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Just to recap my Websites

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Online there are several websites of mine, each one with a specific purpose and leading theme, thus it’s pretty easy to get lost among them.
As my uncontrolled interests range farther than that, I think it’s a good idea to contrive a simple summary page like this:

Web-ankh [DE-IT]: is the site of my web services agency.

There are quite a lot of web services agencies out there, but I think I can offer also something more: in particular
– a thorough protection suite against web malware, inclusive of firewall, updating and frequent backups for just in case.
– plenty of experience about online shops to sell digital goods – comes in handy more often than you think.
Gameover’s Atelier AI & I: this site ( also reachable as Luisa Fumi Digital Art) reflects my unrestrained curiosity about AI-generated art.

I tested so many dedicated AI systems and I think that for the time being Midjourney is the best: not easy to prompt, sometimes sort of “moody” (laugh if you wish), but really unique as results.
Here I present the outcomes of my fights with Midjourney (only the ones I won 🙂 upsized and post-processed in a traditional way.
I’m enthralled by this experiment and keep having a lot of fun with them.

All the images are “ethical”: they do not reference copyrighted characters, living artists, brands, or recognizable individuals.

To flesh out the site there are also a “Cover Art” section, a “mini-clips” page and a Print On Demand Gallery.
Professional photography: a site to show off my skills and my long extensive experience as photographer.

Mostly editorial and travel images from all around the world – untouched by AI hands 😊.
Hosted by Picfair, the site offers also a Print-on-demand service.

I’m thinking of expanding this site to more artistic stuff like exclusive cover art (a different taste from my corresponding AI covers). We’ll see.
Antikstock: last but definitely not least.
A rich collection of curated images (mostly engravings) from the past, all scanned from ancient books manically collected over a lifetime, all painstakingly restored from the damages of the centuries, all free from copyright issues (due to their venerable age).

I’m interested of images that speak to one another, forming complete visual worlds rather than disconnected fragments. Single images from the past, isolated from their context, often lose part of their meaning.

Working with historical imagery often means long research times, inconsistent quality, and stylistic mismatches.
Curated sets solve this by offering visual consistency, contextual coherence, and immediate usability:
press history, old magazine advertising, botanical art, medieval marine monsters, antique Egypt history and art… does it ring a bell?

And yes, I almost forgot it… there’s also my blog here.
I have a lot of fun writing it, hope you’ll enjoy reading it and commenting (unless you’re a troll – in which case you’ll be fed to our pirañas 😄).

The Café-Library — Open at Night

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I’m quietly transforming my websites.
The idea is to offer full sets of selected images built around a focused idea — a set of visuals that share the same atmosphere and narrative thread, designed as a complete package ready for illustrators, designers, publishers, and anyone who needs consistent imagery with a strong personality and immediate usability.

One of my curated sets is The Café-Library open at night
I’ve ever been and still am fascinated by books – don’t know how many thousands I have at home – thus the idea seems fabolous to me:

a bookshop-café open all night with the option to sit quiet and read a book (rented or bought), and at the first morning light, with a warm latte and a book in your hand, to go back to your place and sleep the day.

The atmosphere draws loosely from literary and real references – from Gianrico Carofiglio’s Osteria, to many brillant works of Walter Moers, to the Library Bar in Copenhagen.
Then came my imagination: the quiet pedestrian streets of an Italian downtown, dim light all around, most of it coming from a cheerful open bookshop with tables and seats outside or inside, with people sitting there, reading comfortably and sipping a coffee.
Every so often at the same table sit two people, occasionally they talk together but usually they are as good as alone, each one completely absorbed in their reading.
Sometimes under a vaulted ceiling of one of these coffee-bookshops someone sits at the piano in a corner and plays a soft tune.
Not easy feeding the feeling to Midjourney, but I’m happy with the result of a consistent, common atmosphere.

