Broken Social Scene Shares ‘Can’t Find My Heart’ Video

Broken Social Scene shared a video for the single “Can’t Find My Heart” from their 2019 EP Let’s Try The After Vol. 2. For the visual, the music collective enlisted the help of director Josh Usheroff. Usheroff worked in collaboration with Google engineer Alex Mordvintsev, who created the psychedelic neural network DeepDream. Usheroff spoke about the process in a statement:

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. 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.

Mordvintsev also detailed his side of the creative process:

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.

Check out the finished product below: