AFTER-IMAGES

Ten years ago, Elman Mansimov’s alignDRAW marked a threshold moment—the first text-to-image AI images. Those early results were fragile and uncanny, still tethered to their textual seeds. They carried the excitement of possibility, of a medium still becoming.

A decade later and well into the post-AI era, this work returns to Mansimov’s original prompts and processes them to a speculative point of ending. Beginning with photorealistic interpretations of his prompts generated in Midjourney, each image was passed through an image-to-image AI (Stable Diffusion), the output fed back as the next input, again and again—one hundred iterations in total.

With each cycle, the original composition unraveled. Forms softened, details dissolved. The AI’s own internal “logic” began to surface—hallucinating shapes, saturating the palette with cold, electric hues, and slowly erasing the initial image that fades back to noise- where it originaly emerged from. What remained in the final frames were vast, breathing fields of color, recalling the meditative expanses of Rothko.

This recursive process enacts the phenomenon of Model Collapse: the gradual decay of an AI trained only on its own outputs or other synthetic data. By applying it to the prompts that helped inaugurate this technology, the work creates a temporal arc—linking the first AI images to a speculative “last.” It is at once an homage to Mansimov’s foundational experiment and a meditation on cultural entropy: a vision of what happens when creation folds back on itself. Is there a point where algorithmic recursion might lead not to infinite creation, but to entropy and collapse?

Installation proposal. The prompt is framed in a simple frame, and the grid (100 cm x 100 cm) with the 100 iterations of the feedback loop. One of the outputs -probaply the last one is printed (or painted ) on aluminioum.
prompt: a very large commercial airplane walking in the green grass field

Images created using Mansimov’s prompts and Midjourney in 2025

prompt: A blue school bus parked in a parking lot. A hundred iterations of feedback loop.

prompt: a bowl of bannanas is on the table. A hundred iterations of feedback loop.

prompt: a toilet seat sits open in the grass field. A hundred iterations of feedback loop.

prompt: a brown horse is grazing in a field. A hundred iterations of feedback loop.

prompt: a herd of elephants walking across a green grass field