Just over a decade ago, producer and composer Surkin joined forces with filmmaker Romain Gavras – whose feature films include Sacrifice (2025) – to create GENER8ION, a collaborative, multidisciplinary project. Together, they draw on everything from American rap and Japanese video games to French Touch 2.0 and Detroit techno. Their dystopian visions have an uneasy resonance with the present. Their music video STORM, featuring rapper Yung Lean and choreography by Damien Jalet, caused a sensation on social media. It depicts a threatening near future and offers a bleak vision of masculinity adrift.

Building on their album ‘Love & Tears’, released in June 2026, the duo presents GOD HATES SPACE for Art Basel Paris at the Grand Palais: an immersive audiovisual installation that takes visitors to an independent Idaho in 2034. The work takes the form of a propaganda video made by the Agartha Liberation Army, an insurgent group born in the online community 6Chan. Its members believe the Earth is hollow and that salvation lies within it. Their theology forbids space exploration: paradise, they claim, is to be found inside the Earth. Film, music, and architecture come together around a double-sided, 12-meter screen.

How did GENER8ION begin? 

With a 20-year friendship, shared tastes in music and images, and a desire to make wonderful things. 

One of your best-known works is STORM. What meaning do you attach to Damien Jalet’s striking choreography at the end of STORM II? 

The beauty of choreography is that it makes people feel something. Putting it into words would diminish its power and symbolism. 

How do music and images come together in your work? Do you have a particular way of working as a duo? 

No formula. Just wine, cigarettes, and hours of conversation about images and music between friends. 

At Art Basel, you are presenting GOD HATES SPACE, which, like STORM, is set in 2034 and draws on the mythical kingdom of Agartha. Why this title? 

We like imagining near futures that take an oblique angle on the usual clichés about robots, flying cars, and so on. For GOD HATES SPACE, we thought: What if internet trolls actually came out into the open, and political ideas became even more idiotic? Today, some people believe the Earth is flat. In 10 years, might they become even more radicalized and believe it’s hollow? 

How did you conceive the story and bring its sound and imagery together? 

As a propaganda film that the group might have made itself to show off its strength and the trophies of its guerrilla campaign. 

How did you approach the installation’s design? 

We had the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey in mind, but toppled over. 

You have presented work at venues including the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection in Paris and 180 Studios in London. What does showing your work in a contemporary art setting bring to it? 

We don’t ask ourselves that question. For us, art today transcends spaces and platforms. We make audiovisual works that belong, in different forms, both online and in physical spaces.