Et voilà some of the 16 selected images from the set:

In a time of constant distraction, the idea of a place dedicated to open, welcoming, uninterrupted reading looks quietly radical to me 😀

Une petite note for the AI-skeptics:

If you feel like writing a piece of poetry you’ll probably use a word processor, if only because today stylus, nibs and ink aren’t all that easy to find. And no one will dream of claiming that the real poet is the word processor you typed on and not you.
Things change if you use a sophisticated AI as a writing tool, but not by much: there’s still something essential, let’s call it ‘the human touch’, that you must provide yourself lest the outcome sound somewhat dull, insipid – even though there’s always the simpleton who takes the bite and congratulates, but that’s another story 😉

Same goes if you use a sophisticated graphic AI to give body to a dream you found in your mind, that otherwise would take you days or months to draw or paint with your own hands: if you want it to evoke the feelings that inspired you, the human touch must come from you.
Hard – if ever possible – to tell what this mysterious human touch really is: it’s something that you feel, not that you understand. Something related to the rustle of old pages under your fingers, to the smell of an ancient leather binding, to a gentle breeze ruffling your hair, to the taste of an early coffee, to the faint memory of a happy moment lost in the past… and this is as far as I go.
A tool is a tool is a tool.

Gargoyle Party

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You know those nights when the imagination decides to go off-script? That’s how I ended up making a tiny gothic clip where one devil gargoyle and two strange creatures, sneak away from their eternal duties and throw themselves a party on some forgotten cathedral ledge.
All of it looks like straight out of a 19th-century engraving — sharp lines, dark shadows, and a mood somewhere between mischievous and slightly tipsy.
It’s only a few seconds long, but watching a strange stone creature relax with a drink in hand feels oddly… wholesome.


More whimsical clips to come!

Gameover POD Galley – Ice Dance Sketches

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new!

I made this set of (almost) black and white sketches using one of my personal styles developed on Midjourney.
I like them. It is not only about dancers but also about frozen movements in a moment of grace and black-and-white contrast: they speak of passion, raw energy, precision and elegance. And why not, freedom.

Pity I have not a single space left on my walls 😀

An own Print-On-Demand website?

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Voilà, here it is!


How did I come to face such a feat?
First of all, for fun: I love making websites, that’s it. I had just completed a serious, demanding, challenging website – a historical archive – and needed to do something relaxing to rinse my brain… OK, that’s the truth, but not the whole truth: there was also a bit of commercial interest behind my resolution.

All began when I started visiting the usual popular Print-On-Demand sites…

… disguised as a buyer, in order to find out why I was selling so little on them – well, I actually did sell something there, but not enough to deserve any serious time or toil. I focused on the most obvious form of POD: the art that one hangs on the wall.

I was appalled by the prices:

would I buy anything that expensive myself? Definitely not! Unless perhaps in case of love at first sight, but that seldom happens.
Greed may certainly play a role in setting those high prices, but there must be something more to it. Let’s give it a thought:

First question:
why should one buy a framed work of art somewhere halfway around the world and pay the outrageous shipping costs, when the bare printout would travel much cheaper and faster in a cardboard tube?

Then all it would take is a walk to the do-it-yourself shop around the corner to have it framed according to one’s taste, in a self-chosen frame, maybe also with a sheet of real glass (rather than those horrible acrylic substitutes that would survive the shipping). Which would save about 3/4 of the total cost.

But that’s not all.

Second question(s):

who prints the work of art you choose, and on what paper, and what kind of printer do they use?
Most of the times the colors you see on your monitor don’t look very much like those you see printed on paper.

Who checks the color rendition?

And the diffusion effect?

And the overall quality of the finished work?

Then a disturbing thought came in without knocking:

of course the POD website gets the lion’s share, but also the printers must have their slice of the pie, and the packagers, and the shipment company… what’s left for the author is but laughable pocket change 🙁

Which encouraged briefly the sneaky temptation to bypass at least the POD sites and go directly to those sites that offer printing&shipment as a service… but alas, nothing doing: unguaranteed printing quality, long or very long processing times (up to 2 weeks!)… better forget it.

All of the above looks pretty disheartening, but I’m stubborn: my glorious printer can handle up to A3+ paper sheets (13” x 19”), quite a respectable size for a picture on the wall. A high-quality printing on it takes a mere couple of minutes of my time. I’m free to choose the best possible paper with the right grammage, texture and consistency. I have an encouraging constant number of visitors who show up in my websites, thus there’s no need for advertising…
So why not?
If it works, fine. And if it doesn’t, at least I learnt something new and had my fun 🙂

As a matter of fact I already had a lot of fun thinking of what would fit best on a wall and devising the proper mockup images to convey the mood to my visitors – here too MidJourney, adequately flogged and directed, proved to be a great limitless resource.

