Multi-Grammy winning artist Imogen Heap and London-based Ukrainian director and editor Daria Korsak have created a remarkable 14-minute experimental music video, incorporating numerous techniques - including CGI and AI - for Heap's epic composition I AM ___. 

Two years in the making by the veteran musician, singer-songwriter and producer and Korsak - who arrived in the UK having fled the war in Ukraine in 2022 - the visual for I AM ___ is a sensory journey that explores the personal and the political by immersing the viewer in five visual worlds: from the heart of a microchip, through a brain full of bittersweet romantic memories, into the depths of AI consciousness, inside the eye, and finally through the shifting perspectives of machine and human.

Blending CGI, processed archival footage, macro liquid patterns and VFX-heavy live action, the effect is to hurl the viewer into the the fractured mind of a modern human-machine, caught in the turbulence of personal exploration, geopolitical upheaval and an accelerating technological revolution. Ultimately, the film explores how we could hold onto our humanity and find peace amid the chaos of an ever-evolving world.

It's also the result of a close collaboration between the artist and director, that mostly took place in 'after hours' time while Korsak worked full-time as an editor and navigated a new life far from Ukraine, and lived with Heap as her guest after her departure from her war-torn homeland.

"I fled Ukraine in 2022, and Imogen kindly offered to host me in her home – first for six months, then for several years," she explains. "She was working on the song, and I said I wanted to create a music video for it. I’d never directed anything before, so it seemed like an overly ambitious idea – and it grew into something even wilder than either of us expected."

AI was used as a creative instrument to support the film’s theme of human-machine symbiosis – specifically, to process archival footage for the Noise section, which was then re-edited frame by frame and integrated with live-action and CGI.

In a statement on her website, Imogen Heap says: "Neither the song I AM___ nor the music video were 'created by AI.' The song as well as this music video were created by dozens of human artists over the past few years.

"For clarity, the utilization of AI was done strategically and specifically... For the “Noise” section of the music video, the artist Robert Seidel used personal video footage from my phone that was relevant to the song’s theme (the audio of those videos is featured on and off for a couple of minutes in the song). He processed those videos through the model Stable Diffusion... [before it was re-edited by Korsak]. After which, half was turned into particles by the VFX artist Falk Müller."

Korsak adds that working on this long-term project was also integral to dealing with the challenge of living in a new country, and she acknowledges the help of Deadbeat Films, the production company who were particularly invoived in the first stage of production in 2023, and producer, live action director and co-writer Boris Thompson-Roylance. 

"Forced migration left me feeling torn between places, cultures and systems much larger than myself. I AM ___ became a way of translating that fragmentation into something tangible," she says.

"A lot of people have told me the Noise section feels like an accurate visualisation of what’s happening in their mind on an average day. If anything, I hope the film makes viewers feel a little less alone inside all that chaos of modern life."