Habsburg AI Portrait Studies

Habsburg AI Portrait Studies is a series of cloth-printed generative portrait images and a short frame-interpolated animation produced using a bespoke diffusion model recursively retrained on its own output. This autophagous training causes the model to collapse on itself, constricting the model's distribution around the mean, forcing it to produce images in an amplified version of the model's default style.

The images not only demonstrate the potential retrograde effects on model development caused by incorporating synthetic data into training but also reveal the average aesthetic character of the target model, MidjourneyV5, by exaggerating the formal properties to which it characteristically reproduces.

As an exploration of the aesthetic properties of this collapsed version of Midjourney v5 model, the images in the Habsburg AI Portrait Studies series took a limited subject and prompting approach: investigating the models' representations of human subjects through prompting for "portraiture of men and women". Given the degenerate development of the model and the grotesque portraiture, it has a tendency to reproduce, the series takes its name from the medieval Central European dynasty with a famed legacy of inbreeding.