Pillage Purge Plunder is a collection of 360 AI visualizations created by John Pobojewski. All visualizations were across three different prompt themes — a photorealistic architectural rendering of a luxury villa, an sprawling metropolis, and satellite photos of untouched land. The body of work results from experiments with Stable Diffusion’s ControlNet and Midjourney’s Retexturing techniques. Pobojewski prompted Midjourney with original letterform drawings and selective prompts to retexture the images, resulting in the desired visual while maintaining the structure of the original drawing.

Artist Statement

Countries have been pursuing massive urban expansion for decades in response both to address exploding population growth and to attract billionaire investors. What do the visions for these megacities of tomorrow like Neom really suggest? These pursuits often exploit underpaid labor and sully natural environments through shortsighted construction and development practices. They use land that could house hundreds of families to build luxury developments for only an elite few.

Design is tasked with visualizing and “selling” these projects, creating photorealistic visions of perfection that are so pervasive in our culture, they now seed the AI machines that make “art.” What impact are we leaving behind? Are we helping society steal from the present moment in order to feed the desire for a future that may never come?