Longing for the woman with fourteen fingers
Our current headquarters, lovingly called Shangri La, is an allergy for the minimalist. It's a welcoming jungle of plants, a green island in a grey, angular sea of real estate.
It was November. The eight of us sat under thick blankets in The Green Surfer headquarters, a steaming bowl of pea soup in hand. We had just founded Club Bizar: a club of music makers, festival builders, record spinners and theatre animals that wanted to share fresh energy and creativity. With clients, with festivals, with each other. The perfect complement to digital concepts: real contact, feeling energy, getting joy from people who are enjoying themselves.
AI was still an exotic thing back then. For fun, we fired up MidJourney to see how it would translate us. The first image: a red-haired woman on a dolphin, with more limbs than a person would care for. Cheers! Each next image was even more absurd and beautiful.
Brilliant, precisely because it was so wonderfully off. Human and animal flowed into one another, limbs grew wherever they liked. Not because we asked for it, but because AI filled in our skinny prompt itself. It translated exactly what we wanted to convey: undiluted creativity, unhindered by logic. Perfect imperfection. And that failing gave AI a friendly face. It had flaws, and that made it endearing.
The images became part of our acts, at Paaspop, Zwarte Cross, Madnes Festival and Castlefest. Human work.
Until our festival builder was struck by fire and our joy-makers were laid to ash. For replacements we tried the same prompts again. But now everything was right: the fingers, the limbs, even the pores. There was nothing to fault. Lovely, sure, but also sad. Because the soul is in the illogic. The surprise is gone, the childlike innocence drowned in grown-up perfection.
What remains is longing
