Welcome to Toriyama Street! An imaginary world created with A.I with colourful, extravagant and mysterious characters. The creator talks to us about the inspiration behind the project, and his creative process and gives us some insight into enigmatic people in this street.

Greetings ToriyamaStreet, can you please introduce your project? Where are you from? How long have you been working with AI?

Hello Coeval, Toriyama is a very crowded street full of extravagant characters, it’s a street photography project made without a camera in a place that doesn’t exist. I am an Italian graphic designer and, about three months ago, I decided to try the AI text to image. At first I was skeptical, then I realized that I could unleash my creativity in a completely new way, so I ended up spending hours creating hundreds of characters and I haven't stopped since. That’s how "ToriyamaStreet - Chronicles of an artificial street” was born, in a pretty spontaneous way.

Where is ToriyamaStreet located and why does it attract these cool characters?

"Toriyama Street" is an imaginary neighborhood in a retro-futuristic Tokyo. Nobody knows exactly where it is located or why all these cool characters end up here: some live here, others work here and still others come from distant planets and kingdoms. Why are they attracted to it? There are numerous legends about it, but I believe these rumors only serve to fuel the hype surrounding the street.

What are the inspirations behind your aesthetic? What is the story behind the people?

Manga, video games and Japanese fashion have always been my greatest source of inspiration and have helped shape my aesthetic. I’m a great fan of the work of the famous mangaka Akira Toriyama. I have always been fascinated by the irony and peculiarity of all his characters and that’s why I came up with the idea of creating an imaginary world populated by heroes, villains, aliens, monsters, and (extra)ordinary people. All of them are extremely cool, some can't wait to tell you something weird about them, while others have no desire to talk to us…well, it's not easy to deal with them, but they will make you smile.

In the ToriyamaStreet account we can see the creation of a world where we find diverse characters with eclectic aesthetics. Can you walk us through your process for creating the images? How do you come up with prompts, what image generator do you use? Etc..

First I created the photographic style that I wanted, using a sequence of words that now I use in every prompt, to give the project a coherent and recognizable style. For the creation of individual characters I try to leave my imagination free to give each one of them a set of identifying features: from facial features to hairstyles, outfits, accessories etc…I create all the images using Midjourney which, in my opinion, is currently the best A.I. program for achieving the results I’m looking for. I'm also doing a lot of experiments with MJ "blend" tool to mix some of my illustrations with images generated with A.I. and I must say that the results are surprisingly good, in this case as well.

What challenges have you had working with this technology? What limitations have you encountered to bring your vision alive?

I have always used digital tools to create my works, but A.i. is a completely different one because you have less control over the final result. Seen from a creative perspective, this can be very interesting and funny, but the final goal is always to get a result as faithful as possible to the entered prompt, which is not always so easy. I think this is the greatest challenge you have to deal with while working with A.I.

What benefits have you seen from working with AI? What do you think is the potential?

The thing that immediately fascinated me about A.I. is the possibility of producing visual material that would have been very difficult, or probably impossible, to create in a different way. It is a tool that practically places no limits on imagination. Moreover, I think that the way each person chooses to express their creativity is entirely subjective and personal. For me, the most important thing is to get a final result that visually satisfies my taste, whatever tool I’m using, and from this perspective A.I. has an enormous potential.

Finally, what's in the future for ToriyamaStreet?

The project was only born 3 months ago, and only now I’m starting to think about its future. I have many ideas and I have already started working on some of them. I would like to give a sort of tangibility to Toriyama Street and I’m trying to figure out the best way to do it. There will surely be some news soon.