Introducing One World Moments
An experiment in AI video
Today is the launch of a new project I’ve been collaboratively working on for the better part of a year, One World Moments. The video you see above is a short preview of what’s to come, consisting of 12 short clips of AI-animated videos, which hopefully don’t look like what one would traditionally expect from “AI video.” In the coming days, we will be releasing more short clips several times a week. This first wave of videos represent a brief introduction to One World Moments, a project that has been gestating for a long time and will continue to develop as technology evolves.
As a longtime writer and practitioner of film, I’ve been closely following the progression of AI images over the last several years with a mixture of skepticism and curiosity. One World Moments is a way to explore the possibilities of the emerging world of AI-generated video, intended to lean into the specific strengths of the medium–not as a replacement for traditional narrative filmmaking, but as an offshoot, something that hasn’t quite existed yet because it hasn’t been technically possible until now. I’d mostly like the video to speak for itself, but I’ll go into a little bit more detail about the background and future of One World Moments below.
Background
To go along with the video, we’ve created a website that showcases some influences on One World Moments in a scrolling moodboard style. Exploring the website is probably the best way to become experientially acquainted with our approach, but I’ll try to give some words here to fill in the background.
One World Moments is an audiovisual artwork in the ‘ambient’ media tradition, a somewhat marginal, unofficial canon with roots in the experimental art of the 20th century, with points that could be windingly traced between the Lumiere brothers, Andy Warhol, John Cage, Brian Eno, Chantal Akerman, HD TV video loops, computer screensavers, ASMR videos and Lo-Fi Hip Hop Beats to Study To. Put simply, ambient media places an emphasis on atmosphere and feeling above action or narrative, doesn’t demand or expect full attention, and often involves sampling or remixing. They’re sensory white noise, an emotional backdrop to subtly augment your world, whether for the purposes of relaxing, working, or socializing.
One World Moments is a new experiment in ambient media, which seeks to use the new possibilities enabled by AI image generation to create more specific, evocative, and artistic ambient visuals than have been previously possible on a mass scale.
Future
Given the limitations of the current (though fast-developing) technology, the teasers represent a proof-of-concept for the aesthetic, the phase 1 of the project. The next phase of One World Moments is to go long, to develop proprietary fine-tuned models that can sustainably generate high-quality videos ad infinitum, leading to a 24/7 stream of video and audio. In a way what we are trying to build is an imaginary camera that produces a specific type of image, one that draws from various traditions of film history–actualities, home movies, landscape films, slow cinema, early social media images, internet ephemera–and narrows infinite possibilities into a singular aesthetic.
Like the video, this post is just a small glimpse of all the thought, work, and inspiration that has gone into creating this project, and there will be a lot more to come soon. We hope that you enjoy this early introduction to One World Moments and continue to follow the journey ahead.