A SMALL ACT OF COURAGE

an award-winning short- Live Performance Segment from Dylan Brody

2021. Brody comes out of Covid-induced isolation. He hits the ground running with a gig a STONE CHURCH with audio-support from Oak Honest Records. He brought out his guitar hesitantly, but the segment in which he did so brought the house down. He had intended it to hold the safe spot, nested between tried, tested spoken word bits that he knew would play. He said, “I treated it like the feature act in a three-act night-club. Lowered expectations. These days the guitar shows are my favorite ones. Nesting stories in songs has become almost second nature,” Brody says. “This first time, though, was genuinely an act of courage. The awards you guys brought in with the video changed the way I saw my own work.”

 

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the dylan brody experiments

For art’s sake!

Poetry Against the End of the World brings Mr. Brody’s work as an outsider artist in Los Angeles to a new level. It will be released on the festival and competitions circuit early in 2023

Mr. Brody used the audio from the performance at what he describes as “one of the best shows he’s ever gotten to do,” opening for David Sedaris at the Valley Performing Arts Center. He set the story, told in front of an audience of about 1500 people, against a backdrop of wonderful images created in collaboration with Dall-E, the AI artist.

Mr. Brody took his guitar and a looping pedal on stage with him in Spring of 2022. This short film has won a great many awards including, much to Mr. Brody’s delight, a couple for Best Original Music. We did this in collaboration with Oak Honest Records

This segment from part two of POETRY AGAINST THE END OF THE WORLD consists of the poem Pandemic, written in 2014 long before Covid-19 hit the world.

Images were created by an AI utilizing ONLY the lines of the poem with no additional prompting.

This experimental segment as well as others in the full film, explore and examine the boundaries of AI's ability to imagine.

Says Mr. Brody, "If AI is learning from all that it has access to, let us give it access to high art. Let us fill the burgeoning child-mind of Electronicus (likely predecessor of Quanticus) with optimism and imagery, with problems to solve and solutions to improve. While others make porn, create disinformation campaigns, or find new methods for profiteering, perhaps we can imbue in the coming artificial intellect a sense of wonder, of hope, the spirit of an artist. AI represents the cutting edge of the human exploration of consciousness and how it works. If we as a species act as gods, I want to be at the forefront of giving our creation a soul, curiosity, empathy and all the things we think of as 'humanity,' when we speak of it as a concept rather than a scourge upon a once-green planet."