Moby and the Void Pacific Choir just released the new music video to his song "Are You Lost in the World Like Me?", which has a thoughtful take on people's relationships to technology.
View this video on YouTube
The video features animation from Steve Cutts, a London-based artist whose work commonly features images inspired by tech, the human condition, and modern society.
It starts with users mindlessly staring into their phones as they fall into a manhole.
A woman is seen senselessly "liking" posts on her device.
Another woman tests a filter on a selfie, which doesn't reflect her dark reality.
Other provocative scenes include one where a man harasses a woman on a train while bystanders stare at their gadgets...
...or this one of an opportunistic selfie-taker who poses as a fire burns away in a building behind her.
The imagery of users getting "lost" in their mobile phones ties into the lyrical themes of the song, which poses the question: "Are you free?"
Throughout each scene is one frantic character who is trying to make sense of the world around him.
Cutts told BuzzFeed News that the animations are meant to unveil the manner by which human-to-human interaction has become diminished.
The narrative is told through our protagonist and his struggle in vain to find human connection in the world and failing.
The sound of the track is complex and energetic, so I wanted to reflect that in the relentless pace of everything that is going on around him, giving a feeling almost like he's out of sync with the world he lives in.
The video isn't about just cell phones, but also popular images projected through them: At one point, a woman in a tiny bikini and high heels who's undergoing cosmetic procedures grins at the viewer.
Moby is a big fan of Cutts' artwork. In a statement to BuzzFeed News, he describes it as "one of the best videos that's ever been made for one of my songs."
The video concludes with an eye-popping image of phone obsessives glued to their devices as they walk en masse off a cliff.
Cutts described the point he was trying to make with the piece:
For me the video is about our increasing dependence on technology and about human interaction today, or a certain lack of it.
It focuses on the way tech is changing us, how we have become desensitized and also the general pace of the way we live today, the things we prioritize now.