“I was told that someone was interested in investigating A.I. & did I have any ideas? The first idea I had was to animate the photographs that Rankin & Donald took for Different Class: after all, back in 1995 they had been an ‘artificial’ way of dropping us into real-life situations & getting an album cover done whilst we were too busy recording the music for that album to pose for pictures. No brainer.

“It was my initial idea to produce a kind of ‘making of’ video that showed how the photos had come to be taken – but as soon as I fed the first shot into the A.I. app I realised that wasn’t going to happen. So I decided to ‘go with the flow’ and see where the computer led me.

“All the moving images featured in the video are the result of me feeding in a still image & then typing in a ‘prompt’ such as: ‘The black & white figure remains still whilst the bus in the background drives off’ which led to the sequence where the coach weirdly slides towards the cut-out of me.

“The weekend I began work on the video was a strange time: I went out of the house & kept expecting weird transformations of the surrounding environment due to the images the computer had been generating. The experience had marked me. I don’t know whether I’ve recovered yet…

“I have to thank Julian House for some expert post-production work & Rankin & Donald Milne for allowing me to use their work in this way. As it says in text at the end of the video, I think what they did for Pulp back in 1995 was ‘Human Intelligence at its best’. My final thought? H.I. Forever!”

"Many thanks to Rankin & Donald Milne for taking the original photographs in 1995, for Pulp's Different Class album, which formed the basis for this video.

Human Intelligence at its best.

xx