Participants 2024
About the TEAM
Ceremony Shadows is based in Portland, OR, and originated from a solo ambient/experimental project.
Our music is influenced by our diverse geographical upbringing across the USA, Germany and Poland, and our lifelong immersion in alternative music scenes and cultures.
About the SONG
The experimental science fiction short film “Sunspring” was released in 2016, and immediately caught my attention, since its script was authored by an AI.
I was fascinated by the effort by the filmmakers to bring humanity and emotion to a script written by an AI, and wanted to extend this effort into the musical domain with my composition "Sunfall".
About the HUMAN-AI PROCESS
I watched the short film “Sunspring” for the first time in 2016, because I was curious about the fact that its script was written entirely by an AI.
I ended up watching it many times over in the following years – something about how the filmmakers took what was non-sensical AI-generated text and managed to create something with surprising emotional resonance stuck with me, and didn’t let me go.
Seven years after watching “Sunspring” for the first time, I still kept thinking about it, so I decided to do something about that and created the musical composition “Sunfall” and an accompanying music video.
Since the original script was AI-generated, I challenged myself to create something that preserved its “AI-ness”, but used human compositional techniques seeded and inspired by the AI-generated content to establish an emotional story arc and bring human expression to the resulting work.
Just like humans can use AI-based tools to expand the palette of their creative expression, I believe it’s just as important to use AI-generated content as a seed to be surrounded by human expression, and that’s what I tried to show with “Sunfall”.