“Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas”
Once again, creating and commenting on my own work here with you is a genuinely interesting exercise, and once again we’re jumping straight back into the symbols of vanitas: the flower fading, virtually, and the skeleton that “dances” and reacts to sound.
An old friend, in a rose and a skeleton
To my ears, the lyrics here describe a relationship where the two people involved can’t live together anymore, and a certain faith in karma alongside that. That’s what made me pull the rose and the skeleton back out of the video for “Don’t Say Goodbye.” The rose, for me, naturally embodies the idea of the old friend; the skeleton embodies our present and our future. And as I say that out loud, I notice, again, how much it’s the Little Prince who comes back into my head. My brain associates directly with that old friend and with the kind of relationship the lyrics describe.
A dancing skeleton, and Monkey Island 2
Just reading back the words “the dancing skeleton,” another reference loops in my mind: Monkey Island 2. I played that game when I was six or seven years old.
Spoiler alert: there’s an ending scene where Guybrush finds his parents, and in my memory, they suddenly turn into skeletons and dance. That scene has been imprinted in my head for more than thirty years. I looked it up on YouTube again while working on this, and I was genuinely shocked, first, that I’d forgotten it was built around an actual song, “The Bone Song,” and second, by the atmosphere itself: a bright red, almost monochrome frame if you ignore Guybrush. That’s exactly the vibe I wanted for this video.
Synaesthesia, or just memory?
This lets me get into a subject I keep circling: synaesthesia, and imagination. The first time I listened to this song, I remember visualizing flashes of light on the sounds, and a feeling of being crushed, of depressurizing, on certain sounds.
Julien asked me the question directly: “Are you a synesthete?” I can’t really answer it. I can’t tell whether it’s something learned, from years of working sound against image, whether that even counts as synaesthesia (because to me it just feels like my normal way of thinking), or whether it’s simply imagination. What I mean is that at almost 40, I’m realizing it isn’t just a simple association of sound and color. There are memories in there too, cultural references, immediately tied to words, expressions, sounds, more or less consciously.
What’s left, in the age of AI
To close this one out: in this AI era, I keep being pushed to ask myself what actually remains of my technical know-how, my diplomas, my years of professional experience. And I keep landing on the same answer: it’s precisely my experience, my social background, the cultural references of my own generation that make me create what I create.
That’s it for this special episode, more about the references behind the work than the technique or the video itself.
Spotify Canvas loop created from this visualizer
See you next week for “Godspeed,” a word that obsesses me, since I forget its exact definition and how to use it in English every single time. The full series lives on the N U I T _ Alt Real case study, and the finished visualizer for this track is up on Instagram.
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