My New AI Videos

I’m taking a lot of heat, folks. People are unfollowing me on YouTube. I pinned this comment because the guy precisely expressed a phenomenon I believed I was witnessing.

Spoiler alert, what this fellow was missing is that while, for me, making images with AI alone doesn’t give me as much to do as I would like. The AI is doing really most the heavy lifting. But to make a full-on music video gives me tons to do.

]Me making AI music videos?! Bet you didn’t see this coming. I know I didn’t. So, what happened? Well, you may have noticed I don’t blog much anymore. That’s because I’ve been putting all my energy into making YouTube videos. I can just reach a much larger audience, and I even get paid for ads. Most my videos are art history, criticism, and opinion. However, my favorite part of the videos is all the weird experimental stuff I throw in because I can’t resist exploring with mediums.

So, for example, in my last art criticism video, Everyone Is Wrong About The Fountain [Part 1], my favorite bits are things like the musical interlude I slapped in there with Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” and Marcel Duchamp’s head in a cup of coffee with clouds… The thing is that I can be very analytical and incisive. That’s a consequence of running the gauntlet of a college education through an MFA. But unlike the Postmodernists, or at least the more linguistic strain of them or their precursors, I do NOT believe all reality exists in text. That’s pure twaddle. For me, text is always the map and never the terrain, unless it’s really good poetry or similar writing, in which case it’s “art” proper, and the whole is a sort of “aura” that transcends the sum of its parts.

Then while doing the videos I saw some people making these really cool 50’s style movie trailers using AI, but for sci-fi movies like The Terminator, or Alien. Bad-ass, fun, weird, was up my alley. So, I looked up how to do it and realized I already had all the skills. However, there was an impediment. I didn’t have a couple of the memberships I’d need for AI tools. But I was so hot to make a 50’s AI trailer that I could not hold myself back from getting started while I tried to get those memberships.

And, so using free AI sources I started to work with AI video. And then I just discovered out of the blue that you can now make music with AI. Whaaaaat? Had to experiment. You may not know this about me, but I’m an inveterate experimenter. Got the curiosity bug. And then I just put the two together using the rough procedure I got from a tutorial on how to do the movie trailers.

I went down the rabbit hole big time. Stayed up until first light a couple nights. Forgot to water my plants and feed my fish. Forgot to eat. Leapt out of bed first thing in the morning and as soon as I was showered and poured myself a cup of coffee launched immediately into work. I told myself that if I wanted to explore this new direction–which is soooooo promising if you like to just go completely wild with exploring possibilities–I’d need to obsess on it. It’s a matter of putting the metal to the floor. I did that when I first got into Blender and would do 5 hours of work a day.

Let’s just get out of the way that this is not an easy task, not the way I do it anyway. Hellz no. There’s “text to video” but I only use “image to video” and only images I make using AI. So, I’ll make hundreds of them, choose the best, animate them, choose the best animations for each, then I arranged them on a timeline to correspond with my music… My video editing is a lot more complex than that, but you get the idea.

For the music, it’s a lot of trial and error, working and reworking, and piecing parts together. I write my own lyrics. All together it’s a very sophisticated, personal, and all-consuming process.

Let’s hit the first video. This was just based on accidents that AI made while I was making images as “B-roll” for my video on Duchamp. I wanted to make him in a poster on a wall with a big brain, and then someone standing next to it… The AI put the brain on the person instead. Some of these accidental creations were marvelous, so I started making them on purpose, being the restless experimenter and navigator of rabbit holes that I am. So, my first video is just based on exploring those very weird, kinda’ scary, and beautiful images.

Bubble Brain Helmet Girl

The music, well, I typed into the prompt stuff like “60’s Folk/Psyche” and “Canterbury prog rock” and “experimental pop”… The AI churned out a bunch of pablum with too much reverb until it whacked out and gave me some wobbly vocals and percussion that sounds a bit Native American. I like weird. I don’t like obvious and safe. And I wanted weird because the images are weird. So, there’s a bunch of “girls” (women, really) with glowing, or bulbous, or mechanical brains on their heads. The lyrics complement the images. Basically, the voice laments that she (originally he, but I switched to female vocals] has lost a friend or loved one to the Bubble Helmet craze, which is some sort of VR thing. Just think of people with their heads down in their smart phones.

I got some hate, and people unfollowing me on YouTube. Whatever they think the reality is, it’s not me working late into the night like a mad scientist on these videos. That’s me in full art mode, whatever the medium. Personally, I think it’s a very weird and beautiful music video, and there wouldn’t be anything like it if I didn’t do it.

Next up, I kinda’ wanted to see if I could reel in some of the people I’m losing. I guess a lot of my followers or subscribers like me for rhetorical reasons, as in my arguments support their own beliefs or conclusions. That’s fine and dandy, but I’m an artist first and a critical thinker second or third… So, AI music videos just don’t fit their paradigm. They automatically reject them. They make sure I know they gave me the middle finger with their “unfollow”. They think I’m a sell-out, a trader to the cause, and must be excommunicated.

And it’s not like there’s a ton of people out there making these kinds of AI music videos. I haven’t watched a single one. And I’m not even looking for them now, and I know they are out there, though they are mostly going to be bland AF derivative pap. I like being out on my own limb, fancy free, with my mind unencumbered gliding among the clouds. I like to do it my way first just to see what happens.

