AI Music Video | Ethnographic Study
Hackney in the 90s was squat raves, canal bops with ladders, the streets, the smell... It was a pre-digital melting pot where experience lived only in words, never images. Omar took YouTube comments under those rare tracks and used them as collective memory, prompting films directly from strangers' recollections. The result: memories rendered as they are remembered, not as they were photographed: blurry, folded, fused. Begun May 2025, the project pioneered story-to-prompt, now a core methodology inside Brainclub 5000, where written memory becomes moving image.
76% of YouTube viewers stay for the comments — and under rare tracks from the 1990s, an entire generation has turned the comment section into a shared social space, a place to post memories from an era that was barely documented. The Crackney series makes memories reappear from the comments, collating and collecting them as a share memories.