Gregory Scheckler

We are surrounded and embedded with technology. AI is on the rise, persuading, effecting, and re-engineering our experiences.

The Ai/viary is a vexing film that blends traditional and digital wildlife photography with digital and a.i. animation techniques as a meditation on the increasingly cyborg nature of our lives. This album with the single “Ai/viary Maybe” is the film’s soundtrack built entirely out of electronic (digital and analog) synthesis methods.

See the film here: The Ai/viary on Youtube

Get the soundtrack here: The Ai/viary soundtrack on Bandcamp

In The Ai/viary, a bird sings, but what you hear is a synthesizer. Gregory Scheckler’s short film begins with his own backyard photographs of birds from Williamstown, MA, animated through A.I. processes into uncanny motion, while the score replaces natural voices with modular synthesizers that he composed and performed. The result is beautiful, strange, and quietly alarming: a nature film in which nothing is entirely natural, a documentary as collaboration between artist and algorithm in which it becomes difficult to say who was directing whom. Glitches surface and vanish … a beak changes color, a body’s proportion shifts, a bird grows a third wing in the final frames. Each glitch becomes a small warning about how convincingly A.I. now mimics the real world, and how little we look closely enough to notice. 

I learned a lot about a.i. in the making of this film. It’s both fantastically useful and deeply concerning. I’ve written more about this on Substack. here: [substack article]

Here are examples of a mix of images – some the original photo from real life, others a.i. edited and posed bird imagery trained from my original photos…