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Broken Social Scene have a new video for their song “Can’t Find My Heart,” from their April EP Let’s Try the After (Vol. 2) — it looks like a cross between the White Stripes’ classic “Seven Nation Army” visual and an acid trip. Directed by Josh Usheroff in collaboration with neural network pioneer Alex Mordvintsev and Google’s DeepDream software, the clip shows the band performing in an endless vortex of oscillating textures and color.
“I am fascinated by the changes that AI and machine learning are bringing to all aspects of our culture,” Usheroff says in a release. “I wanted to see how this technology was being used in more creative disciplines. I started researching generative art and came across a video by Alex Mordvintsev. The video featured a series of still images zooming and transforming into one another. The results were mesmerizing.”
He goes on to explain, “We captured the performance visuals in Montreal just a few hours before the band’s concert. My creative partner, Ben Goloff, sequenced the performances and applied style transfers to give the images a surreal and almost painterly aesthetic. We then sent the files to Alex to work his DeepDream magic.”
Mordvintsev describes the video effect as “combining neural artistic style transfer with a zooming feedback loop.”
“I gradually inject each new video clip into the mix, while simultaneously steering the global image style,” he says. “Each video segment is a continuation of the previous, so I couldn’t generate them all in parallel. Thus, I decided to use ‘fast’ feed-forward version of style transfer to be able to iterate quickly on the sequence, incorporating the feedback I was provided from Josh and Ben.”
Broken Social Scene’s most recent LP was 2017’s Hug of Thunder. They’ll be performing at the Trans-Pecos Festival of Love and Music in Marfa, Texas, on September 28th.
