O(a)k Computer

An old oak tree on Hampstead Heath captured on a walk during winter lockdown. The photogrammetry data has been rendered as a point cloud using Unreal Engine. The scan is accompanied by music generated by an A.I. model, OpenAI’s Jukebox, which has been trained to churn out soundtracks based on Hans Zimmer’s complete works. The resulting video captures a moment in time as a fragmented digital memory image. Jake Elwes looks for poetry and narrative in the success and failures of these systems, while also investigating and questioning the code and ethics behind them. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including the ZKM, Today Art Museum and Victoria and Albert ...View all