When She's Gone

"When She's Gone" is a series of 8 1/1s that offers a glimpse into a vision of love and loss. Jae Shim captured Mariana Makwaia on the iconic Santa Monica beach on January 16th, 2023 following a wave of rainstorms in Super 8 film, a format capable of evoking a time and place that feels both familiar and distant. Mari provided the vocals and engineered the sound through a unique Ableton workflow, feeding digital stems from Splice into AI music platform AIVA and sampling the generated results back into the production, to compose a rich musical score that blends haunting analog vocals with digital variations. "When She's Gone" explores the delicate interplay between analog, digital, and AI realms, inviting the spectator to examine the increasingly blurry line between human and machine creativity.