Director: Derrick Schultz

Bio: Derrick Schultz is a designer and post-AI artist. His artwork connects current technological trends with past scientific theory, experimental film history, and technology’s relationship to climate change. His work has been seen in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and for clients such as Sony and HP. He is currently an adjunct professor at NYU’s ITP program, teaching AI Art and algorithmic filmmaking courses.

Film: Like the cordyceps fungus and their ant hosts, generative machine learning models take control of films of the past to further their own infectious spread.

Know No Now was created in collaboration with Artificial Intelligence and is part of an ongoing project in which I am working with Artificial Intelligence to create absurd educational programming inspired by A.I.s’ (mis)understandings of children’s television shows, emphasizing how human-caused environmental collapse is communicated. For Know No Now I asked A.I. to create two ideal puppets for explaining climate change, one more free-spirited, the other more worried, resulting in Jelly Pop and Perky Jean. I then modeled and animated them with 3D software. For the script, I prompted another A.I. to help write the “songs” and situations, including two puppets being confused by the similar sounding and looking words “know,” “no,” and “now.” Finally, additional animations were created that transform between images in order to make the interstitial scenes, which move the puppets from positions of terror about the unknown future into an acceptance of the long now.