Exoplanets 3: Harmonia

Harmonia is a free adaptation on George Orwell's 1984. It tells the story of a town whose residents only sing to each other. Winston, a teacher of the Sing Speak Book, begins to receive small notes about how the holy lyrics are not liberating, but a prison of the mind. Winston begins to truly listen, and speak, but when the Sing Police find out, he is sung back to society.

Harmonia is an album and AI image generated music film. The theme of Harmonia is all about manipulative systems, and stories which we tell each other and ourselves. With AI we create stories for better or worse, consciously but also unconsciously. So the story adds to the question on how we like to use AI in the future. For this film, made in 2023-2024, Robin specifically used the slowness of the medium at that time, and choose for an esthetic that is tactile and very hard to achieve with other forms of film making.

director, composition, performance: Robin Coops

final mix: Jasper Ras

music coach: David Dramm

thanks to: Station Noord, Art Office Rotterdam

produced by: Coops&Co

Link to music

Link to music film

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Statement in use of AI

Robin has no interest in AI visuals that could just as easily have been made by animators or with a film camera and actors. Instead, he uses these tools to interrogate AI from within itself, consistently using form to question content.

Besides that, Robin has always had a strong interest in the dialogue between tactility and the virtual within his work. This is what drew him to generative AI visuals in relation to tactility. In Harmonia, this expresses itself through the creation of a moving stained-glass aesthetic.

Harmonia emerged just as AI image generators were becoming available to the general public. Robin used copyright-free images of birds and stained glass. At the time, it wasn't yet easy to simply merge two images into a film, so Robin turned the images into stickers, which he then placed back into the different visuals to establish consistency. He then leaned into the slowness of the medium as it existed then, which caused everything to move in slow motion. Placing this within an augmented-reality experience inside a church created a different context than a video alone would have, and that context turned out to be fitting: much like a religion, AI is seen by some as something that will solve everything, a new kind of faith.

In the village of Harmonia, the villagers believed the hymn book would protect them against harm, a belief many still hold today. The hymn book was the solution, the means to treat everyone equally and keep them safe. In the end, it turned out to harm the community instead: everyone became its slave, its prisoner. The same comparison can be drawn with AI: we become too dependent on it, too quick to believe it will protect or advance us.

Robin uses AI deliberately and, in doing so, positions himself as a co-user within the situation, just as guilty as many of us. In doing so, he raises the question that drives him: how guilty, and how dependent, are we all really on this use, and what could the future of this use look like? What will our society look like if we continue down this path?

In his research with AI, however, he treats it not as a product but as a process. The AI image is only the starting point of the content, which he then uses as VJ material, so that the work only truly comes into being live. In this way, the AI snippets never become finished works, but samples from which new works are continuously created and performed live by Robin.

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Get in touch for the limited cassette edition of Harmonia!