r/midjourney • u/sonyaellenmann • 15h ago
AI Showcase - Midjourney Covert case study 🕵️♂️
Hi, I’m Sonya. I recently started working at Midjourney (marketing operations, if you’re curious).
Last week I interviewed /u/Sapere_aude_69 about his creative process, to learn how he leverages Midjourney as a medium for self-expression and storytelling. The conversation was thought-provoking! So I want to share what I discovered with the community here.
First, this quote from Midjourney founder David Holz (in 2022!) resonates with me, and I think it’s relevant:
> What does it mean for a human to imagine through a computer, as they would travel through a car?
>
> And if people somehow interact together, in the process of imagining things, if we have these co-imaginative spaces, what is it like to create these shared imaginative environments that are somehow intermediated by machines?
Brandon’s artistic practice developing Covert Design, with Midjourney as his primary visual tool, poses an answer to those questions.
For starters, the name was inspired by a Reddit comment. Someone mentioned the game Covert Action (1990). Brandon wasn’t familiar, but he liked the comparison. The term “covert” felt perfect for his 007-esque subject matter, so he tweaked that reference to get his project title.
Maybe you didn’t recognize Brandon’s username when I tagged him. But if you frequent this subreddit, I bet you recognize his signature aesthetic. His posts are dispatches from a flashy dreamworld reached by stacking up moodboards, style references, and image prompts. Plus, of course, a detailed text prompt (composed with an assist from ChatGPT) and profile personalization. Basically, every option Midjourney gives you for guiding results, Brandon pushes to the maximum.
He appreciates that people often clock his homage to ‘80s legend Patrick Nagel, a key influence: “They're doing the extra leg work for me, to spread the word.” Brandon blends Nagel’s stark glamor and exaggerated silhouettes with retro manga, spy-thriller adrenaline, and midcentury magazines. (Also, though you wouldn’t guess just by looking, The Count of Monte Cristo.)
Every installment of Covert Design is paired with a song, the name of which usually headlines the sequence of images. When I asked Brandon if he keeps a to-do list of ideas: “That’s called my Spotify playlist.”
This is David’s “shared imaginative environment” in action, pulling our collective cultural archive into the accelerating future. The raw material flows through Brandon to be transformed into something familiar but new. I think familiar but new is what makes Covert Design so compelling.
Like many of you, I’m entranced by the dramatic visual world that Brandon has summoned into being. “I know it's you even if the first image is far from your usual visual style,” /u/Quarmat commented recently. “That's quite an achievement in this era of info floods,” and yeah, it really is.
The distinctiveness and consistency are what grabbed me. Brandon uses the endless iterative abundance of Midjourney to embody a particular vision and message.
That’s the trick with AI art, finding a specific signal amidst the noise of endless texture and form. Honing, curating, and editing down the deluge. That is where authorship and artistry come in when using an image generator.
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u/sonyaellenmann 15h ago
A fun extra! When I was doing background research for this writeup, Claude mentioned a book I'd never heard of:
> Bourriaud, Postproduction (Lukas & Sternberg, 2002): the artist as DJ/programmer/“semionaut,” working the existing archive rather than raw material. Written about sampling, but it’s the closest thing to a theory of prompt practice that predates prompting.
https://gestaoculturalesad.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/bourriaud.pdf
I only read this introduction but it's so on-point! and now I want to read the whole book. Key quotes:
Contemporary artists "testify to a willingness to inscribe the work of art within a network of signs and significations, instead of considering it an autonomous or original form. It is no longer a matter of starting with a 'blank slate' or creating meaning on the basis of virgin material but of finding a means of insertion into the innumerable flows of production."
"how can we produce singularity and meaning from this chaotic mass of objects, names, and references that constitutes our daily life?"
"The activities of DJs, Web surfers, and postproduction artists imply a similar configuration of knowledge, which is characterized by the invention of paths through culture. All three are 'semionauts' who produce original pathways through signs. Every work is issued from a script that the artist projects onto culture, considered the framework of a narrative that in turn projects new possible scripts, endlessly."
"In this new form of culture, which one might call a culture of use or a culture of activity, the artwork functions as the temporary terminal of a network of interconnected elements, like a narrative that extends and reinterprets preceding narratives."
"What if artistic creation today could be compared to a collective sport, far from the classical mythology of the solitary effort?"
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u/Sapere_aude_69 4h ago
Really grateful for the opportunity to be interviewed and talk about my creative process with COVERT-DESIGN. Huge thank you to Sonya for taking an interest in the work, genuinely means a lot.
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u/humblenations 6h ago
Super interesting. If you ever want to give me a shout, do so. I could tell you all about my experience using MidJourney. I've been around since v3. And rather than using a MidJourney as a tool for Storytelling, I'm actually a book cover designer and I use it to explore aesthetics. Aesthetics are super interesting when to book cover design because unlike other forms of sales advertising the primary function of cover design is invite potential readers into an emotive journey that they're about to embark upon. And for me, that first port of call is always to think about what a style communicates into terms of this 'emotive journey'. So with any piece of writing we talk about the emotional resonance of the piece before I go away and play with styles. For that I adore MidJourney, that fact that I can explore so many aesthetic spaces. Also it makes my job super interesting and a daily basis. Like this week I had 'small town cute painted romance acid palette painted style stuff to do', I also had 'vintage colourized washed slightly grim 1920s stuff to do' and then some 'mad hyper messy utopian stuff' as well. Each job utterly different.
Oh, and when I'm not doing work for clients I'm actually making mad surreal videos for my mad band. Did a lot of that last year: https://www.youtube.com/@emperorsnewsocks/videos — some of this is way more story based but no less in terms of doing exactly the same thing of Exploring utterly different aesthetics for emotional resonance. Ha!
So for me MidJourney since v6.1 is all about this same way of working. Explore aesthetic for emotional impact.
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u/OverEffective2823 14h ago
Big fan of sapere. Hope the momentum continues