Skip to main content
BY ELLIOT QUARTZ

Elliot Quartz

Experimental · 2023 · 1 credit

View credits
Category
Experimental
Made with
Midjourney · GPT-4 · Photoshop
Released
2023
Views
8
View the work

ABOUT

What would history look like if the people inside it had camera phones? An early Midjourney series putting historical figures inside familiar selfie poses and giving them the captions and habits of modern social media. I developed the concept, generated the images, and combined them with Twitter-style captions in Photoshop. The format later expanded into Viral Selfies of Fiction and Tinder Profiles of History.

SELECTED FRAMES — 8 OF 8

01 — GEORGE WASHINGTON CROSSING THE DELAWARE
02 — FREDDIE MERCURY AT WEMBLEY
03 — MOSES PARTING THE SEA
04 — MARIE CURIE IN THE LABORATORY
05 — ISAAC NEWTON BENEATH THE APPLE TREE
06 — MARILYN MONROE WITH THE CROWD
07 — PABLO PICASSO IN THE STUDIO
08 — NIKOLA TESLA IN THE LABORATORY

PROCESS

I used Midjourney to place historical figures in recognizable selfie compositions, GPT-4 to write Twitter-style captions, and Photoshop to combine the images and text. The central joke comes from the clash between historical imagery and the ordinary visual language of a phone screen.

Credits

MORE

More Experimental Work

  • Celebrity Mortal Kombat

    Celebrity Mortal Kombat

    Elliot Quartz

  • MONSTER TINDER

    MONSTER TINDER

    LEO MAZZINI

  • Who the System Follows

    Who the System Follows

    Glenis Wade