VIRGIL ABLOH | COACHELLA 2019
stage visuals

In the Spring of 2019 Shmody was approached by Virgil Abloh's team to help produce animated video content for his upcoming performance at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival. Abloh, a massively successful designer and visual artist, had begun a journey into the world of Musical performance and DJing and was looking for some visual weirdness to complement his eclectic performance. In the months prior we had been experimenting with some new techniques, using various AI Gan tools to create impressionistic faces and landscapes. Their team was drawn to these sketches and the process behind them. Without getting too technical, this piece was a contemporary take on frame-by-frame animation, using artificial intelligelnce to interpret crude drawings and spit them back out as beautiful and strange images.

To take things a step further, we opted to incorporate some of Abloh’s idols. Using a similar technique with an AI tool designed to intelligently airbrush images, images of Marcel Duchamp, Malcolm X, MLK, Mikhail Gorbachev, and several others, were intentionally deteriorated, one frame at a time. The sequence was then reversed to create a surrealist vision in which these figures were spawned into existence from nothing. All of these components were collaged together live to create an unforgettable audio-visual experience.