Over the past 12 months the Consonance project has been using poetry to prompt visuals from the CLIP neural network using ever more sophisticated algorithms. By combining the power of poetry with the infinite visual range of AI, we can create entirely new content that is simultaneously art, film and poetry.

Consonance is a collaboration between the staff and students at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s and Belfast company Armchair and Rocket, and draws on the unique talents of Belfast digital artist Glenn Marshall and his world-leading work in artificial intelligence. Over the year, we have worked with award-winning poet Stephen Sexton and Heaney Centre graduate Eoghan Totten as well as drawing on work by James Joyce and W.B. Yeats. Each short film has been crafted from individual AI generated images using Glenn’s expertise.

Since we began, packages such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are now freely available, so AI text-to-image generation is here to stay. Consonance is looking at what it makes of literature and what it might mean for film.

In association with the Future Screens NI.