Dorothy’s adventures in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz can be read through many different colored glasses. I became enchanted with all that connects it with the Hero(ine)’s journey,the path of individuation, alchemical operations, and the theosophical concepts that were familiar to L. Frank Baum. All of that opened doors in the realms of self-knowledge, initiatory and mythical journeys, rites of passage, and spiritual awakening. In this path, with a strong Jungian heritage, the characters can be seen as parts of Dorothy, as the adventure happens inside her own soul. Light and shadow — and heart, mind, and courage — all are her inner struggles, conquests, and the process of her empowerment.

I confess that I have read many theories, but when I began to reimagine it, decided to start an entirely new journey, more personal and different of the original story. For example,I always refused to believe that the Wizard of Oz was in fact a fake; for me, that was another of his masks in a huge game of iniciatic steps. Dorothy had to look for her own power instead, and return anew to a metaphorical home. The idea that the Wizard can have many shapes, according to personal phantasmagorias and as a mirror projection of our inner world, was also deeply intriguing. Those were some of the ideas that started me on my journey.


Who was the Wizard behind the mask? I let the mystery prevail. The story is reimagined as a parallel reading, keeping a similar structure in the journey and most of the main characters, environments, and symbols, but seen through the looking glass of my own alicinatory journey and what I found in Artificial Intelligence (AI) lands. From the 1939 movie, I kept the iconic ruby red shoes, but in my memory, the original text, the movie, and a collection of amazing illustrated editions danced around and challenged the creative process with a plethora of references that feed the minds and hearts of generations of Oz fans.

The book is an imaginary journey, with Oz as the map, AI as the vehicle, and my intuition as the compass. I used the programs Midjourney V.4 and V.6, Photoshop Beta, and Topaz Gigapixel AI. The prompts — text and image commands used to generate the images — were created using descriptions, styles, parameters, collages, blending, and the challenges of incessant experimentation in a persevering process of multiple iterations and transformations. In the path, more than four thousand images were generated, making the curatorial editing to reframe the narrative into an entire new adventure.