Louis Carnell
Fixed is the Day
We´ve Cast Our Lot

Client: Louis Carnell, Mute Records
Year completed: 2021
Type: Music Video
Area: Music
Location: London, UK

Made in collaboration with Louis Carnell (FKA Visionist), this audiovisual piece becomes his first work under his birth name. We propose a visual grammar for a world after 2016, imagining a visual vocabulary based on ideological coexistance, as a response to the increasingly polarizing nature of current politics.

The video is produced entirely in CGI, structured in three acts.  The first two parts develop like a workday, from early morning to afternoon. During this day, we get a glimpse of the ouside through a sunlight. We see Visionist´s raw 3D scan  data turn into the model of his bust,  an exercise of claiming our self image from anonymous profiling, abstract user information, and generic categorizations of personality.

The rythm of the piece is tied through the use of a Machine Learning tool, which reconstructs and interpolates each frame. Recently, AI and CGI have shown how narrow is the distance between fact and fiction, raising doubts of what is staged (engineered to appear as natural to our perceptual process, hiding its own purpose) and what is genuine.The images seen on the screens were taken by Louis Carnell himself, inserting his own experience in the virtual stage.  The resulting composition is an amalgamation of sci-fi and user interface aesthetics,  raising question about our immediate future.

The video connects direcly with entertainment and social media platforms, which act as a public space where our opinions are formed and discussed.  Our experience of the world  is deeply mediated by their algorithms, which constanly offers content based on their users´ emotional responses . It has genereated the phenomenon of the "filter bubble": intelectual isolation and communication in order to confirm our own bias.  We become a source of income for these platforms, which exploit our emotions for data and advertising revenue. Our engineered emotions can turn particularly dangerous when they become the conditions under which our future is decided.

Video by David Guerrero

Music by Louis Carnell

Released under Mute records, 2021.

REFERENCES

References. From left to right, from top to bottom: 1."Le Bruit et la Fureur" (Jean Claude Brisseau, 1988)        2.Nam June Paik, 1991      3.iPhone´s face ID AR kit      4.Wolf3dl game avatars creator      5.“Blade Runner : 2049” (Denis Villeneuve, 2017)      6.“Trust Me”, Douglas Gordon (1997)      7.“2001: A Space Oddyssey”, (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)      8.“Biutiful” (Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, 2010)    9.“Daft Punk´s Electroma” (Thomas Bangalter + Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, 2006)      10.Interior by Axel Vervoodt      11.“Barcelona Pavillion”, (Mies van der Rohe, 1929)       12.Linda Loppa´s Antwerp loft (c. 1989)    13.iPhone´s face ID AR kit      14.“Hakama House” (Jun Tamaki, 1998)