Last night prolific musician Chris McKay debuted the 12-minute epic music video for “The Price of a Wish,” under his alter-ego Mindfield, at the Thurtine Collective’s first community-based art party. Today he shares the trippy saga online ahead of the album’s full release tomorrow.
When Flagpole interviewed McKay about The Price of a Wish and newly-formed Thurtine Collective (“Chris McKay Discusses AI in Music and Artistic Expressions of Trauma,” Sept. 3), much of the conversation was an explanation of how he turned to generative AI to create his latest projects after medical issues left him unable to create in the traditional sense. Regardless of what side of the AI conversation you’re on, “The Price of a Wish” music video is undoubtedly the result of McKay’s creative mind and is astonishingly detailed in a personal sense rather than sweeping machine generalizations.
“People’s negative reaction to the tools that I used to make [‘The Other Side of the Question’] made me try to show harder that it’s me, period. So this video, I’m actually in it repeatedly, but the thing that I think is hysterical about it is I’ve made AI versions of myself, mixed them in with real versions of myself, and I defy you to know the difference,” says McKay. “There are photographs I’ve taken that are animated… I’m willing to bet that people are going to see the eclipse photo and think it’s AI, or there’s a photo that I took up in North Georgia of a waterfall with three rainbows over it, and I animated it in such a way so that it’s three dimensional and moves so you’re kind of like looking at it from different angles. That’s a real photo. So, I want to blur those lines.”
Not only does McKay bring himself into this blended world, but he’s also used photos of him as a child and his wife, and fellow artist, Manda McKay. Seeing the real, the altered and the entirely fabricated melt in and out of each other effectively begs you to think about the processes at work—and even more so the empathetic element of someone driven to create still having a means despite traditional obstacles.
“There’s a scene in this video near the end where there’s an animated version of Manda, and it’s a scene in an office. Then it zooms to the window, and the window was my childhood bedroom. It’s the view from my childhood bedroom to my backyard going up, and the pecan tree that I played in as a kid. Then that goes up and turns into the cables on the Golden Gate Bridge. That’s a photo that I took. That’s one of my favorite things that I’ve ever done, and it’s coming out of the pecan tree and going up into the sky. So, every single thing is directly from my life,” says McKay.
“It’s deeply personal, and that’s where I can get self conscious about this, simply because if you’re making fun of that part of the video, you’re making fun of the seven-year-old kid in me.”
As AI grows and becomes increasingly prevalent in the music industry, the lines between the “good” and “bad” camps of thinking have started to break down. It’s undeniable that we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of this technology and its impact.
Like what you just read? Support Flagpole by making a donation today. Every dollar you give helps fund our ongoing mission to provide Athens with quality, independent journalism.
