Justin Hackney’s futuristic fun fAIr

Roll up, roll up! Feast your eyes on the dazzling Earth computer, experience the magic of the multi-sensory holographic bubble fountain, and marvel at the turn-of-the-century charm of Mad Cow director Justin Hackney’s AI-generated Carnival of the Ages. 

Paired with a retro-sounding voiceover, the whimsical film portrays an imaginary funfair, populated with macabre and uncanny characters, and abundant with opulent yet obscure exhibits that feel simultaneously old-fashioned and futuristic. 

To create the project, Hackney first generated imagery and a style reference by putting descriptive prompts into artificial intelligence programmes DALL_E and Midjourney, then entered them into Runway Gen2 with slightly altered text prompts to generate the video footage.