Sam Gulliver’s Electrified Oak has been selected as the new “Art Cover” for the Frankenstein Art Novel—a cyanotype our design team instantly recognized as a natural counterpart to the original Art Cover featuring the sumptuous, feminine layers of a paper sculpture by Barbara Wildenboer. And on the back of the new “Art Cover” is Sam’s haunting work Pyre, which burns ominously, capturing the Creature’s tragic end and hinting at the future that could subsume us all. Created by the Detroit-based photographer Sam Gulliver, these cyanotypes embody both the novel’s paradox of creation and destruction and the artist’s own radical experiment with technology.
“This inescapable cover by Sam Gulliver draws vivid parallels between Mary Shelley’s foundational influence on science fiction and the artist’s depiction of the Creature’s lifespan,” says Bond & Grace’s Creative Director Maggie Lemak. “With Mary Shelley as the creative genesis of the science fiction genre, this Art Cover design harnesses the electricity of science fiction through a contemporary lens. Sam’s works are a culmination of the power of nature and the nature of power—igniting embers of AI, dissecting them, and reshaping them once again by way of the human hand.”
Like a modern-day Victor Frankenstein, Sam found himself in uncharted territory when he began creating a body of work for the Frankenstein Art Novel in early 2023. Until then, he had never even considered using AI as a creative tool—few artists had. But suddenly, with the rise of Midjourney and the launch of ChatGPT only months before, a lightning-fast photo editing technology was, quite literally, in the palm of his hands. Reading Shelley’s 1818 novel at the same time, Sam was struck by how eerily prescient it felt: more than two centuries old, Frankenstein read like an ominous omen warning against the very autonomous, free-thinking technologies that had just been unleashed.
A strong believer in aligning concept with medium, Sam immediately recognized the conceptual potential in harnessing a technology that was already sparking ethical controversy in its earliest months of release. “The time period [of the novel] really coincided perfectly with all the technology coming out,” Sam reflected recently, “So, yeah, the metaphor couldn't have been more spot on.”
In its early stages—and given the rapid speed of its evolution since—Midjourney was unable to generate human hands without glaring errors, a flaw that struck Sam as deeply resonant when considering the darker possibilities of artificial intelligence. While the AI-generated cyanotype Sam would eventually create, The New Adam, seems true to the species—bulging wrist veins and the curved wrinkles of a palm appear intact—it took a lengthy back and forth between Sam and the machine to create the final product.
The technology would “push back,” Sam remembers, in a way that “really did feel like I was collaborating with another entity.” Capturing the competing feelings of beauty, horror, magnificence, and magic combined into one, The New Adam evokes Michelangelo's Creation of Adam (c. 1512) while also echoing Victor Frankenstein’s chilling words: “but now that I had finished [my Creation], the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”
What makes the works in Sam’s Frankenstein Art Novel collection all the more striking is his choice to complete them through a very human means: the cyanotype process, a technique that dates back to Shelley’s own century and is considered one of the origins of photography. Sam converted each AI-generated image into a digital negative, inverting the tones and printing it onto a transparent sheet like old-school film. He then used that negative in the cyanotype process, covering paper with light-sensitive chemicals, exposing it to ultraviolet light, and developing the final print. Despite pushing AI to “exacerbate that otherworldliness,” and “leave its mark on the image,” Sam ultimately began and ended the process through unassisted means—the human hand, and the human eye. An image that he himself created, fed into a machine, and then made wholly human again.
While The New Adam took numerous rounds of back and forth between man and machine, Midjourney generated Electrified Oak almost instantaneously. Given minimal direction, the technology creatively and uncannily captured the symbolic moment in the novel when the young Victor sees a tree struck by lightning and realizes the destructive force of electricity. Wanting to speak to the irony of an idea—or force—that can both create and destroy, Sam fed the AI-powered technology a photo he had taken of a birch tree, prompting it to “make the tree look like a bolt of lightning, but also a neuron.” The result left him astonished. “I was really shocked at how creative the AI was,” he said. “I don’t think I really had to do much else [to alter the image]… it felt like a lightning bolt, in a way—seeing that come onto the screen, like, seeing what it had made.”
Reflecting on this body of work recently, Sam sees his Frankenstein Art Novel collection—which also features Sledge on the Horizon and The Monster’s Reflection—as a record of “a precise moment in history, because it is that moment when this technology made landfall, that moment the lightning struck.” He adds, “I'm really glad I was able to make this work at this time.”
Since then, AI has evolved in ways even its founders never could have predicted. Midjourney can create complex images including chalkboards scrawled with text, Sam pointed out when we chatted, something it would have failed miserably at two years ago. And beyond imagery, its ramifications are leaping into the physical realm, making Shelley’s cautionary tale feel ever more prescient. Victor himself warned us: "Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow,” a message we humans have yet to heed.
As we look at Sam’s Pyre blazing eerily across the back cover, we should consider: are we, like Victor, chasing innovation without considering its cost? Or can we learn from Shelley’s tale—and Sam’s vision, approaching the fire with humility and reflection, before it consumes us all? Maggie Lemak put it best: “This electric cover is for the bold—those who stare fearlessly into the abyss of artificial intelligence and still possess the bravery to counter the darkness within the mortal mind of man. On the cover, the ember that ignites the Creature’s conception; on the back, the Pyre that consumes it once and for all.”
