Lucidbeaming

An AI startup created a tool to generate faces of people for use in marketing materials. The pitch was that they didn't need model releases and could be any ethnicity. It's a cynical use of generative aesthetics and my response video is appropriately ugly and glitched.

Every once in a while I get requests from other groups and musicians to collaborate or make finished visuals for them. Most people don’t realize how much time goes into these videos and I’m generally reluctant to collaborate in such an unbalanced way. This video was for a song by UK metal band Damim. The singer saw my videos on Instagram and reached out for permission to use some of them. I offered to to just make a custom video instead. All the visuals were done on my iPhone, with multiple generations and layers going through multiple apps. I filled up my storage on a regular basis and was backing it up nightly. Really time consuming. Also, that project required the horsepower and flexibility of Final Cut Pro to edit the final results.

This was one of the first long-form results of my video footage from a drive across the USA. It uses a deep quiver of glitch effects and features audio field recordings made at the same time.

Germany has a difficult history and has gone to great lengths to incorporate its past into the present. The Zitadelle is a museum in West Berlin that houses a unique exhibit for this purpose. Throughout the region monuments to problematic past leaders were built from 1849 to 1986. Many of the men they memorialize had terrible legacies. This includes religious leaders, Prussian military leaders, businessmen, and mythical representations of men in power at the time. A historical intervention of these dogmatic sculptures, I photographed the faces and decided to re-contextualize their appearances. In the past decade social media has resurrected some of the worst ideologies in history. They were dying out until anonymous politics became a thing and rekindled their popularity. My idea is to use these statues to build illustrations of these old dying ideas that are empowered by online culture.

These short form videos are ~1 minute each, with original audio. They were made with imagery and footage I shot on my phone and then edited, transformed, and layered at a later date. The audio tracks come from a combination of sources, including field recordings, songs made with iOS apps, and music I commercially released on albums. All of the video was generated with a custom workflow on an iPhone using LumaFusion, Synthscaper, Fieldscaper, Defekt, Glitches, Fragment, Kino Glitch, 8mm, Hyperspektiv, Plotagraph, and Virtual ANS. Final processing was done with FFMPEG for distribution.