Microsoft has launched Artifacts, a new collaboration with TBA Agency collecting new work made with generative technology by different groups of artists. The teams participating are Bladee and James Ferraro, Yaeji and Andrew Thomas Huang, and Cuco with Paul Trillo and Paul Flores. The creations were made using Copilot’s Microsoft’s AI suite as well as open source AI tools, with the goal of showing “how cutting-edge innovation can amplify deeply personal artistic expression while remaining fundamentally guided by human imagination.”
Sanctuary, Bladee and James Ferraro’s collaboration, is a first-person desktop adventure game (or “visual poem”, as Ferraro calls it). Stuck in a decaying labyrinth, players can explore and interact with different chatbots designed as characters. “I think that is like the point of the game,” Bladee says on the project’s landing page. “Being interactive lets people access this vast body of material and extract meaning from it,” Bladee explains.
The music video for Yaeji’s new single “Pondeggi” is directed by Andrew Thomas Huang, the filmmaker behind videos for FKA twigs, Björk, and many more. In the video, Yaeji is chased by a witch through the forest, turning into a silkworm as she runs; Huang says AI was used “as a pipeline tool and also as a means to alter the story itself.” Yaeji adds that the sections of the music video where she transforms into a silkworm, portions that use AI, were “parts that I don’t think I could have imagined myself.” Watch the music video below.
For his “A Love Letter to LA” short film, Cuco enlisted Paul Trillo and Paul Flores. Together they used generative models trained on Flores’ drawings to “remix and reinterpret” the images and used a team of traditional artists to animate them. The animation will be used as visuals on Cuco’s upcoming tour. Check it out below.
