astronaut.horse – stable diffusion artist collaborations

astronaut.horse is a series of open-ended collaborations between visual artists / students and a group of professional software engineers and machine learning researchers who began working with Stable Diffusion together at the Recurse Center in late 2022, shortly after the release of Chat-GPT and Stable Diffusion, the first free and open-source alternative to image-generating AI tools like DALL-E and Midjourney which were and still are private and for-profit.

The group began meeting weekly at the Recurse Center to discuss new developments in Stable Diffusion and Large Language Models, share personal projects using these technologies and implement machine learning papers together to explore their potential use as practical creative tools.

As the Recurse Center community is largely dominated by software engineers and researchers, the group created a space where discussions on generative AI and collaborative projects could expand to include visual artists in the form of a Discord server that is still in use.

Collaborations with visual artists began shortly thereafter and continue to constitute the productive core of astronaut horse as a project. These collaborations also served to help clarify one of the unofficial commonly held goals of the project, to explore ways in which generative AI tools can empower artists through co-working and communal creativity rather than the rote automation of creative labor.

After dozens of artist collaborations where AI models were trained on artist-selected images / artworks a set of commonly used tools began to take shape in the form of code notebooks. When the first opportunities arose to exhibit work from the project, these notebooks naturally formed the basis for a series of generative AI workshops geared towards visual artists and art students as well as writers, musicians, computer science students or anyone curious about machine learning and how it can play a positive role in the creative process.

The name astronaut horse refers to the common AI-generated image of an astronaut riding a horse that often acts as a benchmark for the capabilities of generative image models.

Artist Bio

Astronaut Horse is a collaborative project that has evolved with the insight and work of many individuals. The website, discord and exhibitions would not have been possible without the work contributed by artist Tom Betthauser. His studio website can be found here.