Synopsis
"Memorium" presents a rapid visual history of computer-generated imagery, moving from stark line animations and early wireframe experiments to increasingly sophisticated attempts at three-dimensional form, motion, human likeness, and emotion. Rather than following a conventional narrative or featuring the band, the video assembles archival demonstrations from laboratories, universities, corporations, and pioneering artists. The progression mirrors the song's themes of memory, obsolescence, and technological change, turning a collection of historic computer images into an audiovisual meditation on how the digital past continues to shape the present.
Factoids & Trivia
- The video was conceived as a visual documentary on the development of CGI, tracing its origins from 1951 through the computer-generated imagery of the early 2010s.
- Its source material encompasses work associated with Bell Labs, the New York Institute of Technology, the University of Utah, and other important early computer-animation centers.
- The selection emphasizes technical milestones including wireframe animation, ray tracing, fractals, morphing, and early attempts to reproduce recognizable human features and emotions.
- The project deliberately focuses on digital experimentation, while largely leaving out related but more analog computer-visual traditions such as Scanimate and John Whitney's early computer-assisted films.
- Midnight Juggernauts connected the video to the concept behind their 2013 album "Uncanny Valley": both explore technology's attempts to approach human likeness while risking an unsettling gap between the artificial and the real.
- The band also felt that the song's nostalgic but distorted perspective suited images of obsolete computer systems and abandoned technological experiments.
- The video was released ahead of "Uncanny Valley," which arrived on July 9, 2013, through the band's Siberia imprint and Record Makers.