One of the standout videos of Visions of 2034, a new audio-visual exhibition from film-maker Romain Gavras and musician Benoit Heitz (AKA Surkin), is a blackly comic twist on conspiracy theory culture. In God Hates Space, some young people have defected to the woods somewhere in middle America due to their fringe beliefs, chiefly the idea that the Earth is actually hollow: trenchant stuff in an age when twentysomethings are becoming off-grid libertarian homesteaders, and popular influencers claim that Kendrick Lamar sent “demons through the TV screen” during his Super Bowl half-time performance.
But here’s the rub: God Hates Space, with its creepy-crazy images of fascism and crackpot conspiracy, was made more than six years ago in Ukraine, before the war. Its aesthetic – which Surkin describes as a combination of “confederate” and “Monster energy drink” – is prescient, not referential. “We shoot these videos and sometimes it takes a while for them to get released,” Surkin says. “The future is catching up with us. It gets dumber way quicker than before!”
God Hates Space features the vocals of singer-rapper 070 Shake, who also appears on Neo Surf, a track set to a stunning clip set in a marble quarry. Neo Surf’s vision of young people messing around in striking, alien environments chimes with their view of the future, says Gavras. “If we talk about the future and make a robot, in five years that robot is going to be obsolete. If you make it about kids being kids in the future, that’s timeless. The shit kids do is probably the same shit they’ll be doing in 10 years.”
God Hates Space is a great introduction to the world of Gener8ion, Gavras and Surkin’s longrunning project, which explores ridiculous images of a potentially dark future. Gavras is known as one of the greatest music video directors of his generation, having helmed iconic clips for Justice’s Stress, Jamie xx’s Gosh and MIA’s Born Free and Bad Girls (he also got a measure of tabloid fame by being a boyfriend of Dua Lipa). Surkin has released a handful of cult-favourite film scores and remixes, for mid-00s legends such as Boys Noize, DJ Mehdi and Klaxons.
They’ve been friends “for ever”, says Gavras, and Gener8ion has always been bubbling in the background. “To find budgets to make videos that are ambitious is very difficult,” says Gavras. “Surkin would have a track. We’d talk about the visuals, then find money by me whoring myself out and making a commercial. Piece by piece, over the last eight years, we started building this idea of what the near future is.”
Visions of 2034 coincides with the release of Love & Tears, Gener8ion’s debut album. It includes new videos – one stars Charlize Theron – as well as new edits of Gosh and Born Free. One of the most arresting works in the exhibition is Storm, a music video featuring the superstar Swedish rapper Yung Lean, set in a Leeds boys’ school in 2034 where Lean plays a sort of bullying warrior pupil presiding over his semi-feral charges. It went viral on social media earlier this year, thanks in part to Damien Jalet’s astonishing choreography of school-uniformed male dancers.
Gavras says it’s “entertaining to watch videos on the big screen”, as at Visions of 2034, but he doesn’t mind how Storm’s most striking moments were clipped and reshared on social media. “We put out a long-ass video where the punchline comes at minute four” – no spoilers – “and then the internet does its thing and recuts it.”
The infamous clip for MIA’s Born Free – which shows redheads being pulled from their homes and killed en masse, in Gavras and MIA’s commentary on viral videos of the Tamil genocide – is one of the older works in Visions of 2034, because Gavras feels its themes hew closely to Gener8ion’s pet topics. “What was interesting about Born Free,” he says, “is that we got banned from YouTube for a fiction video, but it was the same time when Saddam Hussein got hanged, and that was not banned on YouTube. It’s always interesting: the dialogue between what is shocking, what is not.”
Of course, Gener8ion is still a magnet for controversy. The clip for Storm was embraced by the American right for its depiction of hordes of young, mostly white, men. In France, the right reviled it because of a shot where Lean draws a penis on a map right where France is. “I often get hate from both ends of the spectrum politically, and sometimes love, and this video got love from both ends of the spectrum, which is rare. But in France, they were like, ‘How the fuck is this Swedish fucking rapper drawing a penis on France?’” Gavras laughs, bemused. “I thought it was funny!”