diaries' creator and producer, Ghan, an aesthetic was established in which an elegant, sparse, and impactful visual style would be the best accompaniment to Waking Up's musical composition. Some influence was also drawn from art nouveau paintings and imagery. I wanted to incorporate a bit of soft sci-fi without the art looking too bionic but also include a cerebral psychological undertone that would represent the conflict between a natural and synthetic consciousness in a compelling way. 

I explored various iterations and directions in Midjourney, but while the results were very impressive, they didn't quite replicate a lot of the cohesive narrative and thematic elements connected to the story I was aiming for.

To me, the final selected version of the podcast image exemplified the story Waking Up wanted to tell about two consciousnesses existing simultaneously in one body while also incorporating the visual motif of consciousness as vibrating waves. It has organic textures among the smooth refinements and minimalist background in the composition and a humanistic touch with an imperfect streak of dried red color as if smeared by hand but still retains its sci-fi genre. I like the subtleties of its organized chaos and dissonance but is still unexpected with a quality of surprise, curiosity, and wonder.

The first episode of the third season of Spacetime Diaries, Waking Up, 1: Fragments, is available to stream here!