The video In the Air Tonight by American artist Andrew Norman Wilson is an evocative, nearly hallucinatory meditation on the decades-old rumor surrounding Phil Collins’ song of the same name. According to this urban legend, Collins witnessed someone drowning during a late-night walk along the shore while another person stood by and did nothing; the song is said to be Collins’s dark accusation of that bystander’s failure. Wilson uses this modern myth as the starting point for a mysterious filmic collage in which, through the voice of Slipperman (voiced by David George), reality blends with imagination, and the iconic melody becomes a trigger for deeper, almost mythological meanings.
The film also aligns with the tradition of ready-made videos - works assembled from preexisting images. Much like Christian Marclay in The Clock, who constructs a new spatiotemporal whole from fragments of cinema, Wilson uses found material to build an original narrative. And similar to Douglas Gordon, who appropriates iconic films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho by slowing them down, deconstructing them, or reinterpreting scenes, Wilson transforms familiar motifs and audiovisual fragments into a work that feels at once recognizable and eerily foreign. Comparable references to Hollywood iconography also appear in Wilson’s first short film Impersonator (2021), in which his characteristic themes of duality, identity, and staged authenticity come through clearly.
Andrew Norman Wilson, Impersonator, 2021, video still
In the Air Tonight thus stands at the intersection of legend and filmic remix, between collective memory and personal imagination. It is an essayistic, hypnotic video that transforms existing material into a new, darkly pulsating myth. Work on the film began during the Covid pandemic, when Wilson collected film clips on the shared Google Drive This Light, which he used to exchange material with friends - a personal archive that gradually became the foundation of the film’s visual language. In the Air Tonight also connects organically to Wilson’s broader body of gallery-based work, such as video essays and projects including Workers Leaving the Googleplex, The Unthinkable Bygone, or Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1, in which he consistently explores tensions between labor, myth, technology, and the aesthetics of the moving image. These approaches reappear as well in his installation and gallery work, including his exhibition at Futura Gallery in Prague in 2018 (curated by Michal Novotný), where Wilson further developed his reflections on the image, post-production, and the role of imagination in the digital age.
Andrew Norman Wilson, Pre-tense, 2018, installation view, Futura Gallery
In addition to his independent artistic work, Wilson has directed several notable music videos - for U2, Oneohtrix Point Never...
Oneohtrix Point Never – Nightmare Paint, dir. Andrew Norman Wilson, 2023, video still
...most recently he created a music video for the song I Hate the Antichrist by musician John Mause, which similarly blends film references, pop culture references, irony, and careful work with rhythm.
John Maus – I Hate Antichrist, dir. Andrew Norman Wilson, 2025, video still
More about Wilson’s first encounters with a video camera, his transition from gallery spaces to cinema screens, and his approach to found footage, myth, and music can be heard in the podcast interview accompanying the film’s presentation:
Andrew Norman Wilson and the piggy statue (from the author's archive)
Andrew Norman Wilson's films have premiered at Sundance, the New York Film Festival, and Rotterdam. His work is in collections such as the Museum of Modern Art New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, The Getty Museum, and The Centre Pompidou, and he has exhibited at LUMA Arles, MoMA PS1, and the Gwangju and Berlin Biennials. He has taught at UCLA, SAIC, and Cooper Union, and lectured at Oxford University, Cambridge University, Harvard University, and Yale University. His work has been featured in Artforum, ArtReview, BOMB, Frieze, The New Yorker, and Wired, and he has published writing in Artforum, The Baffler, and the Paris Review.
In 2021, he was named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine. His films have won awards at the San Francisco International Film Festival and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. He has participated in the Oxbelly Director’s Lab and the Locarno Filmmakers Academy. He has served on the juries of the Palm Springs Film Festival and the Tabor Film Festival. He has directed music videos for U2, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Duck Sauce, and directed campaigns for Google and MCM.
He is currently in pre-production on a commercial film titled Interlaken, a romantic thriller set in the Swiss Alps. He is also authoring a book-length memoir based on his 2024 Baffler article "It's Not What the World Needs Right Now."
