Robots rave in The Chemical Brothers’ new “Free Yourself” video: Watch
Must artificial intelligence always be something we fear? That’s what electronic music duo The Chemical Brothers explore in their new music video for “Free Yourself”.
Directed by Dom&Nic, with the help of production company Outsider and creation studio The Mill, the futuristic clip follows a group of suddenly sentient robots as they giddily throw a dance party inside a factory. A project eight months in the making, the visual imagines a world in which the relationships between humans and AI don’t have to be so strained and doomed.
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Watch below.
Dom&Nic, who’ve previously worked on the Chemical Brothers’ “Wide Open” and “Hey Boy Hey Girl”, talked further about the video’s concept in a press statement:
“Why would artificial intelligence behave any different to humans discovering music and dance for the first time?
We’ve all seen humans dancing brilliantly like robots, we’ve also seen robots dancing brilliantly like robots, but you’ve never seen robots dancing badly like humans. That’s new…
The Chemical Brothers’ music allows people to get out of their box at a gig or listening to the record – it’s a moment of frenzied abandonment to the music. We wanted to capture that feeling in the idea of an oppressed robot workforce suddenly abandoning themselves to music and fun. It’s robots having fun, robots being silly and robots raving!
It’s a black comedy and an observation or conversation about the possible future relationship between robots, artificial intelligence and humans. Maybe we don’t have anything to be scared of, why do we think the worst about AI and humanity?”
The Chemical Brothers’ last full-length, Born in the Echoes, came out back in 2015.
