The Weirdcore World
Weirdcore is an experimental video creator. He can be best described as a digital contortionist. Taking animation to the edge of it’s very possibilities and then stretching even further. His hyper-stylistic way of expressing ideas begs the viewers to self-examine the stimulant fueled environment we find ourselves trapped in. He strives to challenge the separation between the digital world and the world in which we love, sometimes making them indistinguishable from each other. The things that we create, change us in ways that are unpredictable and heavily consequential. Weirdcore emulates this bastardization throughout his work. In the music video he crafter for Aphex Twin’s T69, his intentions to challenge and critique are seen in its purest form.
The video opens with strings of code constantly changing, sometimes forming coherent statements. The code suddenly takes on 3d characteristics and begins to form a London-esque building, slowly coding it into existence. After the first building has been fully realized, a world begins to form around it. All arising from code. The program that that’s building the environment suddenly begins to reference 2D pictures of buildings in order to build 3D tensions of them. In this way simulations create in the same way that humans do; by referencing other ideas and experiences. It forces to viewers to take a step back and analyze the nature of their own reality. If something so complex can be made by computers, where does that leave humanity and the world that we identify with. Couldn’t we just be living in a simulation? As soon as these thoughts began to populate the forefront of my mind, the simulated world implodes and a new one arises.
This one is composed of gyrating cubes that shoot up from the ground, constantly changing it properties. One second, it’ll be made of a cement-esque texture and the next it’ll be made of giant slabs of red meat. The landscape then devolves into sharp blade-like mountains and as the materials begin to change once again, this time made up entirely of at least 100 versions Aphex Twin’s snarled face, stretched across an entire landscape.
In a way Aphex Twin was creating things in his own image, not unlike the gods we worship now. A black hole materializes within the landscape and begins to suck it everything around it into itself, eventually collapsing in on itself and creating a new world.
Every single movement within this cacophony of visuals gyrates perfectly to the frenetic beat of Aphex Twin’s T69.It enhances the song by constantly making you aware of the influence it has on its visual counterpart. These two pieces of art are pretty-much inseparable. The video represents the process of creation, realization and then destruction. This is one of the many patterns that arises throughout the video, but I found it to be one of the most interesting of the ideas expressed. Weird core’s process for making the video was not traditional in any sense and his products aren’t either. For this video he used the Deep dream generator, a program which was initially used by scientist to see what a deep neural network is seeing when it is looking at an image and as now used more commonly psychedelic and hallucinatory art. This effect can be seen whenever something is superimposed on a structure, consequentially changing the texture of the object. In addition to the is Weirdcore used photogrammetry which is “the use of photograph in surveying and mapping in measuring distances.” This enabled him to create digital versions of places that already existed. Once they were in the program he could manipulate them as he pleased. In the video he actually shows this process by superimposing 2d images into his 3d world. Even the Christian god was pretty unoriginal with his most proud creation, creating humans in his own image. In the second stage Weirdcore takes characteristics of the previous Virtual World and applies them to this unrecognizable landscape. Using these familiar characteristics and applying them to such a chaotic landscape gives a familiar yet alienating feeling. This is where the visuals can really be seen matching the beat of the song perfectly. According to Weirdcore in an interview done by The Quietus, during the second collapse the bpm of the song changes about 150 times making it extremely complicated to sync and render.
On a digital storytelling level, the video that WeirdCores Aphex Twin’s T69 experiments and combines technologies to create something original. Within this music video he challenges what a music video can be. Music videos usually function as a marketing material accompanying song. They usually don’t amplify or add anything to the song, but in this case, it adds an entirely new understanding to the song. Music is such an intangible art that it requires something as abstract as it to visualize it properly. Weirdcore does just that by creating something that extends past the sum of its parts to communicate direct and abstract ideas. It shifts our conception of storytelling by using distortion, creation and the eventual collapse to show patters that can be found anywhere in film.
Weirdcore is critiquing the very fabric of our reality by representing the things we find familiar in bizarre, sometimes disturbing ways. The music video for t69 paints the world as a semi-organic technology that can change its intent with no real direction at any given time. The video is mesmerizing and disturbing all at the same time. The fact that the computer he is using to create the world is also ran by lines of code makes it that much more metaphorical. Through rigorous animations he’s able to control every single aspect of the video.
