Artificial intelligence is coming. There’s nothing we can do to stop it and we don’t know what it will bring. But Lawrence Lek has a prediction. His feature-length computer-animated film, presented in a shimmering blue room, imagines a future where AIs are songwriters and us fleshy humans have to fight for supremacy, all with a soundtrack composed by the artist himself.
The narrative follows Diva, a human singer using an AI songwriter to mount a comeback at the eSports Olympics closing ceremony. The aesthetic is all schlock contemporary video game: stilted walking, fantastical landscapes, digital skins and warped undulating surfaces. Lek’s concepts unfurl as the story unfolds: bio-supremacy, the fear of impending AI, corporate dominance, celebrity and ego.
It’s part music video compilation, part video game and part animated film. It’s an enjoyable experience, and has plenty of good concepts to keep you going through its runtime. But you just can’t help but feel that so many of these ideas are being better expressed in other mediums. Game design, literary science fiction, filmmaking; they are all tackling these same topics, with the same technological edge, to higher aesthetic and conceptual standards. Put this in a cinema, and it doesn’t really stand up, put it on your console, and the same thing happens.
It’s frustrating because there are so many top-notch ideas here that if Lek just concentrated it all down, made it more succinct and focused, it could be brilliant. Just like the AI revolution, it’s close, but it’s not quite there yet.