A favorite of YEDM now or his endlessly interesting experimental arrangements and chaotic variation in both his musical compositions and his multimedia videos, Chris Iannuzzi is now diving first into an area that many artists are starting to rally around: AI art and video. Since he praised it Labyrinth The solo LP was dropped with a solo ending in April of this year, and Ianizzu has hinted that he’ll make similar headway with the videos, and he’s officially entered the project with its release on November 4 with “Lonesome Highway Superstar,” the second video from Labyrinth The huge album.
The song “March of Madness” was released as a special video which was the culmination of the Labyrinth, It was actually the first video in which Iannuzzi and his team used artificial intelligence technology, both in animation and in the transformation of faces. “Lonesome Highway Superstar” is the first, however, to be created almost entirely by artificial intelligence. Created in collaboration with the same graphic artists who worked on March of Madness, İlke Köse and Ethem Serkan Sökmen, this video used both Disco Diffusion and Stable Diffusion AI to generate the images. In between the two methods, the team created a video that looks both surreal and hyper-real, with 3D holograms morphing into realistic characters and vice versa.
The inspiration for this was, according to Iannuzzi, a kind of version of the space theme Warrior Road.
My initial idea for a video was a “Road Warrior” type video with an elaborate car on a desert highway. After I thought about this and saw what Serkan İlke did with artificial intelligence in the “March of Madness” video shoot, I thought it was time to look for something different. I thought, let’s put the character in space and make the flight cosmic. I shared my thoughts with them and they went.
The video seems to capture the sense of unity combined with wonder that Ianuzzi was trying to imply in the track as well, with the shapeless visuals being beautiful and stunning but ultimately cold and sterile, especially once the POV morphs into human forms. Dressed in spacesuits and still AI-generated as is, the humanity of their movements and gameplay on the “desert highway in space” is a stark contrast to everything the viewer has seen so far. While these aren’t as impressive as the high-profile “space” photos, there’s more relevance to them than anything else in the video, and it seems like a very short clip.
The video ends with a question, as an anamorphic spaceship attempts to build and rebuild itself over and over within this hyper-realistic but clearly not real space: Will we ever be able to fully coexist with artificial intelligence, or, for that matter, any other forms of intelligence? ground or extra? It remains to be seen at this point, but the answer may not be too far away as the technology continues to grow. For Iannuzzi, meanwhile, it’s all about the same question: When we’re constantly reaching out for more, whether it’s artificial intelligence, space, or even just looking for companionship on a desert highway, are we only serving to isolate ourselves completely? This is an eternal question, and the “Lonesome Highway Superstar” apparently doesn’t have an answer yet.
Visit Chris Ianuzzi’s YouTube channel to watch “March of Madness” and other videos. Labyrinth The rest of his music is streamable on Spotify.
