Jamie Stantonian

City of Dreams

When I dream of a city, it is almost always Edinburgh, the place of my birth and home for 27 years. Across many years, this city of the undermind of has a shapeshifting consistency. Easter Road is the site of a huge flowing river full of grotesque alien creatures. Greenside, at the top of Leith Walk and home of my Italian immigrant ancestors, is often a futuristic shopping century, though the detail of the structures changes each time, the sleek cyberpunk essence of neon splendour and concrete organicism remains. 

Beneath Hollyrood Park and Arthur Seat hides a subterranean temple of unknown antiquity, a labyrinth of tunnels, ruined grand halls, and statues of lords and kings whose names are long forgotten. In the Old Town, this theme continues, as autochthonous stone structures, statues and spires grow from the ground, at once ruins and a tangle of living monuments as seething with life as a rainforest. The Old Town is a place of polaroid parties pulsing with lascivious energy. Decomposed memories from which shadow futures grow.  

This series of photos made in Midjourney v7 are an attempt to capture the essence of this strange alternate Edinburgh, which now feels more like home than the place I left almost two decades ago.

Thinking in VHS

Growing up in the golden age of home movies, the medium of VHS imprinted itself deep on my psyche. Not just the movies which I surreptitiously watched, but the accompanying box art itself with their dumb taglines and hyperbolic blurbs. Between the ages of around 10 and 14, when made up stories with toys I would draw VHS covers for them. These stories were pastiches of hits and schlock of the era refracted through the prism of my adolescent mind. True to the creative process itself, I stole and recombined ideas, plagiarised and remixed, to the point of producing ideas and stories that were almost new. In late 2022 I decided to try and reinvent them with Generative AI as a way to learn what was possible with the technology.