Uncanny builds a bespoke software to bring a Oneohtrix Point Never music video into pixelated existence

Uncanny is the name of design, photography, and direction duo Elliott Elder and George Muncey. Apt is their name, especially following the creation of their strange simulated world for electronic producer Oneohtrix Point Never’s new music video D.I.S, from his album Tranquilizer. The project comes after years of collaboration between the duo, having met originally connected over Instagram while Elliot was interning and George was making YouTube videos under the alias Negative Feedback.

The pairs paths began to merge when they began working on small animation film projects, before they decided to fully take the plunge and quit their respective jobs in favour of directing as Uncanny. Their first project together was for hip-hop collective Brockhampton’s album Road Runner. For their recent collab with Oneohtrix Point Never, Warp Records approached the studio after being impressed by Elliott and George’s work for the label’s Barbican showcase. For this project, rules went out the window so the ambitious endeavour could come to life; creating a bespoke software using sampled imagery from designer Julien Gobled’s archive. Speaking on Julian’s imagery, Elliott says: “Everything has a painterly touch yet feels slightly off and misremembered.” It’s hazy, yet incredibly detailed.

“Conceptually a lot of the video was inspired by the themes of Tranquilizer itself, exploring themes of archiving and degradation,” says Elliott. To create this heady balance of catalogued crumbing, Elliott and George devised a narrative surrounding a piece of software that’s tasked with forecasting natural disasters, documenting and analysing values like wind speed and precipitation – “essentially a worst-case scenario machine”, Elliot says.

The music video serves as a canonical screen recording of the fictional environmental device, following it as it slowly “gives up on objective prediction”, Elliott outlines. The narrative is carved out through the awakening of the device as it discovers divinity and enlightenment, surrounding its acceptance that, out there, lies the unknown. It cannot maintain its logic as it learns new ideas. It’s a very real, bespoke software created for the purpose of this music video.

80 per cent of the video is made up of screen recordings showing these pixellated behaviours unfold. Red pixels are treated like fire, igniting the green pixels which represent grass. Blue pixels flow down, behaving like water, cultivating the growth of the grass. Modifier buttons were added to create synchronicity between the track and the landscapes to perform rainstorms and volcanic eruptions. To Elliott, Julien’s imagery felt like the perfect visual accompaniment to the album, “taking unexpected loops and sounds and collaging across genres”.

The video culminates with the triumph of moss over devastated landscapes. “You aren’t just watching destruction but also regrowth and adaptation,” says Elliott. The track’s ending is bittersweet and nostalgic. These sounds inspired the late addition of the ecosystem’s overgrowth, reflected in a change to the code. Uncanny’s work for Oneohtrix Point Never’s D.I.S. music video is truly innovative and experimental, landing on just the right tone of optimism and despair.