Synopsis

The video turns Darkstar's members into data. Close-ups of their faces are scanned by bands of light, then transformed into wireframes, point clouds, anatomical imagery, and glowing gold particles. Brain scans and digital grids interrupt the portraits as the performers seem to dissolve from recognizable human figures into unstable electronic matter. The clinical imagery contrasts with the track's vulnerable vocal, creating a visual meditation on identity, technology, and the uneasy space between biological life and synthetic representation.

Factoids & Trivia

• "Gold" reworks "You Remind Me of Gold," a Human League song originally issued as the B-side of the 1982 single "Mirror Man."

• Darkstar became interested in the Human League track after hearing it played at 33 rpm instead of its original 45 rpm speed. The slower playback helped inspire the heavy, stretched-out character of the cover.

• The video was presented as a digital mixed-media project combining DIY scanning equipment, custom code, and open-source scientific data.

• The band's faces were captured with a home-built 3D structured-light scanner. The process used flickering patterns from a standard office projector to create three-dimensional models.

• The gold-like contagion and particle effects were programmed in C++ with the openFrameworks library. The code was made available as a downloadable processing application.

• Some of the video's anatomical imagery came from the Visible Human Project, a National Library of Medicine dataset based on detailed scans of human cadavers.

• The production combined openFrameworks programming with After Effects and Cinema 4D, bringing together real photography, scanned geometry, glitch effects, and computer-generated particles.

• "Gold" was the lead single from Darkstar's debut album, "North," released through Hyperdub in 2010.