Beck enlists NASA for AI visual album
The musician’s latest album Hyperspace: AI Exploration has been brought to life by an “interstellar journey” in collaboration with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
For his new visual album Hyperspace, Beck enlisted the team at NASA JPL to curate mission images, which with the help of AI have been transformed into ‘hyperspaces’, a term popularised in Star Wars that refers to a higher dimension allowing faster travel than light-speed.
The AI and direction were handled by OSK, a studio that specialises in disciplines such as creative AI, VR, and interactive campaigns for collaborators ranging from Kanye West to Google to Ex Machina director Alex Garland.
For Hyperspace, OSK used machine learning and NASA’s archive to respond to the question: “How would artificial intelligence imagine our universe?”
Hundreds of thousands of mission images, videos and data were used to build a dataset to be fed into the GAN (general adversarial network, a machine learning model), producing an obscure, textural vision of the universe through the lens of an AI.
The resulting visualisations have been edited into music videos for each track on the album, which have in turn been integrated into an interactive platform that invites people to discover more about what lies beyond our solar system.
The album is also set for a limited edition 12” vinyl release later this year, which features a holographic jacket, a 24-page booklet with AI images and NASA data to accompany each track.