The yuck side: bureaucracy

Death and taxes are notoriously inevitable, and in this case the taxes were the belle of the ball: I had to comply with the EU legislation on VAT applied to member states, which makes a sharp distinction between digital goods (images made of impalpable bits) and tangible objects (images printed on palpable paper), thus taxing them slightly differently – bureaucrats love to wallow in such byzantine subtleties. Fortunately enough I have several websites, so I can place the impalpable stuff on one of them and the palpable stuff on another.

The novelty: Tarots on demand


While I was at it I also designed a couple of sets of author-signed tarots to be printed on demand.
It posed some challenges such as finding out the proper paper, learning how to laminate it, improvising a device to cut them out precisely by hand and round up the corners comme il faut, finding the right boxes to dress them up appropriately for their travel to the customer… live and learn 🙂

Have a look at them – you’ll find an (almost) classical deck as well as a retro-steampunk one with a pinch of humor scattered here and there – the latter, I confess, being definitely my favorite 😀

Gameover’s Atelier: AI+Human Collection

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For some of months I’ve been privately experimenting with Midjourney, and I’m constantly witnessing an enthralling, almost incredible evolution. As I’m using it quite intensively (2638 images generated so far) I’ve reason to believe that I’m also partaking in its ‘training’ 🙂

Self-awareness?

That’s a big word and IMO applying it to today’s AI would (still) be a gross overkill. However in those three months the improvement in composition and quality of the outcome were really astonishing – the ‘thing’ is definitely growing up and learning a lot!

As it may be expected, pretty often there’s plenty of post-processing and upscaling work to do and you end up with an image quite different from the original one. But not always. Sometimes all you need to do is to prompt the bot with the proper wording over and again until you like it, and then to touch up the final outcome just a little: in the end you find yourself thinking “OMG, that’s exactly what I had in mind!”.

I’ve read a lot about millions (or billions) of images being ‘stolen’ from their creators to train the AI – implying that everyone should be entitled to the correspondent royalties. But is it really theft, or are those images just used as machine-learning to point the AI towards some kind of independent creativity?

I’d rather go with the latter, also in view of the incredibly fast evolution of Midjourney.

Just consider…

Think for a moment: when you take a pic of a cathedral do you really wonder if you should pay a royalty to the bishop, or maybe to the architect who designed it? And does such a thought bother you when you photograph the work of a painter from the past, or a car whose logo you’ll remove in the post-processing, or someone on the street who agrees to it with a smile?

Now don’t you tell me that you aren’t drawing inspiration from somewhere when you create a work of your own – maybe from dozens of watermarked images, or from the pictures on an ancient book, or from a scene you just saw and found worth using, or, or…

Drawing inspiration is a human quality and this sort of empathy is the very base of creativity: you create from the world that surrounds you – no world, no creation.

I’ll agree, it’s quite disconcerting, even disturbing, to apply such concepts to a non-human entity, a mere ‘thing’ made of metal and silicon chips. But we shouldn’t forget that this ‘thing’ has been designed and made by humans, and humans are those who use it as the tool it is.

Setting aside philosophy, since this kind of images of mine were received well by Adobe and started selling promisingly I selected some and uploaded them to my Gameover’s Atelier. For the time being I limited my choice to simple subjects that I however find attractive and looked at from an unusual point of view. Should anyone be interested, they can be purchased pretty cheap – outrageously cheap indeed (50% down!) if bought before coming Christmas 😀

I had plenty of fun choosing and commenting them, and I’ll keep adding more and more every day.

Note: the opening image on top was initially created by me with Midjourney’s bot and carefully touched up. The Florentine merchant depicted there doesn’t exist and never did; nor can you buy a “Pear Computer”, to the best of my knowledge 🙂

La vita al tempo del corona virus

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FOUTAIN-s by .

Con questa storia del corona virus i giorni sono diversi dal solito.
Il mio lavoro sul web non ha subito scosse, c’è più tempo però per riscoprire la natura e i meli in fiore: l’aria è più cristallina ed è bellissimo andare in bici nei dintorni.
Insomma c’è più tempo per guardarsi attorno ed apprezzare quello che si ha vicino a noi. Ho preso in mano alcune mie foto locali e le ho “acquarellate”, un mio tributo di affetto a questa cittadina universitaria dall’aria sanamente rurale ma a solo 20 minuti di metro dal centro di Monaco.