Nostalgia Rewired: Gabe Aronson’s AI-Powered Imaginarium

World-Building a New Futuristic Nostalgia

Gabriel Aronson is an Austrian-American designer and animator whose work has lit up stages from Broadway to the West End, the Metropolitan Opera to Saturday Night Live. For over 15 years, he’s been crafting video projections for live entertainment—breathing life into stories through motion, light, and design.

But in the past three years, a new kind of canvas emerged.

With the rise of generative AI, Gabe launched Artomaton, a side project that began as a playful dive into some of his favorite aesthetic touchpoints: world’s fairs, plastic toys, sixties sci-fi, spy movies, and kinetic sculpture. At first, it was just an experiment, an AI remix of visual nostalgia. But something strange and beautiful began to emerge from the noise. Images grew more realistic. Patterns formed. Narratives suggested themselves. And The Fair, a strange, retro-futuristic world ruled by corporate optimism and shadowed by uncanny tension came into view.

In this edition of The Imagination Age Spotlight Series, Gabe walks us through his improvisational, iterative collaboration with AI, where prompts become portals, and co-creation with machines unlock entirely new dimensions of storytelling. He shares insights from Artificial Botany, his interrogation of AI’s aesthetic logic, and opens up about the ethical questions facing artists in this new creative era, from authorship to representation to responsibility.

Gabe’s work wrestles with AI, bends it, and pushes it past the obvious and into the unknown. The result is a body of work that feels both eerily familiar and totally alien—a mirror to our past and a window into our creative future.

This is what happens when an artist with deep roots in traditional craft leans into the machine and invites us to imagine what comes next.

Q: Artomaton delves into “The Fair,” presenting its people, pavilions, and enigmas. How did you conceptualize this project, and what role does AI play in bringing this imaginative world to life?

A: After a lot of formal experimentation with AI, the Fair started as a process of pure aesthetic and syntactical experimentation, literally prompting a jumble of words and concepts that I like and seeing what emerged from that soup. The images were somewhat abstract but evoked places and spaces, which I gave names. Those names, such as “Pavilion of Progress” asked questions such as “Where is this Pavilion, and who works there?” which prompted more concrete explorations with AI, which prompted more questions to be answered… and that has been the process ever since. Working with AI is a collaboration: Throughout the process I have exerted varying levels of control, and I enjoy both the grind of working toward very specific results, and the loose journey of following a winding path without a set goal in mind, seeing what comes at me.

Q: Artificial Botany explores the intersection of AI and nature, generating intricate, otherworldly botanical forms. What inspired this project, and how do you see AI reshaping the way we interpret and create representations of the natural world?

A: Artificial Botany was an early experiment in gen AI, a formal framework for me to get a better grip on how gen AI worked. I set myself very specific parameters: a Botanical Compendium of unusual plants suggested by the aesthetics of famous artists. It was an experiment with a control variable of an 18th century botanical compendium, and then playing with different famous artist’s styles to see what exactly AI was picking up from them. I was interrogating the AI, and seeing how it interpreted the “essence” of an artist.

Q: AI is still an untapped resource in creative production, particularly from a commercial standpoint. Based on your experience, what do you see as the biggest opportunities for brands and entertainment properties to leverage AI effectively? On the flip side, what are the biggest pitfalls or ethical considerations they should be mindful of?

A: For me, the biggest boon is the speed of idea generation, and being able to trial ideas very quickly to see what does and doesn’t work. It is great for aesthetic exploration. The pitfalls of working with AI are the seduction of the tools, losing sight of one’s self. There are questions of authorship, not only in the sense of training data sourcing, but as you work, who is the creator? How creative an activity is curation? However these questions I don’t think are so forefront anymore, as the tools evolve to allow for much more control over the output. Whereas it used to be rolling the dice, now you see tools moving toward putting much more control back into the hands of the user.

Q: Your work bridges traditional animation, AI, and emotional storytelling. As a leader in this evolving space, how do you think AI will redefine the role of human artists in animation and film? What ethical considerations should creators keep in mind when working with AI-generated characters?

A: I am agnostic on the future. I think these tools are powerful in a way that’s impossible to fathom, and great, terrifying changes are coming to all industries. I think we will see a lot of pain in the entertainment industry because there is an enormous sea-change happening. However I know that audiences crave work that clearly derives from the human hand. I want to see AI used as a collaborator, not a displacer, but that is perhaps wishful thinking. The future ease of producing images and video means that originality of concepts will be an even more driving factor in the future.

While I am excited for the democratization of storytelling, and the ability for more people to produce high-quality visuals, the force of sheer will previously needed to make an idea come to fruition, and convince other people to invest money and time and labor into that idea, is no longer as much of a factor. So you see a glut of low-effort uninteresting work being put out that might not otherwise have surfaced, because it didn’t get others excited. Or simply the fact that the investment of labor and time is cut short, the calculus of the strength of an idea versus deciding to put it out there is wildly upended.

On the flipside, we are also seeing incredible stories and artworks emerging from corners of society previously underserved by the existing industrial frameworks, and fresh ideas will be able to gain a foothold.

As for ethical considerations for working with AI-generated characters? Well, everyone will have their own moral compass on these things, but in a world where people produce movies as solo endeavors, in the way that up to now individuals have written stories or novels, what responsibility toward our fictional characters do we have, to their creed or gender, or age, sexuality, disability, biography, when the question of “casting” actors goes out the window? What permissions do we give ourselves, and where do we draw the lines? Interesting questions to wrestle with.

Q: Collaboration between artists and AI is still an emerging practice. What lessons are you learning while bringing your visions to life and how do you think AI tools could be refined to better serve creatives?

A: The biggest hurdle for me is one that is already being addressed, and that everyone working with visual gen AI wants, that of control in outputs, consistency of character and location, and general intent. I am excited to see how the tools will continue to evolve toward absolute control, tilting the creative decision-making back to the person in the driver’s seat. I recognize that that goes against my creative mode of improvisation and conversation, but a sliding scale of control would be very welcome. And the more control the artist has, the less of an ethical dilemma. Someone I am in awe of is Paul Trillo, who is working on the forefront of ethical AI, and has been partnering with Asteria, a company that has trained their models on ethically sourced and licensed content. Many of his workflows are focused on handing back absolutely creativity to the human, but leveraging the great capabilities of AI.

Q: You’ve worked extensively in theater and other forms of traditional entertainment, industries that often prioritize craftsmanship and legacy techniques. For those hesitant to embrace AI, what’s one mindset shift you’d encourage to help them see AI as a tool for creativity rather than a threat to tradition?

A: I think there is an impression that AI is an art-making box that spits out exactly what you want. That certainly is one way of doing things, and I would say that is one type of process, a curative process. You can get something fine, but without delving deeper and iterating, and remixing, and using AI tools as part of a greater tool chest, you aren’t actually leveraging what makes AI such a great asset. AI is also a very broad term, and from the outside there is an assumption that the term means one way of working. I have worked on projects where I build out elaborate environments in 3d software, then feed the resulting renders in texture enhancing AI software, then use photoshop to mix the results, and also add in smaller elements that were generated. It is similar to working with stock elements, which has been the common process for years. I also think AI is valuable as an idea-bouncing machine, even if you don’t end up using it as a tool toward the finished product.

Q: Which genAI artists have inspired you recently?

A:

@sy_the_ai_photo_guy is someone who’s work I’ve been admiring for a long time, really using the weirdness of AI in a bold way.

@boldtron and @slurp.tv are twin brothers who have been collaborating as artists long before AI but have really carved out a niche for themselves in the space, and really play with the medium.