Make your own brainrot character using AI tools and technologies
Inspired by: Viraj Khanna
This assignment is inspired by Viraj Khanna’s latest exhibition, BRAIN ROT: The Life You Live?, where the artist takes the experience of navigating a hyper-digital world and translates it into sculptures, embroidered collages, and visual commentary on the machine-made content that we scroll through everyday and its impact. Unlike the AI slop that has been inundating our feeds, brainrot—and in particular Italian brainrot—emerges from the internet’s own grassroots creativity. Some even argue that it can be seen as its own art movement and bring people together through its weird, joyful, and surreal qualities. Because the characters are AI-generated and infinitely remixable, anyone can contribute to expanding the universe. In this assignment, we’re inspired by a hopeful look at brainrot and we’ll be generating our own brainrot figures using AI tools, to add to this expanding online universe.
Assignment:
1. Think about the kind of creature you want to create, preferably one that doesn’t yet exist in the brainrot universe. Think about the kind of music that plays when they appear and their history or backstory. Is there an emotion that they represent or convey? What kind of environment do they exist in?
2. After you’ve thought about these questions, write a short character bio. For example: DJ Mozzarella is a sentient slice of cheese from an Italian techno remix. He can only communicate in emojis and mid-2000s MySpace glitter fonts. He believes he is real.”
3. Now it’s time to generate the visuals. Use any generative AI image tool, like DALL·E, Craiyon, NightCafe, Runway ML, Midjourney, etc., to create at least one portrait or full-body image of your character. Use adjectives like deep fried, surreal, vaporwave, lo-fi, hyperreal, chaotic, emoji-infested, AI-glitched, digital hallucination to create a figure that fits into the brainrot genre. Try to mix genres or references: “sailor moon x roblox x eurodance x clowncore x windows xp error.”
4. Once the visual image of your character is ready, you can give them a voice. Use a text-to-speech or voice-changing AI tool to give your character an absurd, weird, or funny voice. You can use tools like Uberduck or Voice.ai for AI voice cloning or ElevenLabs for hyperrealistic voices.
5. Let’s put all the pieces together and create a short video or a looping animation about your new character. For a simple TikTok video style you can use CapCut or Canva. Just upload your AI-generated image to one of these programs, add basic motion effects like zoom, shake, spin, pulse, and layer on glitch effects, filters, or stickers to overstimulate the scene. Then you can add the audio that you made in the previous step to bring more life to your character. You can also animate your character using AI video tools in Runway ML, like Motion Brush or Gen-2. The tools can help you add motion, zoom in on scenes, and even generate new frames baked on a prompt. Once your animation is ready, you can voice your character with the audio from the previous step.