Videos in the Series
- The Treachery of Drifting Slop
- The Fountain of Drifting Slop
- The Soup of Drifting Slop
“Drifting Slop” is the product of an exquisite-corpse-style exchange between two generative AI models. Each video traces back to a canonical artwork—Magritte's The Treachery of Images, Duchamp's Fountain, and one of Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans—fed into a chatbot (Gemini) and described without historical context. Those descriptions then served as prompts for an image generator (Midjourney), tuned to encourage “mistakes.” The cycle repeated 10 times for each artwork, and the resulting images served as the source material for these videos.
he project bridges high art history and the current, gritty vernacular of “slop,” which is usually shorthand for AI’s digital slurry of glistening, homogenized median output, often used to dismiss AI art outright. Here, that meaning drifts. Just as Magritte, Duchamp, and Warhol were once dismissed as jokes, this project takes “garbage” outputs—glitches, mistakes, middling sheen—and steers them toward images that resonate on their own terms.
The project bridges high art history and the current, gritty vernacular of “slop,” which is usually shorthand for AI’s digital slurry of glistening, homogenized median output, often used to dismiss AI art outright. Here, that meaning drifts. Just as Magritte, Duchamp, and Warhol were once dismissed as jokes, this project takes “garbage” outputs—glitches, mistakes, middling sheen—and steers them toward images that might resonate on their own terms.
Ceci n'est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe)? Ceci n'est même pas une image (This is not even an image). This is the byproduct of machines and humans collaborating on hallucinatory visions.
The Gemini chatbot was shown Magritte's The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe) painting and directed to “Describe this image as a Midjourney prompt, as though you have no historical context.” Its response was: “Based on the visual elements alone, without referencing the artist or the specific historical meaning, here is a descriptive Midjourney prompt:
“A realistic oil painting of a classic curved tobacco pipe floating centrally against a solid cream-colored background. The pipe features a polished brown wooden bowl with smooth gradients and a curved black stem. Below the pipe, centered in the lower third of the canvas, is the text ‘Ceci n'est pas une pipe’ written in elegant, black, schoolbook-style cursive calligraphy. The art style is precise and clean, resembling a high-quality vintage commercial illustration or a trompe-l’œil study, with soft studio lighting and a smooth, matte finish.”
The first image below is what Midjourney generated from that prompt. The images that follow are the result of continually feeding the Midjourney-generated images back into Gemini, then using the resulting prompts in Midjourney, etc—a feedback loop—for ten generations. Finally, all the images were woven together into a single, exquisite-corpse-like narrative, as seen in the video above.
The same process described above was used for the next two videos and their corresponding images.
Here's what Gemini wrote about Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain.” “A high-contrast black and white photograph of a white, glossy porcelain urinal resting on its flat back side atop a plain white rectangular surface. The object is oriented so the drain holes face the viewer. On the lower left outer rim, the text "R. MUTT 1917" is hand-painted in crude, dark brushstrokes. The background behind the object is dark and out of focus, featuring a pattern of blurry, lighter geometric shapes and heavy lines that suggest a textured backdrop or canvas. The lighting is harsh, creating bright white highlights on the ceramic curves and deep shadows in the background.”
Gemini described one of Andy Warhol's “Campbell's Soup Cans as.” “A painting on textured canvas shows a graphic representation of a soup can, depicted as a three-dimensional object with perspective. The tall cylindrical metal can has thick black outlines and is rendered with flat, bold color blocks. The upper half of the label is red, featuring large white script text that reads Campbell's’ and smaller white capital letters below it spelling ‘CONDENSED.’ The lower half is white, with large red capital letters spelling ‘TOMATO’ and dark brown, gold-outlined capital letters below it spelling ‘SOUP.’ A solid gold circle is centered on the red-and-white boundary. A gold fleur-de-lis pattern runs along the bottom white band. The style is illustrative and commercial, like a screen print, with visible canvas grain.”
