Right: a 2016 CNN-style transfer
by Pindar Van Amen with Robert
Del Naja and Antony Micallef
nated by the AI’s relentless attempts to
generate or perfect images, responses
or behaviours – trying, failing and
repeating without any flashes of temper
or sullen degrading of performance.
“I thought the tension between
competing AIs or the tension between
human and AI could be equally creative,”
he says. “To work in a world where movie
trailers are created by AI, we needed to
be creating the algorithms ourselves
- employing technology rather than
have it make us unemployed.” The
question was: could AI help him create
something entirely new? Could AI
become his collaborator and muse?
Massive Attack’s studio stretches
across two floors of a building on an
industrial estate near Bristol Temple
Meads railway station. The ground
floor has music studios and a virtual
reality studio equipped with motion
capture cameras. The upper floor
has an assembly line of robotic arms
alongside old Wurlitzer organs.
Del Naja is slim, unshaven, with a
loose mass of hair that looks like he’s
growing out a crop. Languid and mellow,
he smiles a lot, especially when talking
about robots and AI. He says it feels like
a natural extension to the way he’s been
creating art ever since he was a teenage
graffiti artist working with spray cans
and chopped-up stencils on the streets
of Bristol back in the 1980s.
Del Naja was born in St Andrews,
a Victorian suburb nestling next to
Bristol’s culturally diverse neigh-
bourhood of St Pauls, where the riots of
the early 80s meant that there was still
a measure of tension between the police
and the community. Del Naja wasn’t
a troublemaker, but he wasn’t hugely
academic, either. “I enjoyed art more
than anything,” he remembers. “I was
obsessed with comics, so I used to draw
images of Spider-Man, superheroes
and villains all over my exercise books.”
In the 80s he fell in love with the
burgeoning street art/graffiti scene
in New York. One night in 1983 – after
leaving school with one art A-level – he
went out with a stencil of a breakdancer
and started painting walls himself.
Nothing that he created survived for
24 hours. “That made me think of art
as ephemeral – when you’ve done
something, you move on, and then it’s
gone,” Del Naja muses.
He started hanging around in the
Dug Out, a tiny basement bar playing
an eclectic mix of dub reggae, punk,
soul, jazz and early hip hop, providing a
magnet for the late-night party crowd.
There he got to know the Wild Bunch,
key players in Bristol’s lively sound
system scene, where unlicensed
parties were held in borrowed spaces.
This renegade approach meant the
systems had to be infinitely adaptable- with every member able to fulfil the
roles of selecter (who picked the right
records to keep everyone dancing),
mixer (who put the records on and mixed
the sound live), DJ (who fulfilled the role
of MC, rapping or singing new lyrics over
instrumentals), and box man (in charge
of setting up and maintaining the huge
speakers and bass bins).
The Wild Bunch recruited Del Naja
to spread the outfit’s name using his
graffiti skills, as well as decorating
venues, selling beer out of the boot
of a car, crewing the speaker stack,
and performing as an MC, often all of
these on the same night.
“Everyone wanted the volume turned
up to the top,” Del Naja gives a quiet
smile. “You had to be the loudest.
Carnival day outside Grant’s house on
Campbell Street, there would be a whole
bunch of sound systems at the end
of each road, so you had to make sure
yours was the loudest. You had to push
all the technology to its limit.”
In 1986, the Wild Bunch signed to a
major label, releasing a few singles and
an album before producer Nellee Hooper
left to join rival London sound system
Soul II Soul (eventually producing and
remixing for artists including Madonna
and Björk), and Miles Johnson – DJ
Milo – moved to New York. Besides Del
Naja, the two remaining members were
Andrew “Mushroom” Vowles, a hip-hop