Bored Panda reached out to Jimmy Neiron, AKA Evgeniy Matskevich, to learn more about him and his toy collection. First of all, he introduced himself: “My name is Evgeniy Matskevich, I am an engineer by education, with a master's degree in information systems. Now I am a pictorialist and author of comics, I have been popularizing science through memes and comics for more than 7 years (I work in the public Obrazovach and other scientific communities). A year ago, when the boom of neural networks began, I decided to take up neural network art and started the Jimmy Neiron channel.”
Evgeniy has been sharing all sorts of generated content on his Jimmy Neiron channel, but his toys have caught our attention the most. We wanted to know what inspired him to create this quite shocking collection.
“Recently, the third version of the Dalle neural network became available for public use. People involved in image generation embraced it with enthusiasm and began experimenting with its capabilities. In one of the chats of such enthusiasts (Chat of the Neuroaesthetics channel), I saw a picture with a plastic toy in the form of a bong, the paradox of this combination led me to the idea of creating a selection with 'non-children’s' toys. Together with my friends, we sketched out several phenomena and things related to adult life that children do not encounter. Some of them, in addition to the most abstract ones, were implemented,” shared Evgeniy.
We asked Evgeniy to describe the process of creating these visualizations and what challenges and breakthroughs he encountered during the creative process.
“In principle, this neural network is very responsive to requests and 'understands' well what they want from it. Once I came up with the basis of the prompt ('packaging a plastic children’s toy in the form of something'), things went very quickly. I translated the descriptions of the toys into English and ran these prompts through a neural network. Some concepts, such as depression, needed to be described in detail so that the neural network would visualize them exactly as I imagined (in the case of depression, a sad person in a tracksuit, with a pillow and a slice of pizza),” explained Evgeniy.
We also asked Evgeniy to share what he would like for people to take away from these toy sets. He shared: “From my point of view, the effect of this selection is achieved through the dissonance between childhood innocence and the often traumatic experiences of adulthood. The combination of colorful plastic and images from the adult world creates a visual paradox. Partly this selection evokes nostalgia for carefree childhood times, partly it is aimed at kidults, people who never grow up, for whom life remains a game. It seems to me that these images are meant to remind us of the childish part of us and remind us of how important it is to preserve a childish view of the world. But of course, everyone can take away something different.”
And lastly, he added: “Try to remain young at heart, that is, be curious, open to new things, and do not lose the ability to be surprised.”
