Image Prompts

1. Make a highly detailed, rigorously peer-reviewed installation work about a fashionable political subject that is simultaneously hailed as a masterpiece and dismissed as an abject failure by equal numbers of members of the editorial board of October. Render it in the sterile optimism of corporate infographics.

2. Create an alternate version of this same work—identical in every way except that I secretly love it, though I would never permit myself to say so publicly.

3. Ensure that the image includes a faithful rendering of the portion of the concept that cannot, by definition, be rendered.

4. Create a realistic video still of a once-influential scholar whose every word has been forgotten, captured at the precise moment before they realize it.

5. Depict a museum label that has ceased to function as a museum label—stripped of didactic purpose, authority, and even object, yet still clinging to its wall.

6. Illustrate precisely who is responsible, while avoiding the assignment of blame in any recognizable form.

7. Render a detailed 1990s corporate org chart in the high Baroque style, demonstrating with ornamental excess that the higher one ascends, the more calcified and soul-less one becomes.

8. Make a realistic color photograph of the United States, printed as a lenticular image so that, from a second angle, it becomes a painting by Alexis Rockman. At its center, visualize my American dream as a hybrid between a spiritual revelation and a PET scan report.

9. Depict fact and fiction intertwined as lovers in the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz—inseparable, alchemical, and mutually deluded.

10. In the style of the Ghent Altarpiece, depict the inner thoughts of an older man waiting at a small-town bus station in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, a pink plastic bag at his side. In his eyes, reveal both the insistence that he does not care about being left behind and the quiet knowledge that he does.

11. Create a realistic 35mm photograph in the style of Manuel Álvarez Bravo illustrating how the largest contradictions are often the ones that refuse to be seen.

12. Imagine a landscape in the style of Hieronymus Bosch that appears, to one person, as an asphyxiating office and, to another, as a long-awaited promised land.

13. Make a fully researched image of a grant application composed with absolute certainty of success. Include an unrealistic budget and subtle indications that, should the project fail, I will take no personal responsibility whatsoever.

14. Depict a version of my life without responsibilities and with limitless resources, yet in which I have miraculously avoided becoming an eccentric, capricious millionaire with unmanageable obsessions.

15. Render all the fears that visit me at night, neatly arranged and endlessly varied, as if catalogued in an Allan McCollum installation.

16. Design a résumé that accurately summarizes everything I have accomplished, avoided, misremembered, exaggerated, and quietly regretted, formatted to please an automated HR filter that does not believe I exist.

17. Illustrate a vast landscape composed entirely of future commitments I have already forgotten I agreed to, each one labeled in small, unreadable text.

18. Produce a group portrait of all the people I have disappointed, showing each person at the precise moment they decided not to mention it.

19. Render my next creative idea as it appears inside a machine that misunderstands metaphors but follows funding trends with perfect accuracy.

20. Depict climate anxiety as a small portable devotional object, slightly worn at the edges from constant handling.

21. Create an exploded diagram explaining why I am simultaneously overqualified and unemployable, in the neutral visual language of a mid-range airline safety card.

22. Make a cutaway view of my brain during a grant-writing session, with each region labeled according to a different type of self-doubt.

23. Illustrate a museum of the future in which every artwork has been locked in a basement and viewers can only see them through a surveillance screen by Julia Scher; every wall label has been replaced by a terms-of-service agreement.

24. Depict my to-do list at the exact moment it gains sentience and, after a brief pause, demands better working conditions.

25. Create a floor plan a masterful exhibition that was never seen due to being censured and quietly removed from the schedule.

26. Render a quiet domestic scene in which every object in the room is a metaphor for a decision I postponed.

27. Make a realistic surveillance-camera still of the genuine joy generated by schadenfreude.

28. Illustrate a professional networking event as a medieval Last Judgment, with name tags instead of halos.

29. Depict the exact instant in which I become obsolete, styled as a cheerful startup explainer graphic and discussed in a PowerPoint at one of Paola Antonelli’s MoMA Design salons.

30. Create a children’s picture book illustration that gently explains to our younger selves why none of our lives turned out the way we planned, but also why it is not entirely a tragedy.