This week’s video is “Livin’ On The B Side” by Kelly Boesch: strange surreal puppets, willowy AI-made music, and a visual world that feels like a high-end fever dream.
Boesch is a fascinating figure. She spent 17 years at IMAX, has a background in painting, design and film editing, and now uses generative tools to create AI-led visual art and music. Not by typing one prompt and walking away, either. Her work is built through concept, image-making, animation, sound and edit. The technology expands the canvas. The taste remains human.
And it made me think.
I had Kelly’s music playing while I worked on Wednesday evening. For about 15 minutes, I was completely inside it. It is lush, precise and beautifully constructed.
Then, quite involuntarily, I had to turn it off.
It began to feel like I’d eaten too much cake. Too rich. Too perfectly engineered. The notes, the construction, the repeated arrival at exactly the right kind of atmospheric fullness. My brain wanted something less seamless, less confectioned, more varied. Still electronic. Still background. Just a little more humanly uneven.
That is not a criticism of Kelly’s work. It is the interesting bit.
AI is becoming extraordinarily good at creating polished versions of a recognisable style. Sometimes, perhaps, too good. Perfection has a texture. And after a while, we can feel it.
But the important point is not whether every AI-created song or film lands perfectly. It is that people like Kelly can now make work that previously required a studio, a crew, a budget and somebody else’s permission. That is the real creative shift: AI is democratising the ability to turn a fully formed idea into something we can see, hear and feel.
And “Livin’ On The B Side” is certainly something you feel. Even if you may want to mix it up with something a bit more human-side.