Haiga

Each haiga begins as a poem — seventeen syllables, counted strictly, five-seven-five. The finished poem then becomes the prompt: handed, word for word, to MidJourney, an artificial intelligence that answers language with images. Most of what comes back is refused. The one image that moves — that surprises, unsettles, or delights before it explains — is kept, and poem and image are sealed together in a single Polaroid frame: an instant that will not happen again.

The work spans every version of MidJourney since its public release in 2022 — from the dreamlike, gloriously unreliable early models to the interpretive sophistication of the latest — and no image is ever remade with a newer version. Each haiga stays in the version of machine vision that existed the moment it was made, so the collection doubles as a chronicle of how a machine learned to see.

Read the full story of the form →