You’ve heard of UGC. How about UGD (user-generated dreams)?
British indie-pop group Bastille released Give Me The Future, their fourth studio album, at the start of February. It was their first new album since Doom Days in summer 2019.
As part of the marketing to set up the release of Give Me The Future, the band and their label, EMI, built a website which takes details of dreams sent in by fans (submitted in text form) and uses AI to, firstly, analyse them and, secondly, to create a series of visuals from them. The visuals are also turned into gifs.
“Our artificial intelligence engine will collect and analyze the dreams that you submit, combining them into a collective visual dreamscape,” says the website. “Our artificial intelligence engine requires as many details as possible to work at full capacity, so please share freely. How did the air feel on your skin? Could you smell the flowers? Did your heart feel like it was going to explode?”
All submissions are anonymised. The results were the very definition of a mixed bag when we looked through them. There was one image that resembled a close up of someone’s internal organs, another that looked like a painting of angels but rendered in bananas and another that appeared to be a drinks cabinet for holding eggs.
There is a link on the website to listen to Bastille on Spotify, but the more interesting creative twist is that some of the visuals generated from the fan entries were used as Canvases on Spotify for the launch of the album. They came with a stamp saying, “This reality made possible by Future Inc.”
EMI told us that they believe it is the first AI-powered Canvas on Spotify.
It is an interesting experiment that blurs the lines between music, UGC and abstract art. The extra incentive for fans – where their dreams could, in a weird form, end up on Spotify Canvas as other fans play the album – is an interesting twist. Rather than treat it as a straight competition, they become (well, their dreams do) a part of the overall creative process around the album.
