Airborne Arcana: III — The Empress
III — The Empress: Ornate, radiant, and abundantly formed, this airborne palace embodies the Empress’s creative fertility, beauty, and power to bring new worlds into being.
The first collector to acquire this piece receives a full physical deck. Contact jonoo@gmail.com to arrange shipping.
The Airborne Arcana reimagines the Major Arcana as visionary landscapes and spacecraft from an imagined future, emerging from the collective unconscious. For decades, my work has drawn upon the symbols and archetypes of the unconscious; here, those same forces animate the tarot’s journey of transformation and discovery.
Each card originated in a body of GAN work I created in 2019. I used the recovered dataset to run an actual BigGAN-deep-128 at its native 128 × 128 resolution, starting from a recorded seed and guided by weighted combinations of ImageNet classes rather than language. I selected the most generative malfunction, not the prettiest image, and used contemporary prompt-based tools to develop and extend it without correcting its distortions. Every card retains its complete lineage, from seed to checksum.
