MGMT have released the music video for, “When You Die,” the second song from the forthcoming Little Dark Age, due out in 2018. The video, which can be seen below, stars actor Alex Karpovsky.
Directed by Mike Burakoff and Hallie Cooper-Novack, the video takes a darkly humorous and ultimately horrifying approach to the question of life after life. Famed French singer, Sébastien Tellier, lends his silky smooth laugh to the track, as Karpovsky moves through cycles of life, death and rebirth, and the story starts feeding back onto itself. Emotions and memories smear both forward and backwards, as pieces of the scenery of his final moments of life become the textures of his forever-looped eternity.
The video utilizes an amalgamation of AI Style Transfer technology techniques, making use of artificial neural networks to impose the stylistic qualities of an image onto video footage. The end result is an eerily familiar, dreamlike interpretation. The effect can appear beautiful at some times and horrific at others.Mike Burakoff and collaborator Jamie Dutcher (collectively known as King Drippa) developed their own software, nicknamed Glooby, to harness the power of Style Transfer for the production pipeline.