Brain Melt is an experimental cinema created by new media artist Komal Goswami through the utilization of 6K video captured by a RED Raven digital camera, AI animations created via Deforum Stable Diffusion, a 3D model sculpted via Mudbox, retopologized in Maya, textured in Mari, lit and animated via Maya, and rendered using V-Ray, and mixed royalty-free sounds. Select sequences were composited via Nuke and compiled with the remainder of the layered AI animation-RED footage-3D art visuals and sound via Premiere Pro. Organic forms in various hues and vibrancy create a visually chaotic yet restrained composition. A lifeless, four-eyed brown and green 3D model serves as the protagonist of this piece. Fragments of letters, clusters of circles, and ovular shapes layered with motifs of the liminal location the character occupies are in most sequences. Dramatic yet euphoric clips of royalty-free sounds are compiled with the overall footage to create a transcending atmosphere. Goswami created Brain Melt in March 2023.

In this work, Hyde & Hyde, the premier character of The Hyphenverse, which is Goswami's 3D character-based world that is deemed the "real-reel world" away from the "real world" or the hyphen between the two worlds, is transcending into the afterlife after his chapters of life have concluded. Serving as an agent of emotional and mental growth, the way Hyde emotionally and intellectually operates is active through the genre-bending sound design and the evergoing motion created through the AI animations layered with just the 3D animated sequences and along with the composited 3D animation-RED footage sequences in this transcending piece. Held in suspense and eventually becoming more overwhelmed by his emotions and thoughts, Hyde convulses and explodes. Brain Melt conveys a transition of symbolic cleansing, an ascension, or catharsis.

Media and its genre serve as a factor in how one can experience affect. This notion applies to all media forms, such as animations, films, movies, music, fine art, etc. Goswami's use of nonhuman materials for Brain Melt, or new media art materials such as 3D art, AI art, video art, and sound art, allows one to consider how capable new media art is in inducing affect through a cyclical use of "the non human" by "the human" for "the human." This repetitive use persists because "the human" still strives to authentically experience emotion while being a part of an increasingly digitally assimilating or machine-dependent world. Cultivated through a hyphenated relationship between aspects of identities and technologies, one can observe that being human is detachable yet attachable. Stemming from Goswami's artistic notion of "living on a hyphen" between the digital and the physical worlds, emerging practices of new media art, such as AI animations as seen in Brain Melt, effectively demonstrate how the use of the non human can impact how subverted affect can be in art perceived by the human.

Link to Brain Melt: https://youtu.be/jX_sRRp-1BM. MOV is available upon request via a WeTransfer link.