dali: Digital Arts Lab, Iscte

Untitled frustration 1

Luis Miguel (botelho). Untitled frustration 1. 40 x 22.4cm. 2025.

Digital image resulting of the digital collage of fragments from two images produced by two AI-based image generation systems and from photos and other digital images by the author.

Untitled frustration 1 was inspired on the audio composition Frustration , by Catarina Santos and Luís Miguel (botelho), for the section Frustration of dali Show 2025 - Wanderings: What makes you question life?

Luís Miguel (botelho) wrote about the creative process:

I asked two AI-based image generation systems - Canva and DeepAI - to generate frustration images, using the prompt

Create a totally abstract image reflecting repeated frustration evolving in time, ending with a paroxysmal anger scream. The image spatial distribution should look like the timeline implicit in the prompt

They generated the following images, which didn't match my intent:

Canva's frustration image

DeepAI's frustration image

I didn't want to use the generated images in a way that their identity would be preserved but I used them as if they were a kind of ink. I used the background of Canva's image, and I used parts of DeepAI's image to create the most part of my image's foreground. I also used a few other images I have in my database.