Squarepusher's Terminal Slam Video Blends AR and AI in Dystopian Tokyo

On January 31, 2020, Squarepusher (Tom Jenkinson) released his first album in five years, Be Up a Hello, on Warp Records. The album was made with the same equipment as his early work, evoking the acid, frenetic sounds of early 1990s British electronic music associated with Aphex Twin, The Prodigy, and Orbital. The third single, Terminal Slam, features a music video directed by Daito Manabe, founder of Rhizomatiks, who will create visuals for the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics on July 24. The video uses augmented reality and machine learning to depict a dystopian future where a protagonist wears special glasses that transform billboards and people in Tokyo's Shibuya district, revealing a society immersed in accelerationism and control systems. Manabe stated the video aims to show a near future using existing technologies, expressing a desire to rewrite advertisements as easily as the protagonist does with her device. The video references John Carpenter's film They Live.