This project was my attempt to force Midjourney to define its references by the same ones I define myself by...specifically, the pop culture that made me. Sure, my parents were involved at some point, but like any true child of the ’90s, I was really raised by things like Frasier, Richard Simmons, and Sailor Moon. Using Midjourney’s moodboard feature — a tool generally meant to help control consistency and style — I loaded it with imagery from the media that imprinted on me most deeply. Not the monoculture moments that defined my entire generation, but the visuals I couldn’t shake as a kid and still reference, consciously or not, in my work today
A highly vulnerable screen grab of the culture that made me.
Using a tool designed to enforce visual cohesion, I intentionally fed it wildly disparate imagery. The more random and specific, the better. The result is a moodboard that feels more like an origin story: emotionally charged, deeply nostalgic, and hard to explain without oversharing how much of a nerd I was at twelve. It’s less about generating a style, and more about summoning the ghosts that shaped my creative instincts.
From that base, I prompt Midjourney to generate images that (in theory) only I, and the odd cultural constellation that built me, could make. The outputs are strange in the best way: not crispy-clean like AI often wants to be, but lo-res on purpose, recongnizable, but not quite.
I’ve used them to build lo-fi music videos, surreal visual scenes, and even turned it into a hybrid getting-to-know-each-other AI training workshop for DC’s creative department.
As the project evolves, so does the moodboard; constantly expanding, resurfacing old fixations, overlapping influences, and letting them mutate. In the process, Midjourney accidentally became a way to externalize taste — not as a fixed identity, but as an ongoing, deeply weird conversation with the things that made me.