Exoplanets

Exoplanets are a multi-sensory experiences through the added layer of sound. We collaborate with different artists and musicians to create musical journeys. The stories are told through the graphic novel series Exoplanets, the virtual concert series The Missions (in co-production with WeMakeVR) and the intergalactic Radiostation Utopia. Robin Coops use and question the use of technology. Some of the planets uses AI technology such as the composition HARMONIA that deliberately makes partial use of AI-generated visuals. This choice of form is itself a comment on the content. For a full artistic statement on the use of these tool, please read further.

Artistic Statement use of AI in Harmonia
Robin has no interest in AI visuals that could just as easily have been made by animators or with a film camera and actors. Instead, he uses these tools to interrogate AI from within itself, consistently using form to question content.

Besides that, Robin has always had a strong interest in the dialogue between tactility and the virtual within his work. This is what drew him to generative AI visuals in relation to tactility. In Harmonia, this expresses itself through the creation of a moving stained-glass aesthetic.

Harmonia emerged just as AI image generators were becoming available to the general public. Robin used copyright-free images of birds and stained glass. At the time, it wasn't yet easy to simply merge two images into a film, so Robin turned the images into stickers, which he then placed back into the different visuals to establish consistency. He then leaned into the slowness of the medium as it existed then, which caused everything to move in slow motion. Placing this within an augmented-reality experience inside a church created a different context than a video alone would have, and that context turned out to be fitting: much like a religion, AI is seen by some as something that will solve everything, a new kind of faith.

In the village of Harmonia, the villagers believed the hymn book would protect them against harm, a belief many still hold today. The hymn book was the solution, the means to treat everyone equally and keep them safe. In the end, it turned out to harm the community instead: everyone became its slave, its prisoner. The same comparison can be drawn with AI: we become too dependent on it, too quick to believe it will protect or advance us.

Robin uses AI deliberately and, in doing so, positions himself as a co-user within the situation, just as guilty as many of us. In doing so, he raises the question that drives him: how guilty, and how dependent, are we all really on this use, and what could the future of this use look like? What will our society look like if we continue down this path?

In his research with AI, however, he treats it not as a product but as a process. The AI image is only the starting point of the content, which he then uses as VJ material, so that the work only truly comes into being live. In this way, the AI snippets never become finished works, but samples from which new works are continuously created and performed live by Robin.