Colonnades was inspired by Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a weird and captivating early modern text by Francesco Colonna which takes the form of a prolonged fantasy about antique architecture, in which a variety of symbolic and erotic masques and rituals take place. The text is generated using a Haskell library I put together a few years ago. I had intended to make a more complicated parody of the original's style, doing not just architecture but gardens, tombstone engravings and nymph's costumes, but I was running out of time, and on a whim I put one of the very basic sentences into StableDiffusion and was so impressed with the output (the nonplussed jade emperor on page 6) that I left the text generator as it was and just cranked out as many images as my laptop could generate in the remaining time. The results aren't much like the illustrations in the original, as I didn't give the prompts any stylistic instructions to try to get Renaissance engravings out of it, but I like the effect of the finished products anyway.

The text generator and associated utility scripts

The images were generated with an early version of StableDiffusion