Lucid Dreaming
An Interview with
Daniel Vasilyonok
“My work is a form of lucid dreaming. I use Artificial Intelligence to capture fragments of the soul discovered within the infinity of human consciousness,” explains artist Daniel Vasilyonok, “My visions act as a fire in my blood that allow me to discover powerful, emotional, mystical art in otherworldly universes. When I pause the dream and find what I'm looking for, it's like I've discovered a new part of my soul to share with the world.” Vasilyonok’s practice is hyper-contemporary and deeply personal; utilising AI as a creative tool that enables the artist to explore and visualise his own inner world. The result is a remarkable body of work characterised by highly evocative and ethereal dreamlike images.
The artist’s practice is fascinating, involving a method of conceptualisation, discussion and visualisation with AI, before cycling through hundreds of images and selecting a piece in a process the artist likens to pausing a dream. The practice is extremely personal and involves the artist exploring intensely vivid mental imagery. He explains, “While iterating, I find my mind is in a state of hyperphantasia visualising related objects, shapes, and scenes as the ones I’m creating.”
Works such as The Eye’s Judgement and Agape’s Song have a powerful cinematic and narrative quality, where figures inhabit otherworldly landscapes. In Agape’s Song, a woman sits serenely playing the guitar against the backdrop of a cosmic landscape. The crenulated surface of an unknown planet swirls against a glowing moon and a constellation of glimmering stars.
In The Eye’s Judgement, a lone figure stands within a forbidding environment, the dark, stormy sky reminiscent of an eye. The figure faces a fiery portal. These enigmatic images draw the viewer into a mythical space, where the imagination is left to construct what has already happened and what is yet to come.
Agape's Ember and Agape-O: The First Wave of the Blue Dream are extraordinarily striking. The artist’s mastery of light and colour lends each piece a mesmerising quality. Their composition, in which each figure dominates the frame, gives the work a monumental presence. Vasilyonok has developed his own visual language characterised by mythological fantastical imagery. With a background in Machine Learning and Computer Science, the artist uses new digital technology as a tool to explore new realms of imagination and creativity. He summarises, “I feel the work I create with AI has feelings of mysticism, grandeur, otherworldliness. I want to communicate a sense of the mystery present in the vast universe. At the same time, I want to convey that the infinite mysteries of the universe can be explored visually through the creation of art with AI.”