Field of Dreams is a collection of 75 character portraits named after outstanding women writers. The portraits are combined and enhanced with 32 surreal background states.

Field of Dreams was developed during November 2021 - January 2022 and has gone live January 31. It is an adieu to the passing year. It is strong but fringe character portraits meshed into wild surreal landscapes.

Portraits get distorted severely in this fashion but many fundamental characteristics remain - especially the eyes and the mouth. The combinations are intense. It is the land coming together with the human in a strange poetic way.

I have built surreal generative character pieces from my photographs. I edited the photographs with VQGAN software and fed the results to create an initial set of founding characters. With these characters I built the set of 75 characters here by randomly mixing different traits of the founding characters.

The 75 characters are named after prominent women writers of great literature from Gertrude Stein to Harper Lee. First name basis.. Mostly..

I followed a similar route with the landscape element by working through several stages of experimentation and iteration to arrive at a large set of surreal landscape pieces. Upon testing them on the character set, I've chosen 31 background states + 1 transparent state that will yield the full character. Some of the states are from diverse collections I have created in order to make the output image less predictable and have a higher randomization element with expanded visual alternatives.

I organized the characters in to packs of 25 which combined with the background alternative yielded 2400 combinations with equal rarities per each character set. I've decided to limit the mint to 1000 characters so that there will be a surprise factor and final rarities will be harder to predict.

I expect that even if fully minted the images will be rather different from each other than one would expect in such a project. Let's visit this if we ever come there..

Then there are 10 Legendary Editions. They are young men from the writings of these remarkable women writers. I've used the names rather liberally. I've made the men young to represent hope for the future. I've made them less decorated, less definite, more open to being shaped. Power shift.. For good..

So with the legendary editions included -- there will be 1000 possible combination minted at max and 1310 combinations will be forever gone. I am curious to see which images survive..

Best of love from me..

Hulki Okan Tabak January, 2022