CEL

We were invited by CEL Studio to collaborate on their ongoing world-building series, Foundations, with a video piece responding to a collaborative speculative fiction text by DeForrest Brown Jr. and CEL, devised through a number of creative round tables initiated by CEL as part of their artist residency. The text featured an accompanying soundtrack by DeForrest Brown Jr.

We responded to this by thinking about sound as a technology: a carrier of ancestral knowledge, creativity, and political consciousness. In this world, dreams are not escapes — they are active spaces where futures are rehearsed and memories circulate across generations.

The film moves between two temporal worlds:

2070, imagined through AI-generated domes whose glitches mirror the instability of future visions; and the 2010s, drawn from archival footage of South African sonic and creative cultures — nightlife, dance floors, lofi tools, and taxi sound systems.

We used AI as a speculative tool — a space that feels neither fully real nor fully imaginary. We built our own matte paintings and style frames from personal archives and references, filtered them through AI systems, and translated them into moving images before editing the final piece to DeForrest Brown Jr.’s soundtrack.

The result is a dreamlike collage where sound, memory, and speculation weave together — imagining futures that remain slippery, unresolved, and still in formation.

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