“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”, Elliott 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.