Zev Deans is a director, editor, and visual FX artist who has created music videos for Ghost, Mastodon, Godzilla, Denzel Curry, Health, and more.
AI is scary. It’s diabolical. It’s the beginning of the end. That deep, incomprehensible artistic horror is matched only by the existential horror we humans feel when faced with the imminent possibility of being replaced by machines.
It’s all pretty fucking metal, don’t you think?
As an artist in the midst of the most important one-track problem of my creative life, my choice to tackle AI as an art form has made me both a lever-puller and a track-bound. I assumed it was human. . Every time we use AI as a tool to build something, we end up lengthening the rope that might hang us. Again, fucking metal.
The unique threat that AI poses to every creative field cannot be underestimated. But as an artist working on the fringes of visual content since the late 1990s, I’ve seen many waves of change crush existing creative means of production, and survival means never home on a hurricane-hit island. I learned that it means not building Both this and my desire to never get bored have led me to act like a mad scientist and a garbage collector when choosing how to make videos. So when DALL-E and Midjourney came along, I was intrigued. As someone who has reached creative maturity in making art by hand, typing a few carefully chosen words to evoke an image can bring gin from a cursed lamp in a dark cave in the desert. It was both exciting and unsettling, like liberation. (Slow heavy metal music is playing.)
But then I tried to generate the video using stable diffusion. And to my relief, I had no idea what the hell I was doing. It was a codebase labyrinthine process, tons of steps and equations. I got a D in algebra but was just a visual he artist who kept dying of erythema on the Oregon Trail. I knew I would need help.
AI art, truth AI video art is difficult, isn’t it? In addition to learning a new language, you also have to develop your own unique workflow to achieve your desired results, as there is no precedent. It’s like taming a wild animal, if that animal is the last wriggling mass of Tetsuo. Akira.
In working with ALN on our second MIZMOR video, I roused myself to look beyond the simple 2D animation style of the “Wit’s End” video to find an affordable way to do something great. I had to find out. Both he and I have been lifelong admirers of Zdzislaw Beksinski’s work and wanted to find a way to bring his paintings to life. I traveled to Oregon with my frequent collaborator, Brendan McGowan, and spent two days working with ALN and Emma Ruth Randle, narrating on family farms and public parks in ALN’s hometown of Salem. The video was shot on location. ALN’s story follows his struggles with distraction and ideation, personified by a shadow self of sorts. We determined that the creature was a Beksinski entity that spewed out nasty stringy roots in an attempt to lure and trap prey.
Early attempts at creature creation
Join the AI team at Adam Espino and Wolf Tijuana. Adam was a visual his artist who worked as an illustrator and graphic artist until he overturned his car and lost the function of his dominant hand. Suddenly unable to draw, he found a way to continue being an artist by learning AI. He met Wolfe by joining Wolfe’s band (also known as Wolf He Tijuana) and they began making videos for themselves and others. Saw this on IG and thought I had to work with them.
Zev Deans, Emma Ruth Randle, ALN, Brendan McGowan (left) and AI artists Adam Espino and Wolf Tifana in Salem, Oregon
Back home, I started developing remote workflows with Adam and Tijuana, venturing into the unknown to find a way to blend AI video with live-action footage. I took many shots in the dark and eventually settled on a collage format. There, we built many layers of found footage shaped to the needs of the shot, and ran the collage layers through AI enough times for us to find them. what we were looking for.
many stages of the scene
Full AI immersion occurs around 7 minutes, and is the final entry into the protagonist’s mind before regaining consciousness. This is the part of this project that horrified me. A lot of work went into creating that image, but most of it seemed to come out of nowhere. Only then did I begin to understand how much of a threat this technology is to many people’s lives. As I gazed into the abyss, I thought to myself, “At least I’ll be able to pick myself up before the whole fucking house burns down…”
A world inspired by the paintings of Zdzislaw Beksinski
Mizumall new album prosaicwill be released by Profound Lore on July 21st and is available for pre-order now.
