Barbie's Real Life
Traditional Photography vs AI
Years ago, just before Photoshop was released commercially, I made a body of work entitled “Barbie’s Real Life”. The idea was that Barbie represented an idealized version of womanhood. Not just her body but her experiences did not match the experiences of the women I knew. I decided to envision her in the “real” world. To make the work I printed the backgrounds for each idea and placed her in front of them (thank you to my then employer New York Filmworks for unknowingly subsidizing my art practice).
I am not ashamed to admit that I am looking forward to the release of Greta Gerwig’s film on 21 July. I’m a little ashamed that I would chose that over the Nolan film “Oppenheimer” that opens the same day. The irony of this juxtaposition is not lost on the internet. Hybrid merch hyping the “Barbieheimer double feature” proliferates social media. So of course this got me thinking what would Barbie’s Dream House look like after an atomic bomb.
Caption: “Barbie's Dream house after an atomic bomb”, created by Midjourney
I am not a technical perfectionist. The idea was always was more interesting to me than the execution (some would call that lazy and they might be right) but it did take time to make my earlier series. After making the above image I thought how much easier it would have been to do that series with AI. I was heartened to see that despite being able to show Barbie’s hard earned real estate obliterated by one brilliant man’s bad idea, it is not so easy to recreate “Homeless Barbie”. Midjourney called me out and refused to proceed with “imagining” my prompt “Barbie dirty and homeless on a park bench sleeping”, although given the puritanical founding of our country I suspect the word “dirty” was what the bot objected to.
Here is the response I got to the prompt in case you have an interest in the subtleties of constraints. I have italicized the words I think might be relevant in this case. What do you think?
“Banned prompt detected
Sorry! Our AI moderator thinks this prompt is probably against our community standards.
Please review our current community standards:
ALLOWED
Any image up to PG-13 rating involving fiction, fantasy, mythology.
Real images that may be seen as respectful or light-hearted parodies, satire, caricatures
Imaginary or exaggerated real-life scenarios, including absurd or humorous situations.
NOT ALLOWED
Disrespectful, harmful, misleading public figures/events portrayals or potential to mislead.
Hate speech, explicit or real-world violence.
Nudity or unconsented overtly sexualized public figures.
Imagery that might be considered culturally insensitive
This AI system isn't perfect. If you find it rejecting something innocent please press the Notify Developers button and we will review it and try to further improve our performance. Thank you for your help!
/imagine Barbie dirty and homeless on a park bench sleeping”
In case you are wondering this has nothing to do with either direction my first post eluded to. There are a lot of detours on the road to discovery.