LEVIATHAN

Animation
LEVIATHAN is a complex multi-tentacled AI creature. Part oracle, part synthetic animal, Leviathan’s outer skin and physical movement is generative and self learning. It floats against an abyss-like black background. By training the creature on a large variety of datasets, it’s exterior skin becomes a collage of visual data that morphs and animates–continually transforming the creatures exterior.
Inspired by the Russian film Leviathan (2015) as well as The Illuminatus! Trilogy Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s 1975 science fiction cult classic. In both the film and the book, Robert Hobbes’ construct of the Leviathan is referenced to describe an unseeable and vast bureaucratic system that oversees and guides our lives.
In this project, the Leviathan metaphor becomes a technological one. Our alien AI creature becomes a proxy for an unseeable and complex technology: one that controls and extends through every facet of our lives in ways that we don’t fully see or even understand.
The datasets are pulled from many different points including social media, weather patterns, historical images and financial data to create an engaging and dynamic creature. Each tentacle is processing it’s own data, creating a sophisticated and beguiling portrait of our collective
memory–an exteriorized expression of our shared humanity and history. It will use our collective memory to invent its own new visual language.
LEVIATHAN is meant to be a surrogate for our own existence—past, present and future. It’s tentacles and body hypnotically morphing as it’s limbs move, twirl and flicker across the glowing digital screen hypnotically reflecting back to us our collective hopes, dreams and failures.

Producer

Chris Dorland

3D Design Animation

Adrian Bolog