Jimi Hextrick - "Haunted Air" (Special VHS Edition)

Once a year a barn in Bethel in New York, known as the location of the Woodstock 1969 festival, becomes alive again with a spooky guest performance.

Now as VHS special edition with a behind the scenes segment that fans can't stop watching!

Director's statement: "This piece began as a rebellion against infinite possibility. With AI, every prompt can open a new world — but I wanted to see what would happen if I locked the door. The piece takes place entirely within a single fictitious barn set in Bethel, New York — the site of Woodstock 1969 — imagined as a haunted stage that comes alive once a year for a ghostly performance. I imposed the one-location rule on myself, not the AI, to mimic real filmmaking conditions and shape the work through extensive hands-on editing. That limitation became the film’s spine, turning constraint into atmosphere.

The main video adopts a 1990s-inspired, high-gloss, high-ISO 16 mm look, while the “behind-the-scenes” segment uses a degraded fake VHS aesthetic. The barn — already stylized like a music-video set — is revealed on a soundstage, but the reveal deepens the illusion. The so-called documentary becomes haunted itself — folding endlessly in on itself under a looping hypnotic soundtrack, led by a seductive interviewer, while the soundstage collapses into something infernal.

Working with AI was its own Sisyphean ritual. Each shot could quickly become unpredictable: tweak one small detail and the entire shot could change. I approached it like jamming — capturing shots, adjusting, co-creating, and sculpting time until shots felt alive. Over time, unexpected outcomes — wandering couches, floating scenery, or lookalikes — became part of the piece’s identity, embraced emotionally rather than corrected. Every frame reflects deliberate human curation and repeated refinement.

At its heart, the piece is about joyful resurrection — of people, formats, and feelings. I brought back the ghost of a single artist, and even a deepfake of my father, to explore how audiences respond to recreated memory. Their reactions — uneasy laughter, recognition, sometimes silence — became the final layer of the work."

Built With

• ai