Digital artist Anne Spalter has been behind the scenes in the art world for decades now. She's well known for pioneering Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design's first digital fine art courses in the early 1990s and now finds herself highly rated in the NFT world for creating ethereal and sometimes otherworldly artworks. 

Recently she's been working on an NFT project (mainly using NightCafe Studio's AI art generating app) to create alien-looking spaceships, each with a very distinct theme. 

The spaceships are designed around a narrative that follows future inhabitants of our troubled planet, and the story behind them is fascinating.

From the AI Spaceships Project Info page: "In the distant future climate change has made Earth uninhabitable.

In desperation the remaining people on earth build a series of spaceships and try to depart the planet. Some fail at launch and go down in flames. Others warp to the past and engage with steampunk battleships, or warp to the future to face highly evolved deadly plants.

Research on the plants reveals a way forward: using the powerful psychedelic powers of plant extracts, the ships open neon hyperspace tunnels and travel to a distant earth future. Some land in the frozen north, some land in the tropical equator, and some land in the desert.

Seeing the spiritual purity of the new settlers, angels arrive and raise the humans to a new level of psychic oneness."

These AI generated Spaceships range in multiple styles, from psychedelic and mystical to retro steampunk and hand-illustrated.

Anne continues, "Whether landing in fields bursting with bouquets of spring flowers or glowing deserts or white wintery landscapes, each ship boasts a unique design. Some are resting, some caught in violent lightning storms, and some warping through hyperspace. One sequence features musical angels. A select number of the pieces are animated."

This collection was created using the Artistic text-to-image option on NightCafe Studio with start images from her own previous artworks.

She believes AI-generated art will open up new creative frontiers for many and will greatly expand who makes visual content.

Anne says, "Text-to-image tools especially are so powerful and fun: being able to create an image by typing a phrase is truly magical. At the same time artists with longstanding practices are fascinated with the new processes and beginning to incorporate AI in interesting ways. For me it often creates new types of compositions that I would not have come up with on my own."

Anne even had some advice to give to any NFT artists who are struggling to 'make it big'.

She says, "Keep making your work and getting it out there. Use Twitter to reach new collectors and meet fellow NFT artists. Participate (in as much as COVID allows) in in-person conferences and events featuring NFT art."

"The question of how “art” is defined is ongoing and changes in different places and times in history. There are still people who think any art made with the help of a computer is somehow not art, despite it’s being used for over 50 years. For decades photography was not included in many venues as a fine art. New technologies can seem mysterious and threatening, especially when they are not understood."

Continuing, "My personal opinion is that art comes from the person creating it, not the tool–so a pencil can be used to create art or a supercomputer, oil paint or AI. Whether or not it ends up being “real art” is more dependent on the person making it and their intentions than the particular tools or media."

Who is Anne Spalter?

Anne Spalter started her digital art journey before there were GAN or text-to-image tools available.

In her own words, "Although artists like Harold Choen had worked to create custom expert systems based on their own styles, there were no off-the-shelf tools available to artists for creating any type of machine learning art. AI art was more the domain of science fiction."

"I have used imagery of flight in my practice for many years– and have always been fascinated with the freedom and promise of the skies. I’m also a sci-fi fan and love the way that fiction can help us understand our reality better."

AI SPACESHIPS DROP DETAILS:

When: June 2 at 12pm EDT, 10am MDT, 11am CDT, 9am PDT, 16:00 UTC. Whitelist access 1 mint/wallet for first 15 minutes, then it's public. The mint page will be posted on my twitter account at https://twitter.com/annespalter. 

WHITELIST page: https://www.premint.xyz/ai-spaceships/

OPENSEA page: https://opensea.io/collection/anne-spalter-ai-spaceships

Price 0.1 ETH each | 501 pieces | Spaceship Narrative