With Autumn rapidly approaching Wales it is time for a new visual art exhibition at SnakeAppleTree gallery. It is situated on Floor Three of the gallery at Crystal Waters.
GothPunk
‘Gothic-Punk milieu’ was coined by Mark Rein-Hagen for the original pentacle White Wolf collaborative game books. They broke the mould because in the World of Darkness the players play the monsters.
“A beast I am lest a beast I become.”
The consequence was a flood of fresh blood including 60% females attending gaming conventions for the first time in roleplaying game history, which previously was a nerd boy thing and not because misogyny. Vampire: the Masquerade made roleplaying hobby Cooler Than Sex for the first time ever.
They were billed as ‘Storytelling games of personal horror’. This is how they were intended to be played.
Later, unfortunately, a watered-down experience where the characters did high-school power-game and romance stuff while just so happening to be ‘cool’ monsters, inflicting horror upon fictional others without necessarily experiencing it for themselves.
The characters in World of Darkness are generically outlined as GothPunk. Later, after the early 1990s, the term was retrospectively pinned on what had previously been called variously and incorrectly DeathRock, or more traditionally, a very early off-shoot of the mid 1970s London Punk movement, Goths.
This series of art is inspired by the illustrations created especially for those World of Darkness books by a number of artists.
From that core it extends outward. Towards the sources of those sorts of gothic horror stories, including the Hellraiser movie franchise inspired by Clive Barkers modern classic novel The Hellbound Heart, through the glorification-of-suicidal-depression cult which was Emo and decades later toward the manga Blame! by Tsutomu Nihei.
These images were created almost entirely in an iPhone using apps, including an original source image, designer text prompts, Wonder AI, PaintCan and the iPhoto editor. The process for these images is repeatable.
Some of the images did not get as far as PaintCan and iPhoto editor because of comparative purposes for education and because noble though that sounds I am of limited patience and attention-span. Life is too damn short to fully process them all.
There is also the source image in its natural form, a photograph of some graffiti. I did not make the graffiti myself. To my artists mind it looks like a cartoon of a goth girl with her fringe over her eyes in a classic emo look, or perhaps her face is half-shadowed like a moon, hiding her inner darkness.
Along with the text prompt which presented to you in the form of a poem is now copyrighted material technically illegal for anybody else to use as a text prompt. I retain all rights to my original anchored terset poem to exquisitely highlight a double-edged problem-and-poetry that AI prompts are an art form in their own right.
Not that I am intentionally making a mockery of the legal systems but, y’know, that oldschool ‘punk not dead’ ethos is a factor even where undead punks is the supernatural order of the night.
Gothpunk, Cartoon Portrait
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| Source image. Wales. Photograph ©2024. Original graffiti is public domain. |
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| “Godd in an Alcove” |
more to follow ...
