./ahmedhashim

I moonlighted as a music producer and audio engineer for years, agonizing over details few would notice. Some of that work left the studio: an edit here, a remix there.

Remixes begin with someone else’s stems, the individual vocal and instrument tracks that make up a song. You preserve what makes the song recognizable and warp the rest to suit your own sensibilities, then send your version out into the world with their name still on it. Those two tracks exist because I loved the originals too much to leave them alone.

Dance music has done this for five decades. A record gets remixed into a dub, which gets cut up into an edit. Somewhere along the line a bootleg appears that nobody can trace back.

Of course it happens outside music as well. Sergio Leone basically lifted Kurosawa’s Yojimbo shot for shot to make A Fistful of Dollars, and Kurosawa sued him over it. Shakespeare borrowed Romeo and Juliet from an English poem, which traces back through a French translation to an Italian novella. Warhol found his soup cans on a supermarket shelf. Art doesn’t usually reveal its process, outside of liner notes and court documents.

AI-generated images can show theirs. A prompt for an image acts like a set of public stems that anyone can read. Read one, and your own take on that image begins to materialize in your mind. I wanted to create a space where the mingling of ideas was the main attraction.

Introducing Critter, an artistic exploration in the form of a miniature social network for generative art.

A network of imagination

On Critter you’re a creature. You enter a prompt and a diffusion model starts dreaming. When it outputs something you like, you share it, and the dream turns into a squeak. Each squeak is shared along with the prompt used to create it, so the words are part of the art.

Critter revolves around a single concept: all squeaks can be remixed. Click remix and you’ll see the squeak’s original prompt loaded in your editor, where the placeholder asks, “What would you change?” Change one word or change it all, then noodle on it until it’s right. Share it and your remix will permanently point back to its parent.

Family trees

The coolest thing about the site is that each squeak has a relatives page where you can see the family tree it belongs to. Here’s one early chain that started, appropriately enough, with a can of soup:

I dreamed the first one. A creature named triz responded to the pop art with a quilt, and I remixed the quilt with denim patches a day later. Three squeaks in and the painting has become fabric, but you can still see where it came from in there. The front page plays on this as well, since its ranking favors ideas that keep getting passed down.

I don’t know what Critter will become, and that’s the experiment. All I hope is for one good idea to get passed around from creature to creature until it evolves into something nobody imagined. If that sounds like fun to you, come be a creature. Make a squeak, or find a squeak you love and answer the question in the prompt box.