Music Video – Matthew Woodham

Throwing Snow – Dragons

Visual album and artwork for Throwing Snow – Dragons music album, released on the Houndstooth music label.

‘I listened to the Dragons album with the ambition to translate it into a visual language. The rich, full-bodied melodies, acoustic instrumentation and stomping percussion are evocative of ancient rituals, whilst the stark, up-front synthesis and two-step rhythms induce feelings of modern-day brutalist cityscapes. For me this dualism felt particularly poignant as music, and experiencing it together in shared environments, can be a form of modern day ritual.

Therefore, I wanted to visually convey earthy, organic textures with a modern, hyperreal edge. The machine learning latent space interpolations are a perfect tool to evoke the uncanny, unreality from algorithmically synthesised morphing video. I trained three StyleGAN2 models on abiotic surface datasets of increasing scales. This produced morphing, machine-made visions of crystalline microscopy, rocky surfaces and the topography of the entire Earth as originally seen by the Landsat 8 observation satellite.

The fallibility, and interpretation of features by the algorithm is similar to the way humans perceive and attempt to make sense of the world around them. This hallucinatory aesthetic, which is both abstract and figurative, is used to evoke sensations of being entranced in a ritualistic experience. The commonality of the ‘experience’ between the human and machine, and the hyperreal representations of natural shape and texture across different scales of perspective, was the basis for creating the real-time video compositions for each track on this album.’

Duration: 39:05
Resolution: 3840 x 2160

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Lone – Coming Into Being and Passing Away

Music video for Lone ‘Coming Into Being and Passing Away’.

‘For ‘Coming Into Being and Passing Away’, Lone described the ambitious idea of expressing ‘dimensional travel’ or a ‘near-death experience’ in an audio-visual format. While this is a deeply personal process that all of us will eventually approach, I wanted to create sensations which I felt represented a fragment of life and it’s ending; or something physical, eluding to the perception of something non-physical.

My primary goal was to create the feeling of movement while remaining stationary. Sometimes light shines out from the depths, a flowing tunnel of tendrils which seems to open and close, a continuous undulation, an oscillating tide with no conclusion. Within the stationary vantage point I hoped to create as much contrast, motion and narrative as possible to succinctly follow the building, gurgling and choking audio details. The flowing shapes at times take on a ‘life’ of their own, sometimes splitting apart and dancing – the remaining sensations of the self clinging on to consciousness. I imagined this aspect of the video as an impression of ‘phosphenes’, an entopic phenomena created when wincing eyes are squeezed shut; or maybe you’re seeing the blood flowing through your retinas; or maybe the colours and shapes are emerging from a cortical source – further down the visual pathway?

Underneath the swelling, pulsing and drifting is an underlying structure, architectural and fractal-like. A deep void which stretches to an unknown depth, emerging into visibility only for brief moments. The walls both build and collapse around you while you move forwards – or is it backwards? The mathematical structure seems majestic, or even omnipotent, yet somehow cold and out of reach, arcing away from you just as it feels as though it’s getting close.

The video was created utilising ‘shaders’, mathematical graphics code, which was rendered in real-time. These were combined with feedback processes, synchronised audio-reactivity and human control to create a visual flow which was at the same time controlled and chaotic. ‘

Duration: 6:34
Resolution: 1920×1080

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Son of Philip – Rubber Stamp

Music video for Son of Philip – Rubber Stamp released on Wigflex Records.

“When I listened to Rubber Stamp by Son of Philip, the popping envelopes and echoing arpeggios evoked a scene of exploring a reef bed in a rich deep blue ocean. The bubbling filter modulation alongside precise, sculpted synthesis inspired me to create a visual experience which blends flowing nature and ridged man-made edges. I trained a StyleGAN2 machine learning model on a dataset of jellyfish, amoebas and other tentacled sea creatures. The trained model was used to synthesise ‘latent space interpolation’ videos, which morph between different defined visual parameters of the image-generating model. The animations were used to create a generative audio-visual composition which is somewhere between abstract and figurative, nature and machine, documentation and synthesis.”

Duration: 8:15min
Resolution: 2560×1440

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