Holy Week in Spain is something sacred: a mixture of religion, devotion, faith, idolatry, and folklore. It was to be expected that some creator would eventually put generative Artificial Intelligence at the service of this event as well.

I felt that Juan Pablo de Miguel’s daring, provocative, and futuristic video proposal had a perfect place on an avant-garde, pluralistic, and international visual platform like Dodho.

Juan Pablo de Miguel (@demiguel on Instagram) is a practicing Catholic who fully respects the people’s devotion to the “pasos,” but does not understand all the paraphernalia surrounding these processions that transforms an act of faith into an act with traits of idolatry. Juan Pablo understands even less the “sectarian” aspect of the confraternities.

On the other hand, Juan Pablo has a very peculiar  but surely possible  vision of the future. He believes that in the not-too-distant future, both robotics and artificial intelligence will inevitably merge into our everyday lives.

These two dimensions have inspired Juan Pablo who, as a photographer and visual artist, has created this clip, assembling videos generated entirely through artificial intelligence. The message the artist conveys is a positive one (or a positive metaphor) of integration: other races, beings from other planets, or robots will participate in our traditions.

The title of the clip refers to the idea that although the images in the video represent a future we now see as dystopian and impossible, perhaps in the near future it will become our reality… If you don’t think it is possible, I invite you to think back just two years… Two years ago, could anyone imagine that a person could talk to a fictitious entity about their feelings and receive comfort and understanding? Or receive advice from such an entity about raising their own children? According to Juan Pablo, what we see in the video will eventually come, but we will not realize it and by the time we do, it will have already happened!

A brief explanation of how Juan Pablo de Miguel created this visual piece: starting from the idea described above, Juan Pablo prepared a prompt; using Leonardo Flow State, he refined this prompt until he obtained an image close to what he had in mind. The AI model used allows rapid generation of image variations, helping the creator to get closer to the desired idea through successive approximations, modifying the prompt at each iteration. Once the desired images were obtained, they were refined through an upscaler and used as input into another artificial intelligence to generate (always iterating as many times as necessary) a 5–8 second micro-video. After obtaining a micro-video for each image, Juan Pablo edited the final clip. Once this task was finished, he used the clip as input into another artificial intelligence to generate the accompanying audio.  [Official Website]

CLICK HERE to watch the full video