Pitchfork/2020/Interview

===Interviewhttps://pitchfork.com/features/interview/grimes-miss-anthropocene-interview/===
=Grimes Dissects the Visual World of Miss Anthropocene=
From TikTok dancers to anime epic Akira, the pop provocateur maps out the look of her latest album.
by Eric Torres
MARCH 10 2020
On the cover of Grimes’ dystopian concept album Miss Anthropocene, a new god who reigns over the modern world is busy tinkering around on their laptop. Rendered as a muted, black-and-pink interface featuring digital art tools, hyper-realistic dolls, computer code, and “BUY NOW” buttons, the image is meant to evoke the album’s villainous electronic pop music. It also offers a peek into the way Grimes tends to work: Miss Anthropocene’s songs and visuals were crafted using software like Ableton Live, After Effects, and Photoshop—programs in which she’s clocked countless hours perfecting her art. As far as the genesis of the cover’s centerpiece, an in-progress, winged creature, Grimes explains, “I took a selfie in the mirror painting on my boobs, and then just kind of traced over that and made it psychedelic.”
Speaking in a stream of consciousness over the phone from Los Angeles, Grimes reels off the rest of her points of inspiration for Miss Anthropocene’s surreal visions. As she veers from singing the praises of finger-gun-firing TikTok dancers to casually dropping the names of 3D imaging software like Blender and ZBrush, Grimes can be a little bit tough to keep up with. But one thing is clear: She’s not about to run out of ideas anytime soon.
Pitchfork: In the video for “Delete Forever,” you play a queen looking over her crumbling empire. How did that one come together?
Grimes: This was actually one of the hardest, most intensive videos we’ve ever made. My brother Mac and our roommate Neil [Hansen] literally did all the 3-D modeling and built the whole world. It’s based off book four of Akira, which is one of our favorite illustrations. The original idea for the video is it would be a queen in a palace counting her jewels as the world burns around her, kind of like Nero on the violin while the city burns. It’s super loaded imagery. We were also trying to figure out how we can get better at building things in Blender and just making everything on our own, because it’s so expensive to make CGI, and you don’t have full control. So mostly my brother Mac does it. He’s a good artist who I trust, and we have very similar tastes. We can reduce our price point a lot, so we’re trying to be able to do this effectively in-house. It would be sick to create this level in [video game software] Unreal Engine and allow people to enter it eventually.
In the “Violence” video, you’re reading the ancient military text The Art of War in the opening shot. What does that book mean to you?
“Violence” is about the goddess of gaming, so I thought putting The Art of War in that context seemed fun. Even the church we filmed it at is all white, so it was supposed to look like ZBrush as well, like we were in a CG world. It was impossible to execute, so the thesis of the music video kind of fell apart, but it looks like how it was supposed to look.
You worked with dancer Natsuki Miya, who has performed with the likes of Beyoncé and Ariana Grande, on the choreography for the “Violence” video. What was that like?
That was really fun! If I hadn’t gotten knocked up, I would have done it again. [laughs] I randomly hired [Natsuki] five years ago on an audition, but she was always extremely good at improvising. So when we were looking for a choreographer, we thought of her. And she did an awesome job. It was inspired a lot by the TikTok user Cindy. She does this weird, kind of cute gun dancing, where her hand movements are edited with the sounds of guns being cocked. It’s this very arresting style, but it’s extremely TikTok-oriented because it’s all fast motion and sound effects and allusions to video games.
To promote the album, there were also provocative billboards and street art that read “GLOBAL WARMING IS GOOD.” What was your thinking behind those?
I was like, “Well, we could just throw my picture up and be like, ‘buy the album,’ and no one’s gonna give a fuck—or we could treat the city like an art gallery and put up an actual piece of art that isn’t super promotional for the record but maybe it makes people think or makes people talk.” So [conceptual artist] Ryder [Ripps] put together the “GLOBAL WARMING IS GOOD” thing. When I saw it, I was like, “Oh, fuck no, this is a huge mistake.” Then I was like, “Wow, this is so scary that I think we should probably put it up.” The goal was to have less advertising and more public art.
How does your new avatar War Nymph, which was recently featured on the cover of a magazine, play into the album’s concept?
War Nymph is a digital persona. It really is an alternative psyche. As a society we’re going through this weird psychological process of everybody splitting into two identities, their online identity and their real-life identity. Gaming reflects this too—the person I am in games is this other life I have that doesn’t relate to my physical life and having [felt] traumatized from how my online life was manifesting. Then I ended up getting pregnant too, so I was like, “Oh my god, help me get through the album.” So we scanned my body and made a digital self. This thing can become the id, the online psyche of Grimes.
But eventually, in theory, probably five to 10 years from now, you’ll be able to just get an app, take a picture of your face from every angle with your phone, and get a decent 3-D render of yourself. And maybe eventually there will be programs that are more accessible, where you can edit how you look, and then you can make that a playable character in a game. I feel like this Ready Player One future is where we’re headed, so why not start now?
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.Category:InterviewCategory:2020