Max Cooper’s new music video spotlights Mexico City in motion

The video for Max Cooper’s new track Perpetual Motion features gliding drone footage of Mexico City spliced with geometric visualisations, as a way of illustrating the human systems that give life to these spaces

Mexico City is the home of Max Cooper’s new music video for Perpetual Motion, the first single off his forthcoming visual album, Yearning for the Infinite. The LP came about as a result of a project commissioned by the Barbican as part of its Life Rewired season, which invites artists at the intersection of technology and creativity to explore “what it means to be human when technology is changing everything”.

The Belfast-born producer has a penchant for drawing out the human element in technologies, or using technologies to visualise human nature and phenomena. Perpetual Motion sees him build on past videos designed to interrogate the complicated ties been life and tech, this time injecting geometric patterns and static transitions into aerial drone footage taken above Mexico City in full swing.

Cooper’s concept for the video was realised with the help of long-term collaborator Nick Cobby, who shot the footage together with three Mexican photographers, Manuel Marañón, Roberto H and Santiago Arau. Textures and visual effects were then contributed by artists including Jessica In and Andy Lomas.

“Max’s idea for Perpetual Motion was to document the continuous movement of people, exploring how there is no inherent meaning in life, only our own meaning which we create through striving towards our goals,” Cobby wrote in a post about the project. He and Cooper landed on the idea of using Mexico City – “a sprawling metropolis of nine million people, all packed in tight and some really interesting land forms and architecture.”

Upon scouting locations with Google Earth, Cobby found that the locations offered a fascinating perspective of the city that could only be seen from above, boasting their own geometric patterns which would prove to marry well with Cooper’s natural inclination towards eye-catching shapes and structures.

“I was really interested in the juxtaposition of these orderly forms with the irregular, disorderly chaos confined within it,” Cobby added. “For me it really helped push the idea of living as part of a perpetual system.”

Yearning for the Infinite is released on November 7 2019; register here for resale tickets for the Barbican’s sold out Yearning for the Infinite show; barbican.org.uk