Man, this city . . .
How a German digital creator's subway superheroes caught the attention of the Biebs
Julian van Dieken was laying in bed at 3 a.m. in the Berlin apartment he shares with his fiancée and their 4-month-old daughter, scrolling through his Instagram messages.
The German educational filmmaker and photographer was trying to keep up with a sudden spike in followers, when he did a double take: Justin Bieber had just followed him.
The international pop star who has sold more than 150 million records, won two Grammys and has been named “Favorite Male Artist” by the American Music Awards four times – that Justin Bieber?
Yeah, none other than the Biebs, himself.
For van Dieken, known on Instagram as @julian_ai_art, the past two weeks have been a whirlwind.
First, two influential Instagrammers, @pubity (32 million followers) and @complex (11 million followers) pointed their audiences toward a series of AI-generated images van Dieken had made depicting Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and the Joker riding the New York City subway.
The mentions got van Dieken thousands of new followers overnight. And it caught the eye of Bieber who has 268 million IG followers and follows back a mere 733. It led to a surreal moment when Bieber slid into van Dieken’s DMs with a message along the lines of, “Hey really cool stuff. I like your art.”
All of which raises the question that seems to be on everyone’s minds these days, is AI-generated art, art? Does that make van Dieken an artist?
Well, actually, van Dieken is an artist. Besides being a filmmaker / photographer, he draws “cute and curious” comic birds (@the_vannys) as a creative outlet.
“I don’t really care about the labels,” he told me over Zoom last week. “I care about the experiences, the playfulness of it all – expressing yourself.”
In his day job, where he produces multi-media content for a German educational workshop company he co-founded with his mother, it often takes weeks to finish a project. With The Vannys, he found he could quickly sketch out an idea and post it to IG within an hour.
Then a couple months ago, he discovered AI-art and suddenly there was literally no limit in how he could express himself.
A series of fantasy images he called #TinyCubeWorlds were getting some attention when he posted the subway superheroes. That post actually followed two similar subway sets depicting characters from Star Wars and anthropomorphic animals.
Van Dieken’s images are a takeoff on the types of photos that street photographers have captured for years of haggard commuters, melting into their seats, beaten down from a rough day in the city.
We love the humanity of subway images because we feel them. We can empathize with the person caught in a candid state of too-exhausted-to-give-a-shit.
Likewise, van Dieken’s images delight us because we’ve always been fascinated with the idea of superheroes facing the same everyday problems as the rest of us. Pixar’s The Incredibles or Will Smith’s Hancock come to mind.
For van Dieken, the sudden spotlight on his work was wholly unexpected. Truthfully, he’s still trying to figure it all out. At first, he was drawn to the flashiness of it all, the absurdity of what you could create.
Then he wondered to himself, is it possible to tone this down and make it real? That’s when he started thinking about the grittiness of the NYC subway.
He may not have been the first to have the idea; you can search Lexica and see the superhero motif ranks in popularity somewhere between beautiful women and famous movie mashups. But anyone who has tried to create similar images knows, it’s not as easy as just typing in “Batman sleeping off a bender on the D train.”
These types of AI-generated images can take hours to get just right.
While van Dieken is hesitant to call himself an artist, he does see generative art as an emerging genre that will bring a new wave of artists to the forefront.
“You will see the difference between a skilled artist and someone who types ‘winter wonderland’ in and gets a nice image,” Van Dieken said. “The people who push the boundaries, experiment and who have something to say emotionally, they will emerge as real artists.”
You can follow van Dieken on Instagram at @julian_ai_art.
You can follow Joe Newman on Instagram at @most_sublime_media. Get fresh content delivered to your inbox by subscribing to our Substack newsletter.