Huemin’s Model Scape: an Exploration in Generative Landscapes
Exploring a kojii.ai Model in Detail
(By Maxwell Cohen)
Nothing about Huemin’s kojii.ai model, Model Scape, is unexpected. There are no accidents on Earth; everything that exists evolved logically. Huemin, for instance, could not have become the remarkably versatile and curatorially-gifted AI artist without his having been among the first cohort of alpha testers to experiment with Stable Diffusion, which is the benchmark model for AI artistry today. And Model Scape, so terrestrially-minded, could only have been created by someone with a background in earth science and applied physics. Model Scape is itself an evolution! Huemin calls it the “fifth installment in a series of collections that explore AI-generated landscapes with an emphasis on geometric abstraction.”
Model Scape’s four predecessors were the stepping stones from which Huemin’s newest project could leap from and soar. The genesis of the series, Scape, is the basis for everything thereafter, a predominantly architectural collection full of straight lines and geometric shapes and warring color contrasts. Its immediate successor, the aptly-titled Escape, leaned away from geometry and into illustration; moreover, it nestled architecture within larger landscapes, between rolling hills, upon the seaside, floating in space. The third and fourth iterations of the series, New Dimensions and Paper Scape, were stylistic variations on this same theme, with the former “inspired by Hasui Kawase's woodblock prints” and the latter almost cubist in composition, inspired by the work of Charles Sheeler. All four collections share Huemin’s trademark emphasis on precision and over-curation: These remarkably reserved collections were capped at sizes of 64, 48, 128, and 33 pieces respectively, whittled from a larger body of work containing hundreds of thousands of images.
From off these origins Model Scape leaps, and oh boy, does it soar. That’s partly because the model behind Model Scape was so meticulously calculated: First trained on a staggering 2500 works dataset of generative geometric art, Model Scape was then prompted to perfection using “carefully curated geologic elements, such as climate, landforms, structures, and color palettes, and the works of A.J. Casson, Claude Monet, Zancan, Richard Nadler, and the greater generative art movement in the NFT space.”
But it’s also a product of Huemin’s singular skillset. While the artist’s desire was “isometric, orthographic artworks,” the outputs themselves are so much more profound in effect than words can properly describe. Model Scape generates entire artificial worlds —as detailed and varied as our own— as seen from above, like we’re looking down upon them from an airplane window. At 36,000 feet, one understands that the world as seen from this spot, at this moment, with these specific environmental nuances, will never appear again in the same form. The Earth becomes a series of songs sung only once and in a key never to be heard again, inimitable geological processes revealed to an audience of one.
Model Scape creates worlds with that very same majesty.
Kojii.ai users select but three traits from Huemin’s concise UI: Climate, Landforms, and Bodies of Water, though each category contains a host of options. There are 19 Climates to choose from, like tropical, alpine, cold, warm, humid, dry, or mediterranean. We select from 27 Landforms, including volcanoes, glaciers, fjords, deltas, estuaries, and wetlands, while amongst the 18 Bodies of Water available are marshes, swamps, reservoirs, waterfalls, and glacial lakes. Copious back-end modifiers are randomized within every generation, and so the resultant images —textured, topographical, painterly— emerge from a near infinite pool of possibilities.
The result: Model Scape generations are much more than mere aesthetics. They suggest and contain entire histories. We must wonder, for example, how these cloud-rippled peaks could come to rise up from the ocean itself. Or were they carved in place by one particularly fiery, lightning-lashed sky?
And how many eons of flood and erosion passed before these cliff-side lakes snaked between twisting plateaus?
Who placed the wooden slats on the brown bridges which traverse this archipelago of ponds, and where are they now? Every indomitable, snow-soaked tree that pockmarks this landscape: Which westerly wind guided their seeds to this spot, and how many of their brethren were drowned in the waters, suffocated by the snows?
Huemin writes that Model Scape “invites viewers to consider the philosophical implications of AI-generated art and the changing nature of aesthetics in the age of AI,” but the latter claim works in reverse too. We must also consider the changing aesthetics of nature, with unreal yet plausible locales unraveling themselves before us. Here, artistry comes to augment reality. For each newly-invented key within which Model Scape sings, our own Earth expands into another octave.
Model Scape both emerges from the world which came before it and also nudges that world onward. On Earth, there are no accidents. Everything that exists, has existed, and will exist all evolved from the same marvelous and minute logic. Model Scape is that logic made manifest, taken to all its inevitable conclusions, prophetic possibilities presented for our inspection and appreciation.