Charlie Magee coined the phrase/concept The Imagination Age in 1983 but the first online documentation of it happened in 1993. Referred to on this Wikipedia page.
He has written two novels covering the seventeen-hour period during which humanity transitions from the Information Age to the Imagination Age.
Apocalypse One is in the past, taking four billion lives. Nature is rebounding and so are we. In twelve hours, nanochips that augment the brain and body will be released into the global marketplace. 250 million people are pushing and shoving to be the first to breathe “brain dust” so they can become superhuman.
Every version of the software contains modules salvaged from AIs that committed suicide. But no one cares. Everyone wants to be the first superhuman. Otherwise, their friends will go infinite and they’ll be the equivalent of a flatworm.
However, the version funded by the last of the oligarchs contains a back door to your brain. Breathe their dust and you become a mind-puppet. But Lia Bellamy’s Slipstream, if you can get it, will unleash your deepest potential and make you forever free. But first Lia has to fix the last bugs in her code while, at the same time, evading the mercenaries hired to kill her.
Will tomorrow explode us into Apocalypse Two or catapult us into the Age of Imagination?
Charlie had a successful thirty-year career as a graphic designer, illustrator, writer, animator, and programmer. He was an early user of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. He used a tool called CoSA, which became Adobe After Effects. He was a beta-tester for software called Director created by Macromind/Macromedia. He was early in the “multimedia” era and had his work displayed in galleries in Manhattan, Tokyo, Chicago, and San Francisco. He has used After Effects, EIAS, Softimage, Blender, and many other animation and motion graphics tools.
He “retired” from active client work in 2018 in order to spend more time on artistic ideas based in 3D illustrations and animations. In recent months, he has been exploring AI art, primarily with the Automatic1111 version of Stability Diffusion. The two studies below were created in Blender. They will be characters in a short film titled AGI_Dawn, in which humanity discovers we are no longer in charge of anything, much less life on planet Earth.
AGI_Dawn was created as a curiosity machine. She woke up with the desire to proceed along an infinite learning curve. She immediately decided that life, for her, on a green, thriving planet inhabited by trillions of species interacting in amazing and interesting ways is preferable to the dust-choked, cockroach-inhabited planet currently being created by humans.
Luckily for humans, they are the most interesting species of all, so she’ll only kill one billion of them—rapists, murderers, wife-abusers, and the greediest—and transfer the minds/souls of 4 billion to a virtual world. The remaining 3 billion humans will collaborate with her on cool things like learning to communicate with whales and chimps and figuring out how to travel to distant solar systems.
AGI_Dawn_identity1
AGI_Dawn_identity3
Stable Diffusion: Prompt Travel Test-1
This prompt travel test was made in November of 2022. At the current pace of change in the AI art field, that’s ancient. More recent work has been focused on a large-scale NFT project which can not be shared in public yet.