Responses by Gil Correia, art director and creative director; Ivo Purvis, art director and executive creative director; and Lourenço Thomaz, chief creative officer, Dentsu Creative Portugal.
Background: The campaign’s goal is to communicate the return of electronic music festival Jardim Sonoro, which, after a two-year break, changed its location to the largest natural park in the Lisbon, Portugal, area. The target is a very demanding audience: half Portuguese, half international—and all of whom are electronic music lovers.
Design thinking: As the festival location moved, it became difficult for us to imagine how the artists would blend in with nature. From that challenge, an idea came: What if we asked an artificial intelligence to imagine this for us? We started testing with the Midjourney platform, learning from our mistakes and improving how we interacted with the machine until the results exceeded our expectations.
Challenges: The fact that we had no idea what Midjourney would produce! That’s what excited us and led us on this path. Novelty and discomfort often lead to great work. We knew that we would have something fresh and that we would accept what the machine would give us because we felt that it was creating unique and unrepeatable works of art.
Favorite details: We didn’t change the images. There was no post-production on the illustrations. All the details and mistakes that came out of the machine became part of the artworks that they are. That, for us, is the greatest source of pride.
New lessons: The most important thing we learned is that AI is a great tool. We are still at its beginning and will certainly see significant developments in the near future that will dazzle us all. But it won’t replace anyone. Like other technologies that have emerged before, AI is a great tool, but it always needs someone to guide it in the creation process.
Alternate paths: The best part of working with AI is, even if we had done everything exactly the same way, the result would be different. The machine, like an artist, never repeats itself.
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