Earthsea
2023
Earthsea is a series of AI-generated images inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea novels. Rather than illustrating specific scenes or characters, the project attempts to capture the atmosphere of the stories: a world where magic is woven into the fabric of reality, where myth and history blur together, and where dragons, islands and oceans exist in a space between the material and the imagined.
As with my Objects Unknown series, I was less interested in photorealism than in the ability of early AI models to access unfamiliar visual territories. Their imperfections, ambiguities and dream-like inconsistencies became a way of exploring an imaginary beyond existing references. By generating and filtering through hundreds of images, I searched for forms that felt as though they belonged to the world described by Le Guin without directly reproducing it.
The project drew inspiration from floating architectures, remote island settlements and vast oceanic landscapes, combined with the atmosphere and composition of eighteenth-century maritime paintings. The resulting images depict fragile cities suspended above the sea, monumental towers emerging from mist, and impossible vessels drifting between water and sky. These landscapes appear ancient and familiar, yet impossible to place in any real geography.
What fascinated me most in Earthsea was the idea that magic is not a spectacle but an invisible force underlying reality itself. The AI-generated imagery became a tool for exploring this condition, producing spaces that feel simultaneously real and immaterial, as if they had emerged from memory, myth or a half-forgotten dream.
The project explores how artificial intelligence can be used not merely to generate images, but to visualise worlds that sit just beyond human imagination, places that feel discovered rather than designed, carrying the ambiguity, mystery and poetic uncertainty that lie at the heart of Le Guin’s writing.
"When Segoy raised the islands of the world from the sea in the beginning of time, the dragons were the first born of the land and the wind blowing over the land. So the Song of the Creation tells. But her song told also that then, in the beginning, dragon and human were all one. They were all one people, one race, winged, and speaking the True Language.
They were beautiful, and strong, and wise, and free.
But in time nothing can be without becoming. So among the dragon-people some became more and more in love with flight and wildness, and would have less and less to do with the works of making, or with study and learning, or with houses and cities. They wanted only to fly farther and farther, hunting and eating their kill, ignorant and uncaring, seeking more freedom and more."
They were beautiful, and strong, and wise, and free.
But in time nothing can be without becoming. So among the dragon-people some became more and more in love with flight and wildness, and would have less and less to do with the works of making, or with study and learning, or with houses and cities. They wanted only to fly farther and farther, hunting and eating their kill, ignorant and uncaring, seeking more freedom and more."
