Drill Baby Drill
2025
Drill Baby Drill (2025) explores the entanglement of technological optimism, ecological collapse, and the aesthetics of power. The film appropriates the structure and melody of Suicide’s 1979 song “Dream Baby Dream”, reimagined with new lyrics as a critical parody of Donald Trump’s populist slogan. The cover transforms the original’s minimalist longing into a confrontational mantra—a reflection on how political figures co-opt the emotional vocabulary of popular culture for ideological ends.
All imagery in the film was generated using AI-based prompt-to-video and prompt-to-image tools, primarily Luma Dream Machine. These systems describe their process as dreaming—a term that mirrors the original song’s title and invites reflection on the role of artificial systems in the production of cultural imagination. The machine dreams, but whose dream is it?
Across three movements, the piece shifts from subtly surreal landscapes to increasingly uncanny representations of environmental collapse. The opening evokes the sensation of drifting through an endless, slightly warped screensaver—hyperreal yet subtly wrong, like a dream of nature filtered through software. It recalls the visual language of default desktop backdrops and operating system wallpapers—Apple’s El Capitan, Mojave, or Microsoft’s rolling green hills—images that have quietly shaped our collective imaginary of natural beauty and wilderness. Beamed into millions of homes through consumer electronics, these frictionless scenes function as ambient ideology: a global, shared hallucination of what nature is supposed to look like. From these dreamlike beginnings, the film gradually fractures—floods, droughts, and burning glaciers emerge as hallucinated symptoms of human intervention. Time-lapsed palms sway to synthetic rhythms, frozen waterfalls glisten like commodities, and collapse seeps quietly into the cracks.
The soundtrack shifts accordingly, mirroring the film’s unfolding narrative. In the first part, the sparse, atmospheric sonic textures of Suicide’s original track accompany landscapes that feel both familiar and strange. These evolve into upbeat pop EDM beats, reflecting the glossy optimism of AI-generated biomes. In the final section, the sound hardens into a stripped-back hard bass anthem, echoing the aesthetics associated with far-right online subcultures and the white supremacist fringe that helped propel Trump’s rise.
But the hallucinated apocalypse is not just subject—it is also process. The energy-intensive demands of generative AI systems rely on precisely the kinds of extractive practices embodied by the phrase Drill Baby Drill, first popularised as a rallying cry for fossil fuel expansion by former Republican Maryland lieutenant governor Michael Steele, and later hijacked by Donald Trump and declared at his inauguration. The work thus loops back on itself: AI dreams of nature, but to power those dreams, it consumes the very resources that accelerate environmental collapse. The machine imagines destruction while feeding on its conditions.
In the final sequence, flames engulfing an Antarctic ice shelf are shown in reverse. The destruction is undone—the machine rewinds. The fire retreats into stillness as the camera pans over a vast, untouched Arctic seascape—questioning whether artificial systems can not only replicate disaster, but imagine its undoing. Drill Baby Drill interrogates this tension between simulation and reality, and asks what happens when political language, machine hallucination, and ecological urgency converge in a single feedback loop.
Drill Baby Drill (2025) premiered as part of the Vienna Digital Cultures (VDC) festival ‘Model Collapse‘ curated by Nadim Samman and organised by the Kunsthalle Wien in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991’.