The Rocking Horse Winner

THE ROCKING HORSE WINNER is a pictorial dive into early childhood memory.  Twenty inkjet renderings are the beginnings of a collection drawn from over 4000 artificial intelligence works made from text descriptions of scenes and imaginings from my early childhood.  I like to think of these images as a mindscape; a place where meaning can be drawn from the shadow of memory.

At the age of five I spent a good deal of time on a plastic rocking horse, listening  to country music and a tune called “Bimbo” by Jim Reeves.  My fantasy world grew to include cowboy boots, hats, pajamas, a cork- shooter, Roy Rogers, his dog Trigger, Mighty Mouse, and a talking horse named Mr. Ed.

Eventually, I grew up, said no to law school, yes to film school and started making social issue documentaries. My cowboy history had been long lost in the tumbleweeds of career, marriage, family, art and survival -- when I first tried out visual artificial intelligence software -- Midjourney to be precise.   “Make anything from anything” one of the slogans read. I began by commanding the software to “imagine” something from a text prompt. 

/imagine: a 5 year old boy with black hair rocks on his rocking horse in his mid century modern bedroom, 1965, black and white photorealistic.

A few fuzzy blobs appeared and eventually morphed into the left image:

My early childhood memories aren’t at all vivid or detailed but they are imbued with sentiment and emotion.  It is these feelings that I  endeaver to explore, reveal to myself and render through the use of AI software and photo compositing techniques.  

I described objects and action, style, character, mood, texture, facial expression, camera position, lens focal length, lens aperture, graininess, colour palette and more.  If the results didn’t strike a chord, I worked on each element  separately until it was right and then blended the layers together.  Using my photo at age 5, I “trained” the software to understand my likeness.  Each successive image seemed to ignite more memories and stir more of my emotions. As my image library grew from dozens, to hundreds and eventually to thousands, I became aware that I was building a memory world,   a mindscape that had meaning to me and might have meaning to others.  Welcome to THE ROCKING HORSE WINNER.  I hope this collection brings you a little closer to your own childhood wonderland.

-Howard Goldberg