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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