Thread by @bildoperationen

Playing around with AI-generated, non-existent movies and the idea of #ArtificialNostalgia, I started thinking about the notion of ›vibe,‹ how it might describe what I'm looking for in these images and what distinguishes it from concepts like ›style‹ or ›mood‹
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https://twitter.com/bildoperationen/status/1627242486551703554

Much of the discussion around AI-generated images has involved questions of style, and for good reason. »In the style of ...« is maybe the most common phrases used in prompts, as #DallE, #Midjourney, and #StableDiffusion promise to produce images in any possible style
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This category of style transcends cultural hierarchies: Style can mean the brushstroke of a painter, the visual qualities of historical technical media, or the look of certain games & TV shows: Van Gogh, Polaroid, Unreal Engine, or Southpark – everything becomes a ›style‹
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Now that styles can seemingly be detached at will from individual artworks to create ever new images ›in the style of ...‹, it's no wonder that the debate about AI as a form of plagiarism boils down to the question of how to protect individual styles from being copied
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Coming back to images like the above stills from an imaginary sequel to »Alphaville«, they can hardly be said to copy Godard's style, even if such a thing would be possible in a few stills. Rather, what makes them appealing (to me) is a certain ›vibe‹ they allude to
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However broadly defined, style always denotes a mode of representation seperable from what is being represented, e.g. van Gogh's style can be stripped away from sunflowers and cornfields and applied to other subjects – and the same goes for the Unreal game engine ›style‹
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›Vibe‹, however, is conveyed as much by what's represented as by how it's represented: It’s in the hairstyles, clothes, and faces; in the cars, architecture, and furniture; in colors, surfaces, and textures; in the graininess of film stock or the blurriness of old VHS
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Style, in this sense, is a certain visual quality common to otherwise very different images, while vibe seems to be a more than just visual, rather atmospheric quality shared by images that seem to share the same aesthetic ›world‹
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Elif Batuman sums it up perfectly: »... ›vibe‹ turns out to be something like ›local colour‹, with a historical dimension. What gives a vibe ›authenticity‹ is its ability to evoke … a certain nexus of historic, geographic and cultural forces.«
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theguardian.com/books/2008/apr…

In his fascinating »Theory of Vibe« (from which I got the above quote), @peligrietzer has elaborated on this world-creating quality of aesthetic ›vibes‹, calling the vibe an »abstractum that cannot be separated from its concreta«
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glass-bead.org/article/a-theo…

In my view, it’s this historical concreteness, its rootedness in the specifics of a certain cultural moment in space and time, which defines ›vibe‹ in contrast to style, and which also distinguishes from the similar ›mood‹
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Aesthetic ›moods,‹ such as those visualized in mood boards, are also atmospheric qualities that go beyond the purely visual. But compared to ›vibes‹ they seem to be much less concrete and specific: ›gloomy‹ is a mood, ›1980s cyberpunk fiction‹ more of a vibe
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›Moods‹ in this sense refer not to the concrete worlds conjured up by images but to the generic atmospheres they evoke, and their authenticity is based on a certain emotional tunedness, not a sense of historicity. Such moods, then, have much less to do with nostalgia
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What’s more, ›vibes‹ seem always already mediated, and while they appear to be inextricably bound to historical media and their visual qualities, these specific qualities have long been the object of remediation and simulation, years before AI
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Indeed, much of pop culture in the last decade, from »Stranger Things« to the movies of Luca Guadagnino, seems obsessed with recreating the vibe associated with ficticious historical worlds as conveyed by movies from the 1970s and 80s
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What seems different with non-existent movies created by AI though is that they recreate vibe without content, they conjure up worlds that are fascinating to look at but are not inhabited by human characters – they are a purer and emptier form of #ArtificialNostalgia
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(Big thanks to @hannesbajohr for pointing me to »A Theory of Vibe«)

(Also, big thanks to @StrickSimon for coining the phrase »›Springbreak on Tatooine‹-vibe«)

https://twitter.com/bildoperationen/status/1627279527381504003?s=20