The Winter Market

The latest in AI music video developments

"The Winter Market" is a science fiction short story written by William Gibson and was published in Burning Chrome.

Casey, works as an editor at a Vancouver studio that specializes in turning the images from people’s dreams into movie-like productions. While attending a party hosted by his friend, junk artist Rubin Stark, he meets a young, drug-addicted woman named Lise who relies on an exoskeleton to move. She suffers from a degenerative disease that greatly hampers her mobility, and she wears the exoskeleton at all times even though it causes abrasions on her skin. Rubin describes to Casey the circumstances under which he first met Lise. He had been scavenging in an alley for materials when he found her sitting motionless and seemingly waiting to die, her exoskeleton having run out of battery power.

Casey takes Lise home from the party and, at her request, connects their brains so he can see her dreams directly. The images are so vivid, powerful, and unsettling that he brings her to his boss’s attention as the start of a new project. Casey works with Lise for three weeks as the project expands, but her physical condition steadily deteriorates from the effects of her disease and addiction. Shortly after the recording sessions are completed, Casey sees Lise for what turns out to be the last time, meeting a random man in a bar in search of a final pleasurable experience.

The finished project, released under the title Kings of Sleep, proves to be a tremendous commercial success. Lise uses her share of the profits to have her consciousness uploaded onto a computer server, in order to achieve a form of immortality and free herself from the constant physical pain of her life. She dies and her body is cremated.

Casey dreads the thought of receiving a telephone call from Lise, wondering if it will be the true person or only a program constructed from her mind.

One thing I’ve learned from uploading the videos to Instagram is that no one on that platform watches more than 30 seconds, even though the effective limit is three minutes. Since 30-45 seconds costs a lot less than three minutes, I’m focusing on doing shorter videos for experiments, while working on one full music video with an actual film director to see how far we can push the technology with someone who knows what he’s doing.

What begins with a single picture can be radically repurposed, while still maintaining a reasonable degree of consistency, as the following progression demonstrates:

What follows is a short video based on Gibson’s short story, as part of one ongoing project. To be clear, it is not a Psykosonik song, it’s just me combining what I’ve been doing with Soulsigma and Vibe Patrol with a more intense techno vibe.

Fast white modules translate souls

Into products you can sell

While the shattered city shows

Heaven and synthetic hell

Kings sleep well in platinum

She fades to ones and zeroes

A phantom in the system

Living somewhere no one knows

Reach across the neural fire

The dead learn how to sing

She took what she desired

What does her damnation bring?

As you can see, I borrowed a few visual elements from Chiba City Blues, but those elements are much more integrated into the storyline now rather than randomly produced by the AI director.

In any event, the advances continue on both the video and the audio fronts. We’re still many months away from full movie production, but it’s legitimately in sight. In the meantime, the music videos allow us to make regular progress on a reasonable project scale. I’ll almost certainly produce a video on the following song later, but you can hear a very different style with some exceptionally good audio quality on this newsong, written two days ago for a Sigma Game post, if you’re interested.