The Story of My First Memory AI Art
In this article, I want to share the story of my first AI Artwork, created in the summer of 2022.
I got early access to DALL·E 2 thanks to a creator on Instagram who had been experimenting with AI tools and inspired many people at the time. After one of the live sessions they hosted together with the official DALL·E account, I was invited to try it myself. Suddenly, I could generate anything I could think of.
I still remember that moment very clearly. My eyes filled with tears and my heartbeat changed when I saw my prompts visualized for the first time. It meant something very simple and very powerful to me: as long as I could describe it, there was a way to generate it.
Here is a video I published in June 2023:
Almost an Art Student
When I was a child, painting was one of the few places where I felt seen. In the first grade, third grade and fifth grade of elementary school, my paintings won first place in painting competitions. Since I was also good at math and science, painting slowly stopped being “the thing” I was known for.
At some point, I took a talent exam for an arts school. I made it to the second round. The drawing prompt was: draw your dream school. That morning, I couldn’t think of a strong composition. I chose a very literal approach and drew my own school.
Looking back now, I understand what was missing. I wasn’t familiar with different styles or compositions yet. I hadn’t trained my eye enough to develop a personal style, a tone of voice, a vision, whatever we want to call it.
I didn’t get selected in the second round. From time to time, I still wonder what would have happened if I had received a formal art education. Would I still have studied engineering? I don’t know.
All of this might explain my emotional state when I was finally able to create images based purely on my own inner world and share them with others.
For me, dreaming has always been about sharing feelings.
The House Near the Hospital and Auntie E
Let’s talk about this specific AI artwork. It is a Memory AI Art piece and this is the first time I’m writing its story down. I shared it with a few people before, but never properly wrote it down.
When I was a child, we lived in a house close to a hospital. Relatives of my grandparents from the village would sometimes stay with us while they were getting diagnosed or treated. It was a convenient place.
One of them was Auntie E.
She was a soft and kind soul, with a very distinctive voice. Whenever she visited, her voice would fill the house. She had suffered a lot because of her close family, but she never became bitter.
When we visited her home, she welcomed us with a smile and a big heart full of love. She didn’t have much, but everything was always extremely neat, clean and tidy. She had big flowers in her garden. Their pots were made from sunflower oil tins.
She also knew how to massage incredibly well. If you had muscle pain, she would somehow find its root and almost miraculously heal it. When she stayed with us, she showed me a few things. Maybe that’s why I still know a little bit today.
She was one of the relatives who stayed with us during the diagnosis process. That same year, after she was treated, she passed away in the summer.
I spent my summers in my grandmother’s village, so I was there to help with the funeral. One image I will probably never forget is seeing her coffin placed on top of her new kitchen chairs, still wrapped in their nylon packaging.
It made me incredibly sad that she never got to enjoy those chairs.
That same summer, a famous young singer, Barış Akarsu, also passed away. There is a song by him that I associate deeply with that summer 2007:
The Rain We Watched Together
This Core Memory AI Art is about me and her.
When I think of her, the first thing I feel is how big her heart was and how naturally she knew how to share love without conditions.
One day, she was staying with us and it was raining heavily so much that you could barely see the mountain from the window. I think there might have been a power cut as well. She opened the window and we watched the rain together.
She said, “rahmet yağıyor.”
It means something like: mercy is raining.
You know the smell of the earth after a good rain.
In this Memory AI Art, I wanted to capture that moment.
I imagined both of us as younger. According to the stories I heard, she had very long hair when she was young. That’s why the girl on the left is her.
I hope she rests in peace and somehow feels the love I still have for her.