NIM SHAPIRA | Creative Director

BJBT

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ORACLE’s AI Eurovision SONG: Blue Jeans & Bloody Tears

2020 WEBBY HONOREE ART & EXPERIMENTAL

2019 LOVIE AWARDS WINNER - (the European “Webby” Awards):
Gold in Internet Video: Weird & Experimental.
Bronze in Internet Video: Viral Video.

Digital Media Festivals - official selection:
35th Haifa International Film Festival
The Wrong Biennale 2020
NeurIPS Creativity Workshop

In May 2019, Tel Aviv hosted the 64th Eurovision song contest for the 4th time. As all of Europe (together with Israel and Australia) waited for this year’s oh-so-glamorous and famously kitschy song contest, a group of artists, musicians and programmers have asked themselves is there a special DNA for a Eurovision song? What makes it a hit or a flop? What makes it memorable? And What makes it a winner? We decided to explore human creativity through technological innovation by creating an Artificial Intelligence Eurovision song that celebrates this melodramatic & campy song competition. 

The project team fed hundreds of Eurovision songs – melodies and lyrics – into a neuron network. Then, algorithms produced thousands of new tunes and lines of verse, from which a few musical units - a chorus, a verse and a c-part were carefully selected and “welded” into a song. The result - a Eurovision song that comprised entirely of material written and composed by Artificial Intelligence. Titled "Blue Jeans & Bloody Tears", the song is a hilarious, weird and catchy duet on disillusioned love between man and machine. For the “man” role we casted none other than legendary singer Izhar Cohen - Israel's first Eurovision winner (1978) and to musically produce it we reached out to Avshalom Ariel - who co-produced Israel’s most recent Eurovision win (“Toy”, 2018). 

Within hours and without any paid promotion the video reached dozens of global and local media outlets celebrating our song; From podcasts and radio stations playing it, to TV stations, magazines and newspapers loving it - or loving to hate it. Reddit users debated their favorite line in countless threads, Youtubers covered the song, fans wrote down the chords progression and most of all people analyze the song lyrics looking for hidden meanings. Not only were the accolades tremendos, the song surpassed official Eurovision entries from countries like

Austria, Albania, Belarus, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Hungry, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, and the the United Kingdom making us unilaterally declare our song as the true winner of the 2019 competition. Robots 1, Humans 0.

“Camp taste is above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation - not judgement. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy”
(-) Susan Suntag, 1964

CREDITS:
Concept and Lead creative direction by Nimrod (Nim) Shapira Construction and Production by Allenby Concept House
Co-produced by Nimrod (Nim) Shapira
Song Curation by Amir Shoenfeld
Song Production by Avshalom Ariel
Additional song curation by Ben Scheflan, Nim Shapira, Avshalom Ariel and Eran Hadas

Music video directed by Karni and Saul @ Sulkybunny
Title design by Adam Blufarb
Illustrations by Eliran Bichman

Lyrics generation by Eran Hadas
AI and ML Team: Oracle Innovation and Oracle Cloud Asaf Sobol - Senior Business Development leader, Oracle Israel Andy Welch - Innovation engineer, Lead data scientist, Oracle UK Asaf Lev - Senior Innovation engineer, Oracle UK, Ireland & Israel David Cottee - Senior Director of Innovation, Oracle UK, Ireland & Israel

Midi conversion and Music consultation by Micha Gilad
Additional Midi conversion by Ann Streichman

Legal consultancy: Attorneys Sally Gillis and Shirley Gal from Eitan, Mehulal, Sadot.