With the Emergence project, I set out to work with different video artists for each chapter of the story, so that it could be varied and stay fresh throughout a 90 minute live show, while still following a single narrative.
For the music video for Trust, I found an amazing artist called RC Aksun who specialised in comic-style animations full of hidden meaning and political messages - this seemed fitting for the part of the story where humans had arrived and had started to establish complex societal structures.
The video brief was to focus on the emergence of altruism, and Cenk came up with the interesting idea of transposing this from a pre-human evolutionary process, to a future emergence of altruism in robots. This opened the door for some additional scorched world and warring political system narratives, which fit in well with the generally darker themes in the other videos upon the arrival of complex human society. I'm not a pessimist though, things do eventually get better in the overall Emergence story, it just happens when humans and society as we know it have transitioned to a new state.
Cenk really went to town on the animation work and detailing on this, I have to say a massive thank you to him for the time he put in, which is pretty obvious watching the video, which has been hand-crafted from the bottom up. It's very different to all the other videos in Emergence, in that it's a more traditional self-contained story than the others, so I hope it will appeal to those of you who aren't so into the more abstracted parts of the project.
We made an interactive companion guide to allow readers to have a deeper look into all the themes, music and videos in the Emergence project - enjoy a deeper read here.