So, for the next video, yeah, I thought I’d reel some of my deserters back in by doing a music video about art criticism. I mean, that’s experimental! Obviously a music video slamming Duchamp is not something you see often. I may have the only one in existence, especially if we narrow it down to AI. So, a thinking person would be alerted that this is a very individual use of the medium that only Eric Wayne would even think to attempt.

END ART

If you don’t know, Marcel Duchamp wanted to put an end to art, to discredit it, and to get rid of it like he believed people had stopped following religion. He also wanted to devalue the artist and for society to regard them as no more than craftspersons. Not everyone knows what a prick this guy was. So, I took images I made as possible B-roll for an upcoming section of my Duchamp video about his wanting to extinguish art, and the I made a music video out of them just to see what the hell that would look and sound like. We got spoken word, experimental, free jazz, art rock, contemporary classical for the music. We’re talking super artsy, as in something that would be performed in an art gallery rather than a concert hall kind of music. This video is nothing like the first one.

Surfing Cyborg Girl

After the first two very weird music videos, I decided to take a different tactic. What would be different? Hmmm. How about a surf song? About what? What would be cool and appropriate in terms of subject matter? How about a surfing robot? Hell yeah! That’s my vibe. Well, I ended up going more garage punk, because the surf stuff was too soft and melodic for what I wanted. This is about a rebellious robot who refused to go to work, or go to war, and she [I tend to prefer the ladies] only wants to surf! Go through the process, arduous as it is, and see what comes out the, er, other end.

Uuuuuh, the AI loves boobs. Not that I’m complaining, but I had to type into the prompt “flat-chested” or “modestly built” in order to try to tone it down a bit. I failed. Might as well run with it. Yeah, I know that robots have no use for boobs. It’s me you’re reading. They haven’t strapped me down and lobotomized me yet. The neurons are still firing. But it’s funny that they do. Get it? I know that you know that I know robots don’t need boobs. It’s funny.

I was working hard trying to get AI to make good surfing footage, which, by the way, is only 2-4 seconds at a time. The free AI isn’t really up to what I wanted. Then I used what I learned from my former accidental discoveries. Put a human and a robot in the same image and the AI will do something much more interesting with both. Soon I was creating whole female garage punk bands with robots in them. And I went gritty, so they are in backyards and abandoned theme parks… It’s weird that AI can go so strangely personal and evocative. You put that in the hands of someone who can integrate it with meaning and there’s the potential to kick it up to eleven.

It’s so weird, cool, and off the charts that a 58 year old artist living in Cambodia can crank out a 80’s sounding garage punk song by a female group populated with robots. People don’t get it because they have no idea what goes into it, or that I use all of my art education…

OK, I gotta’ work on the next one. But let me say this about AI. Yeah, guess who has been going around headless for the last couple years because as a digital painter I was front and center at the chopping block? The guillotine was swift, deadly, and why stop with just one cut? I’d have to go back every few weeks as the AI got mercilessly exponentially better and take another chopping. I’m like a cat down to 2 lives. So, nobody really knows better than I do [that’s an expression] how AI can kill one’s hopes and dreams and prospects over night with a big FU from the people behind it.

And, nah, someone churning out AI images as an overnight super genius is not a real artist. And no, if you didn’t paint it, you didn’t make it. Right, as in, I can’t say I sang in any of these songs or played the instruments or took the photos. I didn’t compose the music.

I didn’t play the guitar solo! I’m not saying I’m a musician! But I invoked the AI to produce it, and selected it from several variations, and I put the weird animations to go with it. And I just love how long the neck is on the robot’s guitar, and the way his fingers move. You’ll see. It’s hysterical. And one can use the AI ironically like that, meld with it, play with it, and not just do things by the book. Make mistakes work for you. We can look at art from more than one angle and on more than one layer. F with the audience a bit. Test their metal.

Ah, I just love that guitar! And there’s an oversized yellow one that comes right after it that makes me happy.

So, yeah, I’m not taking credit for playing the instruments, singing, or rendering the images. That’s all the genius of AI. I’m just taking credit for what I did with it all among nearly infinite possibilities. And this is a highly creative enterprise, integrating image making, animation, video editing, lyric writing, sound editing, Photoshop, and individual dreaming and vision. Contrary to the general association with AI, this isn’t just pushing a button, or thousands of them. It’s envisioning a kind of alternate reality.

So, for example, I have an idea to do Medieval sounding music, maybe mixed with late 60’s folk-rock, a bit of metal, and doing a song about witch burning. Who else would do that? What images will I make [can I go Breugel, or Bosch]? How will I animate them? What will the music sound like? I have barely an idea. It’s a whole rich and creamy and rewarding process.

This is a new genre that has only been possibly for a number of weeks, and I’m surfing on the crest like the cyborg girl. I’m getting every kind of resistance, such as not being able to purchase memberships for the AI tools I need because my bank considers the purchase “suspicious” and “possible fraud”, or else the companies bouncing my credit card after my bank approved the payment. Suffice it to say I’ve been trying to get a few memberships for a week with no success. I’m using free AI imaging, free AI video making, and free AI upscaling. I’m not using the state of the art, nor the faster or more versatile options. But like the cyborg girl washed up on the shore with her panels broken upen, short circuiting, and with crossed wires, I refuse to give up. I’m going back out in the surf if it kills me. And all the resistance I’m getting, the cold shoulders, the unfollows, the mean comments, the downvotes, and all the weird coincidences only tell me that I’m veering into new territory.

Hey, do me a favor and check out the videos, share them on social, and give them a like. And if you are one of the people that deserted me as if I am a defector from true art, you might be the one drifting from the sun, not me.

Cheers.