A series of videos where we use AI to generate extinct animals in disappearing landscapes in the Arctic, Amazon, and Kerala. Once we and our ecosystems are all gone maybe only the AIs will dream of the past. Barthes’ famous proposal is that photography is characterized by the presence of death. To Barthes a photograph stopped time, and while the world goes on living the photograph is the embodiment of an emanation from beyond the pale. In “Those Who Were Living” we extend this concept to a series of photographs, but insert, like Durer’s Rhinoceros, an image he drew based only on description, animals already gone, soon to be gone (on the endangered species list), and only glimpsed in the deranged fantasies of dying sailors in the Arctic and other remote parts of the world visited only by the “explorers” (read exploiters) of capitalism and the mercantile classes, there to extract from the environment what gains they could. The title is taken from T.S. Eliot's and Ezra Pound's poem "The Wasteland".
These videos of serene landscapes, with the trash removed using AI.
Above is the video I made for the song “Lockdown” from my band The S.E.A.L.S. overwhelming credit for the song goes to Susie Luna Greene, with contributions by the rest of the band of course who are Meg Schedel, Sophia Sun, Ria Rajan, and Sofy Yuditskaya.
This project explores integrating what the AI generates and the video we shot. Humans experience the world through persistence of vision and a narritivizing brain. This project explores combining AI generative video with persistence of vision by using industry video production techniques. The ideas of film bring with them a formatting structure, a long form, consistent point of view, objects, subjects, foreground, middleground, background. Which isn’t something we see in AI video much these days (in 2022-2023).
Conceptually we are thinking about showing a story that an AI might tell about the past. If it is told descriptions of what things looked like in the before times, when animals roamed the world, when there weren’t candy bar wrappers all over even the most remote environments. We thought about those who are already gone, the animals that even we have only imagined based on descriptions that were told to us from papers and wikipedia entries. We never saw the Common Lime Butterfly or a Blue Footed Booby either. We already use AI to fill in gaps from the past, add resolution to film footage, sounds to a documentation that was silent, all that from models based on the present. Projecting the perspective of our current world view bi-directionally into time.
Barthes famously said documentation was like a Momento Mori, even when recording a living moment, that moment, if not the actors in it disappears forever.
Landscapes of a planet soon to be changed, there is no pristine countryside, even the gan space is dissected by roads.