Broken Social Scene shared the psychedelic official video for their anthemic single “Can’t Find My Heart.” Directed by Josh Usheroff, the visually-captivating video features an endless vortex of performance footage run through a series of style transfers and surreal artificial intelligence-created textures. This cutting-edge approach was developed in collaboration with Alex Mordvintsev, a pioneer in neural network generated visuals and creator of Google’s DeepDream.

“I am fascinated by the changes that AI and machine learning are bringing to all aspects of our culture. I wanted to see how this technology was being used in more creative disciplines,” explains Usheroff. “I started researching generative art and came across a video by Alex Mordvintsev. The video featured a series of still images zooming and transforming into one another. The results were mesmerizing.”

“We captured the performance visuals in Montreal just a few hours before the band’s concert. My creative partner, Ben Goloff, sequenced the performances and applied style transfers to give the images a surreal and almost painterly aesthetic. We then sent the files to Alex to work his DeepDream magic.”

Alex describes the technical process as follows: “The video effect is based on combining neural artistic style transfer with a zooming feedback loop. I gradually inject each new video clip into the mix, while simultaneously steering the global image style. Each video segment is a continuation of the previous, so I couldn’t generate them all in parallel. Thus, I decided to use “fast” feed-forward version of style transfer to be able to iterate quickly on the sequence, incorporating the feedback I was provided from Josh and Ben.”