Flower Studies

2026

The following images are the first images made with Xylem, and the first from its underlying model, Telomere 1.0. They came from the prompt “flower”, and they show how the model failed. The failure is a colour collapse. When Telomere can't hold natural, in-between colours, every tone snaps to a harsh extreme of magenta, green, black or white. Those four are the corners of the colour space digital images are built from. That makes them the emptiest place in real photography, and the one thing a broken model falls back on.

Every image created in Xylem starts as pure noise, a field of random static. Over 100 steps the model clears the noise away, nudging the mess closer to the prompt, in this case the word "flower", until something is left. What emerges is a flower of sorts, still deep in colour collapse. The model doesn't draw. It surfaces an image from static, nothing entering from outside.