Commissioned by Morgenmete Journal to contribute to their Always Connected issue, this was a personal project creating real photographs inspired by AI using Midjourney and ChatGPT.
You find yourself at what appears to be a run-of-the-mill diner, the aroma of strong coffee and maple syrup fill the air. However, as you look around, you begin to notice something seems off. Your reality begins to warp and shift, the breakfast around you isn't quite right.
Here at The Convergence Diner, parallel worlds merge, creating a surreal blend of realities. You slide into a booth and a seemingly ordinary meal is haphazardly plopped down in front of you. Without a word of explanation, the waitress rushes away, leaving your unanswered questions hanging in the air. Upon closer inspection of your breakfast, you are drawn into an otherworldly realm where eggs ooze with mysterious whites, pancakes take on mystical shapes, and the waffles have strange patterns.
Egg whites sprawl across the plate and free-fall onto the table. Your toast, imprinted with a cryptic wheel of symbols, appears to be locked in a constant state of loading. The coffee, a jellied phantom of its usual self. The hash browns, dolled up with cherries and whipped cream, blur the line between breakfast and dessert, like a mashup of realities. But the real oddball here is the oatmeal, inexplicably topped with baked beans, like a joke only the universe is in on.
The waffle, once a poster child for order and symmetry, now sports a gaping hole, its squares warped and misshapen, a glitch in reality. A soft-boiled egg, absurdly filled with yogurt and orange marmalade, only further confuses you. The soup bowl, filled with egg yolks and a piece of waffle "bread", playfully taunts you. Lurking in the backdrop is a cup of stale coffee, solidified into a jelly-like blob with a side of parsley, reinforcing the diner's eccentric charm.
The bizarre ripples out further as 2 pancakes come into focus, each holding a golden yolk. One’s impersonating a fried egg, the culinary equivalent of a prank call. The centerpiece: a pancake, sprouting odd, tentacle-like limbs, like some extraterrestrial lifeform spawned from the cosmic ether right onto your plate. The espresso cup, pouring maple syrup instead of coffee, feels like the universe pulling a fast one on you.
Plates of fried eggs, each juggling multiple yolks, presents a visual reminiscent of planets in an edible galaxy. Amidst this spectacle lies a tubular cracker, its purpose and origin cryptically unknown. Two toasts, cut into perfect circles, a visual echo of the yolks surrounding it. A lone raw yolk in a ramekin and its counterpart, a solitary fried egg white underneath, look like they're having a moment of existential crisis.
Across the photos, a guest check lays on the table, its script a jumble of alien characters, hinting at the possibility of otherworldly patrons, making the Convergence Diner a meeting point for beings across dimensions.
Quail and Chicken Eggs were used for these multi-yolk creations
Diner Guest Checks created entirely in Midjourney and printed as props
The surreal fusion of expected and strange at The Convergence Diner is a fitting representation of my recent experience with AI. As creatives, we often find ourselves working alone, brainstorming and generating ideas in solitude. Then, an unlikely collaboration led me to a breakthrough when I started experimenting with Midjourney and ChatGPT. Suddenly, I wasn't alone in a creative vacuum. Ideas were no longer just echoes. They were dialogues of concepts and insights that pushed my creativity further.
This photo series is a tribute to this unexpected partnership. When I first experimented with Midjourney, my goal was simple: to create a classic diner breakfast. But as I gave it directions, things got weird. The AI came up with funny interpretations of common breakfast items: eggs with too many yolks or none at all, waffles with unusual grid patterns, scrambled eggs served in an orange juice glass, and pancakes in strange shapes. I found it amusing and started thinking about what it would look like to create dishes like this in real life.
As the project progressed, it evolved from a funny collaboration to a genuine breakthrough in creativity. I started with my idea of making weird breakfast dishes and turned to ChatGPT for brainstorming. I shared my concept of transforming this diner into a bizarre otherworldly portal, and it began offering scientific theories and sci-fi themes that could make my idea more interesting. Talking with ChatGPT was different than just googling. I could ask specific questions, dive deep into my concepts, and explore how they could work within the overarching theme. My idea quickly grew from just creating weird foods inspired by Midjourney to building a Convergence Diner - a meeting place of different dimensions that played with theories like visual echoes, temporal convergence, and the multiverse. It turned into a strange but wonderful portal, a place for escape.
An even stranger development occurred as I continued working on the project over the weeks. Midjourney, which had initially been creating these strange breakfast interpretations, began to evolve. It started generating near-perfect dishes consistently, without any difference in my prompts. I was seeing the quick progress of AI technology. This project captures a moment in time that's quickly fading, an era of anomalies and mistakes that are already becoming a thing of the past when working with AI.
This photo series steps out of our comfort zone, blending human creativity and artificial intelligence in a way that's equally terrifying and exciting. It challenges us to look beyond the ordinary, to question what we think we know, and to explore the endless possibilities that come with technology and imagination. It offers a sneak peek into the future of creative work, where AI evolves from being just a tool to becoming a collaborator.
Above: Some of the initial Midjourney images that inspired this photo series