About The Author
L. M. Hawkes builds curated visual archives of historically-grounded worlds.
For most of my career, I’ve built things with technology.
Sometimes that meant software. Sometimes complex systems. More recently, it has meant finding ways to combine artificial intelligence, visual creation, storytelling, personalization, and the web into experiences that couldn’t have existed a few years ago.
Hawkes’ Impossible Portraits is the clearest expression yet of what has always excited me about that work.
I don’t particularly want to make something and have you stand outside looking at it.
I want you to come inside.
I want to build an experience and invite you into it—to give you something you couldn’t ordinarily experience, and then let your presence change it.
That’s what makes an Impossible Portrait different for me from simply creating a beautiful image. The world may begin with something I’ve imagined and systems I’ve built, but it isn’t finished until you enter it. Your face is there. Your spouse is there. Your children are there. Your pets are there. It becomes your family’s impossible place and moment.
And then you can share that experience with other people.
That idea—turning an audience into participants—is the thread connecting much of the work I’ve found most satisfying over the years. The technology has changed enormously. What I can build with it has changed even more.
Today, AI makes it possible to create experiences I once wouldn’t have known how to make at all: worlds that can be constructed around particular people rather than merely shown to them.
That’s what Hawkes is becoming.
Not simply a publishing company, an AI art business, or a collection of products, but a place for creating experiences people can enter, make their own, and share with the people who matter to them.
Come with me. Let’s see where we can go.
Explore historically grounded images by subject, setting, and visual focus with the Art Pack Configurator.