DRIVER
ACT II / The Drowning.
This song took me 5 years to share, and it began with the vision of a drowning, specifically a girl drowning a robot that she built. She builds it to start again, and she drowns it to bring it to life.
DRIVER takes place at night, just before dawn. The girl wakes in the middle of the night and drives the machine to the water to drown it in an attempt to evolve its senses, and it works.
This release is part II of an A.I. story series that began with our song/video “Sentient” in collaboration with artist Matt Griifin. It was in “Sentient” that the robot was moved for the first time by music, expanding what the human and machine believed was possible with their relationship. In DRIVER the natural world takes the machine to new depths and a metamorphosis takes place that brings nature into
collaboration with machine, challenging and transforming what’s possible with artificial intelligence. There may be more to come as the story lives and unfolds, until then, this is DRIVER.
DRIVER was shot from the perspective of the drowning robot, focusing on the the miraculous death and rebirth of a machine, a girl and an unimaginable relationship.
Endless time and attention go into creating, but sometimes chance and the natural world take the lead. On the day I shot DRIVER we were on a test run, the light and water were out of this world. We tried to return for a "proper" shoot many times, but we never saw it like this again. So, we used the test. I made this video entirely without any special effects, just nature and technology at their very best together.
The video and song features Choreographer and Dance artist Maria Nilsson Waller. DRIVER was written before we met and before our collaboration began. Maria had also created an A.I. dance piece called ’Blanca’. Blanca was a computer program that traveled through space and time on a shamanic journey inspired by the Sami traditions in her homeland of Jamtland. Blanca longed to connect organically, emotionally and spiritually with this world. Eventually, she washed up on a shore, here and now, and feeling the water and sun light on her for the first time her senses came to life and the connection was made. These parallel stories/works come together in DRIVER.
