Augmented Granular Impressionism

… and also, welcome to the first post of my new ‘Nick’s Corner’ blog 🙂

To celebrate the blog going live, I’m introducing a new concept ‘Augmented Granular Impressionism’, or (once that context is set) – AGI for short!

Just like ‘Nick’s Corner’ itself, AGI defies precise definition, including in its physical expression …

… so let’s have fun with it!

Below is the first one we assembled yesterday – ‘we’ being the 2 entity human-ai team collaborating on the image (i.e. the ‘A’ in AGI as ‘Augmented’), under my direction.

In this case, I took a number of photographs, one of a landscape (Belvoir Bay in Herm) and the rest to provide a palette of textures to choose from. I then specified how I would like these combined, refining with a few follow-up questions.

Of course, I was not the only one with agency in this process: there was room for interpretation in carrying out my requests – including of my follow-up refinement prompts!:

Ok, this is a good point to clarify something. There is one aspect of AGI that is very precisely defined, and is not open to interpretation.

You need to know this if you want to dive in and create your own AGI! Otherwise, it is not AGI!

A completed piece follows a naming convention consisting of seven elements separated by (six) hyphens:

• AGI

• year (as four digits) the piece was composed
  
• month (as two digits)
  
• day (as two digits)
  
• counter number (at least three digits) in case you compose more than one piece on a given date. Don’t worry too much if you don’t remember the exact order you created them in – just use the counter number to make them unique for that date. Also, if you want to consider variations on a piece as finished works in themselves, just assign them a new counter number for the day!
  
• two initials in uppercase (yours or the initials of any persona you choose if you prefer not to use your own)
  
• A what-three-words (lower-case) address from a location of your choice not connected to your home – so for instance a nice location in nature

So the format is:

AGI-yyyy-mm-dd-ccc-IN-///what-three-words

for example:

AGI-2000-01-01-001-AB-///your-chosen-square

Final thing to note is that the date relates to the date of composition of the piece (or finalisation of it), not of the elements that go toward making it, be they for example photos you have taken, your own artwork or your own splashes of paint colour etc.

Ok, so here was my next piece from yesterday as I began experimenting:

I’m starting this project – and with this post, the launch of AGI! – and also importantly to me, finally, finally launching my ‘Nick’s Corner’ blog! – during a holiday in the tranquillity and relaxing environment of Herm island.

In the above case, the main landscape photo for the piece was a photograph of a cloud taken in the last two weeks (not in Herm) and a close-up photo of an iron railing and a plant were used for textures, both taken from the garden of St Tugal’s.

Ok, now the next:

This piece just used one additional image for the texture, a photograph I took of wet gravel after rain on the main dirt track outside of St Tugal’s. I also exported this image to Lightroom and had a quick play with the sliders etc.

If you have a go, you can find a workflow that works for you, but out of interest, in my case, I collected the photos in three albums called ‘AGI Landscapes’, ‘AGI Textures’ and ‘AGI Impressions’, the latter to store the completed works.

(works sounds grand, doesn’t it!)

Next piece:

So this made use of a photograph of sunset over Guernsey, taken yesterday (21st April) from Herm, I believe with my iPhone camera zoom ramped up to maximum (both optical and digital), and used the bark of a Herm tree as texture for the sky.

While the light was low and combined with the high magnification, the sea didn’t look great in the photo, the ai (in this case ChatGPT) stepped in and decided to make the sea look better than in the actual photo. I was happy with its decision and put up no argument!

The church was silhouetted by the setting sun in the actual photograph, so that compositional choice was not made by the ai, but rather was a matter of luck from where I was viewing the sunset on that day.

Ok finally for this first set:

I find this one is just fun. In Herm, it is a pleasure not just to see but also to hear the Oystercatchers, and their cries carry a long way over the water.

On which note, and as per the earlier observations that (other than the naming convention), AGI defies precise definition, I see no reason why other modalities could not be used as materials for use in compositions, for instance a sound recording of an Oystercatchers’ call.

Just to be clear though, the above is just an image, so please don’t hover over in the hope that sound will also start playing!

Finally, the featured AGI image for this post was also composed using the same approach, so for good measure I am going to term that one AGI-2025-04-21-006-NR-///driveways.subgenre.waveform

I hope you enjoyed this post, and maybe get tempted to have a play yourself and produce and maybe publish your own AGI! 🙂

Nick.