Lore Machine Meets dolorsilentium
Vampires, lofi anime, and the secret psychology of AI aesthetics
dolorsilentium is a Finnish designer and photographer. His eponymous Instagram account taps into a nostalgic anime vibe that connects with hundreds of thousands of followers. We invited dolor to take Lore Machine for a spin and share his twisted take on AI-collaborative creation.
Dive into dolorsilentium’s LORE The Forgotten Sector.
Interview below…
dolorsilentium is a real vibe - the old school anime, the melancholy, the chrome. Where did you and it all come from?
I've been creating and posting online art for about a decade. My main medium was film photography for a long time, but then I found out about visual generative AI tools. I was immediately hooked. Playing around with concepts and aesthetics super-fast intrigued me. At the time, I was testing out multiple AI pages on social media. This old school anime page was one of them.
My original idea for the page was to try to mimic the nostalgia old VHS-ripped 80s/90s anime evoked in me. That's what I started with. After having good luck with the algorithms, I just kept going. There were a couple open-minded artists creating with gen AI in the retro anime space back then. I definitely wasn’t the first, but I definitely hit that wave.
You’ve got a wild amount of followers on Instagram and so much love. There are a lot of artists who toil away for years but never crack the algo. What’s the cheat code?
I gotta hand it to the superpower that is the creative speed of gen AI tools. My images are kind of funky and interesting, but being able to post 5-15 new "works"/images every single day gives me an advantage in the game of #CreatingContent.
If you want followers on social media, it's 100% quantity over quality, I swear by it. Growth and followers come from viral posts, and viral posts are defined by the algorithms. You can't predetermine them because you can't predict which posts will take off. It’s all based on luck that lies outside of a creator's control. The only way to stack your odds is by creating and posting as much content as possible. That's the secret sauce.
I take a psychological approach to my posts: I bet on that visceral urge to click an image, to grab attention. I'm not completely sure how it’s defined, but I trust my intuition. It's about aesthetics and images that evoke the "oh what's this?" reaction in me. I’m an explorer of the unknown and unseen.In a world obsessed with perfection and ultra high-definition, my approach has been to make my images look worse. That's the wabi-sabi of my continuous feed — it's the vibe, the immediate response to low fidelity. Realism is for the boring; imperfections let the imagination fill in the noise and fly.
Does more followers = more happiness or more sadness...
More followers don’t bring more happiness. I know it sounds like a millionaire saying "money doesn't matter," but that's just how it is. Do more followers bring sadness? No, but it's true that people start to see you differently when you have a big platform. Suddenly, they're less interested in you as a person and more interested in what you can do for them. I'm painfully aware of that.
Constantly gaining followers is a pretty good metric for "success," but I'm not so sure what that success even means anymore. I’ve said quantity over quality in content creation, but the kind of audience you attract depends on which one you prioritize. Chasing massive gains in followers and views by posting tons of stuff can get the numbers high, but what do those numbers actually mean?At the end of the day, what we’re after as creators, as people, is connection. And only focusing on numbers doesn’t guarantee any of that. That's been my experience.
You’d have to be living under a rock on the moon to have missed the absolute disgust some folks have for AI Art. How is what you make artistic expression verses the lazy slop people hate so much?
I think what makes my feed stand out from the "generated AI look" is my passion for the unexplored aesthetics. My eye is super-trained on how AI images usually come out, and I always try to push away from that — directing the models to new paths. I call this "breaking" them: forcing outputs the default patterns wouldn’t normally produce. Working like this often leads to defects and horrible mistakes in the images, but for me, that’s the only way to stay creative and imaginative with these tools.
Midjourney offers very nice tools on this front, like sref and moodboards, while on the Stable Diffusion side I’ve been experimenting with IP-Adapter and LORA-mixing. Mere prompting doesn't get far. I'm honestly terrible at prompting.
I edit each one of my images and people don’t see that. When they see an AI creator, the immediate reaction is "no skill/talent." But I use my background in design and photography to play with the colors and textures, distorting them just enough to create the "vibe".I put a lot of effort into my feed and how the colors match. Yet nobody ever compliments me on color, even though every palette is something I decide on and mix by hand. Some people ask, “what’s the filter called?” and I just tell them it’s “dolorsilentium,” because that’s me and my experience, doing it manually.
Your posts are often carousels. Some are variations on an idea or style. Others feel like they’re telling a story, but in a distant ethereal sort of way.
Reading Haruki Murakami woke this up in me. I love how he plays with the idea that something is happening, even though we can't fully comprehend it. It’s all fragments and confusion and disorientation. I’m also drawn to the Lovecraftian sense of "cosmic horror"…not necessarily supernatural, but the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible. It’s the horror coming from inside. It’s the little shadows lurking in the corner of your eye and soul. You can see me playing with this in my captions a lot. I like to hint at it, then let people’s imagination fill in the rest.
Gun to your head, you have to adapt one of your posts into a feature-length film…which one is it?
Just one? Oh boy. I’d probably take one of my vampire posts, and make something with a touch of horror, maybe some romance, and a bit of dark comedy. Vampires fascinate me. Their endless lifespans give them infinite story potential. Their struggle with human traits, and the tension between instinctual urges and sophisticated culture in modern society, leaves so much to explore.
People keep asking me to do something with the cars, but I just don’t see it. Unless I wanted to make another generic Fast & Furious, there’s no real story there for me.
How does the future dolorsilentium stay the same and how does it evolve?
The constant experimentation, shifting aesthetics, and bold themes and visuals are not going anywhere. I’m not running out of ideas; honestly, I don’t know if I ever will. It’ll stay dark and sexy, the way it’s always been.
I’d love for dolorsilentium to become a relevant business partner in the future. I also want to move into longer-form, more professional projects, like an anime series or a manga. Collaborating with brands and companies excites me, because it’s about making others known too and benefitting mutually. My dream is to flood the world with dark, lo-fi retro anime aesthetics.