The Fly (2023) by Andrew Norman Wilson

Commissioned by Universal Records for the U2 album Songs of Surrender. Rescored with a performance of Clause DeBussy’s Reverie by Joshua Piper.

In the Air Tonight (2020) by Andrew Norman Wilson

There’s an urban legend about Phil Collins’ inspiration for his 1980 hit “In the Air Tonight,” which I first heard as a teenager while getting high in a friend’s basement. According to the ritual of the legend, the song is played while a narrator tells the story, syncing the infamous analog drum break of the song with the climax of the narrative. In March 2020, from a hillside home that faces the Hollywood sign, I began to dwell on Phil due to an experience he had one night on the Pacific Coast Highway. Driving alongside me was a woman tuned into the same radio frequency, emphatically singing along to “In the Air Tonight.” (Andrew Norman Wilson)

The Unthinkable Bygone (2016) by Andrew Norman Wilson

The Unthinkable Bygone was the first project I developed in collaboration with the animator Vlad Maftei, whose experience includes realistic simulations of vital organs for the healthcare industry as well as the limitless elasticity of a 4D Spongebob Squarepants film. Such overlaps of scientific visualization and popular cinematic technique are a key site for understanding science as a cultural practice that offers information about matter without revealing a consciousness-piercing truth. Together Maftei and I created a 3D model of Baby Sinclair from Jim Henson’s animatronic puppet TV series Dinosaurs (1991–94) and subjected him to varied forms of scientific analysis, including simulation, dissection, reflection and endoscopy. What emerges is an infinite loop in which speculation on an organism’s intelligence, experience and points of view inevitably reveal the influence of cinematic and televisual convention, in an attempt to leave the viewer knowing less than they did at the beginning of the experiment. (Andrew Norman Wilson)

Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: The Old Victrola (2020) by Andrew Norman Wilson

This work uses three different imaging technologies—a photographic lens, photorealistic ray tracing animations, and fractal ray-marching animations—to zoom through three constructed environments. (Andrew Norman Wilson; full program note here)

Ode to Seekers 2012 (2016) by Andrew Norman Wilson

Ode to Seekers 2012 was initially conceived at Rockland Psychiatric Center in Orangeburg NY, which contains the abandoned children’s ward that is navigated through from a mosquito’s point of view. The similarities between human behavior and that of the three computer generated seekers in the video—a mosquito, a syringe and an oil derrick—suggest a sense of camaraderie, but also provoke a fear that, like those digital objects, we may just be a puppet of algorithms or economic networks or genetic coding. (Andrew Norman Wilson)

Impersonator (2021) by Andrew Norman Wilson

A Hollywood Boulevard character impersonator struggles to earn a living from photographs with tourists in its unrecognizable costume and then returns to its LA River encampment to find the police confiscating tents. Without a sense of place or purpose, and a loose grip on reality due to the conspiratorial podcast it consumes, the Impersonator drifts deeper into the fantasy of its character. (Andrew Norman Wilson)

Art Director: Remote Viewing (2023, excerpt) by Andrew Norman Wilson

A live reading of a radio play that offers a glimpse into the the Los Angeles chapter of the artist collective behind Wilson’s Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: Lavender Town Syndrome.

Gray Subviolet (2023) by Andrew Norman Wilson Nightmare Paint (2023) by Andrew Norman Wilson

Commissioned by Warp Records for the Oneohtrix Point Never album Again

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Andrew Norman Wilson is an artist and director based between Europe and America. Festival screenings include Sundance, the New York Film Festival, and Rotterdam. His work is in collections such as the Museum of Modern Art New York, Whitney Museum of American Art and The Centre Pompidou, and he has exhibited at LUMA Arles, MoMA PS1 and the Gwangju and Berlin Biennials. He has taught at UCLA, SAIC and Cooper Union and has lectured at Oxford University, Cambridge University, Harvard University and Yale University. His work has been featured in Artforum, ArtReview, BOMB, Frieze, The New Yorker and Wired and he has published writing in Artforum, The Baffler and the Paris Review. (Photo by Emily Berl)