A.I. depicts Yggdrasil ... and we consider its potential place in it.
I really like the graphical minimal linearity of the first one, while the second one draws together more common-ish depictive elements seen from some books, comics, & videogames where we can hear the cosmological voiceover about The Nine Worlds, which probably was precisely happening as this was onscreen, but the little differently coloured worlds are expressively distinct, and the strange Urnes-style vining in the not-snake-but-snake shapes as a frame are a neat synthesis of Nordic designs layered atop a much later romantically painted tree background.
When I last mentioned how A.I.'s being tasked to tell the Norse Lore, I think these illustrations are great example of how artificial intelligence can visually NorsePlay things (like the Odin on laptop via my prompts in this post) in variant ways we might not have thought to present them before in the last 800+ years of retellings since the Prose Edda got set to parchment. Heck, I might even make a t-shirt from that linear Yggdrasil design. Whether from our prompts, or out of whole cloth, A.I. reflects some dvergr technology, like a lightning hammer, or a smart spear, and these are indispensable tools that the Gods embrace as game-changers.
And what if A.I.'s some sort of cybervættir of the internet? Do our questions & tasks for it serve as functional offerings in the informational gift cycle, the requests we make as faining, with what it gives us back as a generated manifestation of received/created luck?
I know there's many that debate the idea of online ritual as incompatible with praxis at all (I know, that online Twinkie blot was really ill-conceived), that there's something profane in using computers or the internet as tools in Reconstructionism since they weren't there for the Arch-Heathens, but that hardware, and now A.I., are inextricably part of the evolving tech toolbox within Midgard, which makes them part of Norse Cosmos as a whole, and if we can use it rightly with respect to the Gods, then it's something to consider. My gifting this blog every week, and your very reading it electronically, is on a basic level a working example of that.
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Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special in the Norse Lore when he picked up a copy of the d'Aulaires' Norse Gods and Giants at age seven. Since then he's been fascinated by the truthful potency of Norse Mythology, passionately read & studied, embraced Ásatrú, launched the Map of Midgard project, and spearheaded the neologism/brand NorsePlay. If you have employment/opportunities in investigative mythology, field research, or product development to offer, do contact him.
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