'Hospital Job' is a lucid ride through remixed, retold, and reinterpreted memories. Locations and moments from throughout the year of 2020/21, from around the UK and Netherlands, Belgium, are rearranged, re-explored, and re-presented in 360° to allow the viewer to experience these memories as their own.
The video was designed to feel like somewhere between a near-death experience, a trip and a lucid dream. Things don't appear as they should, perspectives are warped, scenes and surroundings aren’t complete, lighting rapidly shifts, and the camera eerily flys through these memories, or dreams, in artificially smooth ways. Certain parts of images are very well replicated but small details are lost, faces become abstract shapes.
Each memory sits as an island, floating in space as the viewer moves through exploratively, some memories or spaces blend into one another, often illogically but always seamlessly. Flashes of pure serene blue skies, birds flying and other real videos appear as backdrops to the memories, pulling the scene in and out of reality, both closer to and further away from real memories.
I first met Kris when playing the game ‘Rust’. It was literally the first time I logged in, I might have been running around for about fifteen minutes when I stumbled into Kris building a small base. I spoke to him and offered to help him build his base in exchange for him preferably not killing me, and to also learn some more about the game. Meeting with Kris on Rust became a semi-regular thing for a while, we became good friends through playing this often arduous and painful open-world game together.
Once I found out Kris made music, and I told him that I had interest in making a music video, we decided at some point to collaborate, to make a 3D music video inspired by the weird adventures of rust. During one evening, we spoke about ego deaths and near-death experiences, and Kris told me about the inspiration for one of his new tracks, which happened to be one of said ‘I think this is it’ moments. We both spoke and laughed about our all too close brushes with potential insanity and the emotions that came with it. He showed me the song ‘Hospital Job’, and I instantly fell in love with its spooky looping echoing sample, and its heavy bass hits. I decided that if I was going to work on a track it would be this one.
I then set about using a borrowed iPad Pro with the new Lidar 3D scanner, capturing most events of my life in the last year, any interesting locations, happy moments, a nice tree here or there, i captured it all. I loved the way you could endlessly reexplore and rediscover these 3D models. Not just in the way you can with google images or old photos and videos, but that you can actually discover new things, new elements, new items of interest. I found the whole experience akin to a lucid dream or the process of remembering a memory. I can always remember what people look like, but the moment I try to imagine someone's face, to see it in my mind's eye, it falls apart. Again, this was matched in these 3D scans, with the postures, colours, shapes of people intact, but their faces often abstract blocky unrecognisable objects.
I spent many evenings and weeks exploring these digital memories, replaying them over and over, choosing the most interesting and most compelling. Ones that I felt meant something, to myself and to the song. The kind of memories your mind might flutter back to upon flirting with death, the kind of flashback moments you see in movies, beautiful serene moments with family and loved ones, interjected with odd bits, like trees and bridges, that I cant quite remember where or when I saw them, or why on earth I would be remembering them. This is often the way my brain behaves in a good dream. I think this is what this music video is. A semi-lucid ride through remixed, retold and reinterpreted memories.
A huge thank you to Feline Hjermind, without whom I wouldn't have got anywhere near completing this project, nor would it have reached the quality and finish that it did thanks to her incredible editing skills and contributions to the project.
Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1A1sFtoJ8eM
With: Feline Hyermind (editor) https://www.instagram.com/feline.hjermind/
