PAUSE BUTTON PORTRAITS: THE FACE THAT ATE ITS OWN PASSPORT PHOTO

Earlier this year I made over 90,000 images that were based off of the album cover art for Hall & Oates hit album Private Eyes which was released in 1981 -- Pipi Universel insists that he was not the art designer for this album but I have yet to see any proof of his claims -- in my mind the album cover is a prime example of some of his earliest design work.

Private Eyes yielded two #1 hits on the USA Billboard charts -- both the title track and I Can't Go For That (No Can Do). Another track Did It In A Minute reached #9 on the charts.

My main attraction to this album art in particular was seeing how Stable Diffusion would recreate and reinterpret the halftone patterns and hand-rendered stipple-ink patterns from the pre-digital era of graphic design. This led to some interesting discoveries as many of the outputs I was getting had textures unlike anything I'd ever seen before -- and the compositions were wild as well. So I just kept it running 24/7 for several days while inputting various different reference images and prompts and settings -- and in turn running those different combinations into different custom models that I had created.

Here are 51 images culled from those experiments -- when I showed some of the pieces to Shaun Keenan he commented that they looked like pictures of a tv screen that was showing a paused frame of a VHS tape -- I really liked that description because that's exactly what some of the textures remind me of -- a certain quality of pre-digital era glitch & grain. So, thanks to Shaun: PAUSE BUTTON PORTRAITS, it is...

Legio X May 12th, 2025

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3072 x 1728
created with sd 1.5 using custom models in neural frames
upscaled using topaz giga
2025