An Artificial Clockwork Reimagining
I’ve always had a strange fascination with Anthony Burgess’ dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange and the adaptation by Stanley Kubrick.
The imagery from the later is deeply ingrained in the psyche of western pop culture, and the film holds an interesting place in cinematic history. Partly due to the unflinching depictions of sexual violence and the response of the general public that resulted in Kubrick himself pulling the movie from cinemas at the time.
Nothing like getting censored or banned to jet propel you to cult status!
My contact with A Clockwork Orange was at a very early age, the iconic image of Malcolm McDowell as Alex DeLarge as a full colour, full page image in a book on Science Fiction cinema.
Malcolm McDowell as Alex DeLarge
I was kind of blown away, after reading about the movie and subsequently looking for it on VHS, I found it was not available (this was the 80’s after all) and the only way to see it was at an indie cinema, that screened it weekly opposite David Lynch’s Eraserhead a movie as equally notorious as it is different to A Clockwork Orange. Being a 14 year old punk rock kid at the time, this just served as fuel for a fire in my imagination.
In response to this caged fascination, I sought out the novel. Now in the meantime I’d discovered the filmmaker Terry Gilliam and his epically dystopian Brazil with it’s exceedingly Formica Punk/Cassette Futurist look, dark storyline and nihilistic world building, it certainly left an impression.
While reading the Burgess novel I was primed to envision a world constructed from Gilliam’s vision. The book is an amazing dark satire of society, pushed to an extreme of violence, disconnection and government funded mind-control. Needless to say the movie in my head was gritty, grim and highly visualised.
Then along came the beautiful bleed of pop culture crossover. I began to find Halloween costumed girls dressed as highly sexualised Droogs, The Simpsons parody of the film, t-shirt designs and music videos borrowing imagery from the film thrust the Clockwork Orange pocket universe I’d constructed for the movie into a strange, vaulted pool of inspiration.
Leading me to create these pieces.
A creative brand idea 
Illustration piece called Ultraviolence 
Breakfast at Kerova’s
Fast forward to a decade later and I finally got to see the movie digitally, and…
I was pretty disappointed.
After all the movie didn’t have the highest budget and couldn’t possibly reach the production level of my minds eye.
I am happy to say that I’ve matured in my appreciation for the film and visually, the Korova Milk Bar opening is stunning in it’s visual storytelling.
Open the Pod Bay Door Hal
I’ve posted some of my AI art previously and I’ve become a regular user of the MidJourney platform. One of my recurrent personal challenges has been to effectively integrate the medium into my own work.
Enter my Terry Gilliam inspired remake of A Clockwork Orange.
I began building out text prompts that set up scenes of Droogs in Cassette Futurist settings, leaning hard into 60’s design motifs.
A really early attempt resulting in something that looks more like a Jack White album cover, cool but not what I wanted
After tweaking my prompts I managed to get some distinctly late 60s Droogs, I quite like the slight uncanny valley and distortion achieved with these.
Its interesting to note how the AI got very literal with the term Orange, adding it as an accent colour or in some cases, drawing an image of a orange slice into the image
In keeping on trend, and perhaps pandering to my own vices, I switched the Droogs to female. For one, I thought it would be more interesting to feature sociopathic female dilettantism to potentially broaden the concept.
My first passes at female Droogs were cool but a little too Christian Dior and not enough Viddy Well
With a little prompt tweaking I managed to get a much more late 60’s vibe
The environment design was a lot easier to achieve, Cassette Futurism isn’t too hard to replicate. 
About a third of the way along in the process, I decided to cast Olivia Wilde as Alex. This yielded some cool results.
And for the mind control, government project aspect of the movie, I created some genuinely disturbing imagery, which was of course pretty awesome!
After creating a few hundred images, covering everything from characters, specific scenes and world building environments I was left with, well, a bunch of images. So I decided to kick it up a notch and animated a ‘Sizzle Reel’ as a proof of concept.
Finally I generated some pop-art style posters with MidJourney to round out the piece.
Overall it was a fun creative experiment, not necessarily a successful one but I certainly scratched a creative itch.
So will this be my last dalliance with the world of Alex DeLarge? Probably not, but it’ll keep me satisfied for a while.
The Clockwork Is Still Turning
It’s been several years and while doing some research to pull together my reel, I found there’s still a very healthy interest in the material. A stand out for me was Frank Kozik’s Ludwig Van bust, the Rob Zombie music video for ‘Never Gonna Stop’ and I even found a porn parody called ‘A Clockwork Whore’. Feel free to Google that one yourself, I’m not putting the trailer on here.
Ludwig Van by Frank Kozik 
Detail of Ludwig Van
Clockwork Porn…
Whether it’s the visual language created by Kubrick or the social commentary posed by Burgess, I would recommend checking out A Clockwork Orange, at the very least you might wind up with a Halloween costume idea, if not some rich creative inspiration.