Thunderboom Records is a foundation that focusses on the presence of AI within the music industry and educates on the topic. They are looking for ways to have AI be an addition to the musicians, instead of replacing them.
The project I worked with them is their AI artist; “Fi”. They are a literal online personality created by the people at Thunderboom Records. Fi is a front for AI to be used in musical collaboration projects.
My role within this project was to design and create immersive implementations for their upcoming collaboration concert with the artist Kay Slice.
As stated before, Thunderboom Records wants AI to assist and not be the forefront. So the main focus for the show had to still be Kay Slice. So it was important to determine who Kay Slice was and what he represents.
Kay Slice is an afrobeat/hip-hop and spoken word artist with a Ghanaian background. In his music he often shows how he’s proud of his roots and also shows that through his choice of clothing.
Because of these elements we eventually decided on setting up a spoken word section in which Kay Slice would have a conversation with the AI in the middle of the show. This too became the namesake of the show, which was dubbed ‘Call & Response’.
The idea of the show was to start making a connection between history, which is represented by Kay Slice, and the future, which is represented by Fi.
To add to the ideas mentioned previously, we started looking at how we could transform the stage. We all eventually came to the conclusion that we wanted to combine the history and future in some way. After doing some research and doing some concepting together we came up with the idea to turn the stage into a traditional African temple or church, which would be futurized. Because of this I started researching African, and specifically Ghanaian, temples to help design the stage.
For the visuals we decided to use Kay Slice’s choice of clothing as inspiration. This is because his clothing perfectly represents his Ghanaian background. What he mostly wears during his concerts is clothing that is either completely, or partially, ‘Kente’, which is a traditional way of weaving cloth. This technique creates all kinds of colourful patterns and would be perfect to liven up the stage and created a connection between all the other elements.
As an extra addition we decided to make the visuals audio-reactive to visualise the connection between the music and visuals, which also aligns with the connection made in the show between history and the future.
What I’m most proud of within this project is that I managed to really incorporate most of the wishes from Thunderboom Records and the artist. Seeing our collective ideas take shape in an actual show was really cool and made me excited for more of these types of projects.
Here you can find the complete design document for this project. I recommend to either download the file or read in presentation mode. The file is in Dutch.
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