I met Dustin for the first time in late 2023, whilst in the gym at Hafnarhaus (our wonderful co-working space in downtown Reykjavík), a notable encounter not just because I'm so rarely anywhere near a gym, but also because it resulted in him asking me to create a visual piece to accompany a track on his new album, 1 0 0 1.
'Harmonic Dream Sequence', in his words, is a psychedelic depiction of the current naive desire to experiment with technology, with a lack of concern for some possible future where it gains autonomy from its creators and users.
This really resonated with me, and so I set about trying to create a visual system that would capture both the complexity and scale of this AI-driven future, hinting at the anxiety-inducing speed, the unknowable biases buried deep within it, and also look kinda cool.
The resulting video is intended to be a poetic visualisation of both the wonder and anxiety produced by our collective ability to develop technology that not only reflects our own world back at us in unsettling, distorted and disruptive ways, but how it can also - through modern neural networks and 'AI' systems - appear to create new worlds for us to explore.
Created in TouchDesigner, and using a mix of real LIDAR scans and simulated (hallucinated?) depth scans, millions of particles represent the raw data we feed into these ever-hungry machines. At first they form strange, uncomfortable shapes which periodically resolve into recognisable forms before collapsing again into chaos. Then structure emerges, as we train the system to recognise connections, patterns and layers in the data, before we dive into it, triggering chaotic lightning flashes of connection between disparate pieces of data, and producing unexpected outputs at incredible speed.
But despite having access to an entire Internet's representation of reality and the results of incredible computing power, we're left with a uneasy feeling at the results, the ghostly, dreamlike sensations it leaves us with making us ask uncomfortable questions about our own minds, and the future it beckons us towards.