M I R R O R   W O R L D   / /   P R I S O N E R S   O F   N E P T U N E   ( 4 : 3 0 )

Behind this music video is a stereo recording from an improvisation session in 2019, by Jonathan Dower and myself, two halves of Prisoners of Neptune. Other than audio mastering, these four and a half minutes are presented exactly as performed that day – with no cuts or edits – at a standing array of synthesisers, drum machines, samplers, mixers, loopers and effects.

Conversely, making the video took me weeks of cuts and edits, dealing with just a computer.

In keeping with 2020's "theme" of home-bound isolation, I'd challenged myself to make a cohesive work using only footage pulled from online sources. Mainly this was stock footage, but I also used one of the worlds earliest convincing examples of AI-generated humans, ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com.

As they go by fast, the film strobes many hundreds such portraits. I collected them by writing a script to politely trigger the website over and again, and save each newly-generated face locally with a unique name. I then placed each one frame-by-frame in the video editor to create the animated sequences.

Time-consuming, but hopefully a result emphasising their uncanny and confronting nature.