Checklist

Recognizing it

A piece of art is usually read as Cyberparadist when most of these are true:

1. The environment is wild, lush or geologically dramatic.
2. The built world is small relative to the landscape.
3. The built world looks highly advanced, clean and minimalist.
4. Technology feels mature and quiet, not industrial or improvised.
5. The mood is optimistic, serene or sensually pleasurable rather than gritty or anxious.
6. The composition implies enclosure: a campus, a garden, a habitat, a ring.

Four out of six is a borderline case. Fewer, and the work belongs to a neighbour; see the distinctions. One further test applies when the work tells a story: the abundance is not paid for by scarcity kept out of frame. A paradise for an enclave above a deprived world wears the look and breaks the Laws; the cautionary cases explain why.

Composing it

A recipe that reliably produces the aesthetic, in whatever medium:

1. Start with the landscape. Choose a setting and give it most of the frame. Decide where the horizon sits; high horizons and aerial views keep the world going behind the enclave.
2. Place a bounded enclave. One cluster, one boundary: a shoreline, a ring, a shell. Keep it under a third of the image.
3. Build it from the shape vocabulary. One dominant form per structure, repeated at several scales; lattice for anything large and glazed; a ring or a shore to hold the center open. See shape language.
4. Give it clean materials. Platinum ceramic, pale stone, glass that glows faintly. No seams, no wires, no rust.
5. Hide the machines. Craft hover, trains glide, nobody operates anything. If an interface is visible, it is a thin annotation in the air, not a screen.
6. Light it for late morning. Soft haze over distance; shadows that are teal rather than black.
7. Add one accent. A single occurrence of folly or a flash of orange foliage; see the palette.
8. Add one figure, or none. Scale comes from a lone person or a small group at the gathering place.

Writing a prompt

Many pieces in the gallery were generated with image models, and the recipe above translates directly into a prompt. Describe, in order: the landscape and its scale, the enclave and its boundary, two or three shapes, the materials, the light, the palette, the mood, and the absence of clutter. Name what to leave out as clearly as what to include; “no neon, no crowds, no smoke” does more than most positive adjectives. Label the result as AI-generated when you share it, as every piece on this site is.