"Head in the Clouds"
Winner of the Skyframe Award 2026
Acrylic painting stop motion animation
Hosted by The Story Engineers, I was selected as one of five finalists to compete in the second annual Skyframe Awards. Commissioning emerging artists to create a work in response to a prompt, the competition provides a unique platform to showcase student creativity in the heart of London on a large scale to the public, press, and professional art world.
In response to this year's theme "Light and Depth: Vanishing and Appearing," I decided to play with double meaning to invite viewers to look for shapes in the clouds and contemplate uploading our consciousness "into the cloud." With the rise of generative AI and AI slop in general, I responded with a vanishing of the real and an appearing of the uncanny. As commuters look up at "the sky," I intended for them to find something a little bit different with each frame.
Visual:
For the visual, I wanted to create something tactile and handmade for the big screen, so I used painting in stop motion animation. Below you can find a detailed breakdown of each phase/element:
00:00-00:20: In response to the prompt's starting frame "reveal," I use black globs of paint to form a spiral that I spread with a palette knife to create a vortex effect.
00:20-00:42: Green dots slowly start radiating outwards before materializing as binary code, representing the moment of "uploading into the cloud."
00:43-00:56: Appearance of light blue sky with non-distinct clouds.
00:57-01:09: Sunrise and the construction/deconstruction of the first head in the clouds. For this real face, I referenced the likeness of a Palestinian friend I met while traveling. This representation intentionally opposes the genocide of Palestinians and accelerated epistemicide of non-Western ways of knowing.
01:10-1:18: Three birds fly across the sky before they are "consumed" by an emerging AI slop bird cloud in the sky. In the early days of people reckoning with the deterioration of reality on the Internet, I saw a post exemplifying that if you Google searched "baby peacock," half of the images would be AI-generated. As such, I referenced one of these images to paint the cloud AI baby peacock (rather than printing this element) to represent the challenges of being able to distinguish between real/fake.
01:19-01:23: The appearance of a building from my travels in Newcastle. My friend pointed out the prominent white streaks on the building as nests and markings of bird shit, which I thought was an interesting visual to include as a moment of nature adapting and "reclaiming" human landscape disruptions.
01:24-01:26: The insertion of the printed out AI-generated head mimics the infiltration of AI into the image ecosystem: disturbing and unusual.
01:27-01:40: Sunset on the current era of the image information landscape as we know it, with paint overtaking the printed out AI-generated slop. The animation ends with a bird on the Newcastle building flying across the screen.
Sound:
I collaborated with Ryan Pierre for the soundtrack, who combined a mixture of techniques such as recording, interpreting, coding, and prompting Claude to respond to the color density on screen and translate those values into instrumentals. We first put our brains together to align on the creative concept to create an immersive experience in which the valley between the synthetic and the real in the age of AI becomes increasingly shallow.
Key moments include the recorded "Upload Complete" to appear with the printed out head, the field recordings of bird calls blending and becoming distorted with synthetic bird sounds, and typewriter sounds to pair with the beginning binary code. At the end, I layered some a recording I took of segulls in Milton Keynes to represent nature's reclamation.
Ryan added his own personal flair in interpreting specific moments, such as the shift in tone from melancholic to hopeful with the shift in color from black to the blue sky. One he created the baseline piece, he used Claude to generate a python script which could interpret the amount of each color on screen and translate it into MIDI data.
The end result is a piece that attempts to capture the emotions and feelings of the piece, while also reacting to the content of the video itself in real time, something like a synthetic organism.