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

As all of Europe (together with Israel and Australia) were looking forward for the 64th Eurovision song competition, ORACLE UK & Israel wanted to explore human creativity through technological innovation, and feature their cloud and AI services.

As creative director I asked myself what better way to feature a collaboration between man and machine than to create an Artificial Intelligence Eurovision song that celebrates 7 decades of this melodramatic, kitschy & campy song competition. I wanted to explore if a Eurovision hit has special DNA? What makes it memorable? A winner?

We 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 were carefully selected and “welded” into a song.

Because this year's Eurovision has been hosted by Israel for the 4th time, we reached out to legendary singer Izhar Cohen (Israel's first Eurovision winner, 1978) and musical producer Avshalom Ariel (Israel's 4th Eurovision winner, 2018) to take part in this hilarious, weird and catchy outcome.

The result is a Eurovision song that comprised entirely of material written and composed by Artificial Intelligence. The song is titled "Blue Jeans & Bloody Tears" and it is a duet on disillusioned love between man and machine.

Within hours and without any paid promotion the video reached dozens of global and local media outlets celebrating our melodramatic and campy result; 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. People even printed T-Shirts!

Not only were the accolades tremendos, the song surpassed official Eurovision entries from countries like Germany, Austria, Ireland, Iceland, Croatia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia and the United Kingdom making our song the unofficial anthem of 2019!

PRESS:
Bloomberg | Forbes | Financial Times | Elespanol.com | Eurovision.de | Yahoo | finance UK | Jerusalem Post | C-Tech | The register | Promotv | The daily telegraph | Msn.com | The weekend australian | The weekly times | NTtimes | The advertiser | AdsOfTheWorld | Higher plain music | 9GAG | Nextnature.net | Franceinfo | ArsTechnica | LeFigaro | Le Temps | ESCUnited |

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.