How Big Tech’s Fantasy of Human Upgrade Shaped Tim Arnold’s Album Cover for Super Connected™
The AI Story Behind Super Connected: What IS ‘TA Plus?’
To celebrate the two-year anniversary of Super Connected, I thought I would share this unpublished article and interview that I recently came across, originally written by Aurelio Vasquez for Sonika Magazine. The interview took place just before the album’s release and explores the origins of the album cover, which has since become a signature of the project and our tour this year.
Sat in his favourite restaurant, Little Italy in Soho, Tim Arnold recalls a story that has nothing to do with technology but everything to do with the spirit of Super Connected — his long awaited 26th solo album. The owner, a long-time friend, once gave him one Flaming Ferrari cocktail after another on his 23rd birthday. By the time he left, it took him half an hour to walk home — though home was right next door on Frith Street. “I don’t know if I’d survive that night now,” he laughs, but there’s something in his voice that suggests a certain nostalgia for those days, a time before digital screens took over every conversation.
Before the Super Connected project took its final form as an album, film and theatre show, its seeds were already taking root in Arnold’s mind. In 2016, as he delved deeper into the songs he had written about technology’s grip on human nature, a lingering memory from years before resurfaced — a time when he had worked at the Apple Store in 2010 and first encountered the concept of transhumanism.
Among the many ideas that swirled in this vast technological labyrinth, one symbol stood out: H+ — a tiny logo, a simple letter ‘H’ followed by a plus sign. But its meaning was anything but simple. It signified the transhumanist ideal: that a human being, when fused with technology, could become something more, something enhanced, something better. The promise was seductive — improved intelligence, extended lifespans, increased efficiency. Humanity 2.0.
Yet Arnold saw something deeper, something darker. So H+, the Transhuman logo, for Arnold, was the inspiration for his Super Connected alter-ego, only known to his fellow cast members and crew, until now, as TA+ (or TA Plus) — an AI avatar designed to be the ultimate digital enhancement of a human being’s deepest dreams. What if this better version of a person was not better at all, but merely an avatar that we as humans were trapped inside of? To be more obedient? More predictable? More controllable?
This became a central theme woven into the Super Connected film script and its songs, including one of the earliest tracks, “Start With the Sound”. This song, written in 2015 and originally inspired by Arnold’s research into Silicon Valley’s focus on image and video and marginalisation of sound, later became not only the opening track of the album but also a crucial moment in the film — a scene where the father in the story, played by Arnold, is lured into a tech company’s offer of a free family device.
That device, named iHead, had one unsettling feature. It would generate an AI avatar of the user, an idealised digital reflection built from years of accumulated data, tracking their interests, desires, dreams and fears.
For the struggling musician played by Arnold in the film, the AI-generated version of himself, TA+, was not a tired, weary artist navigating the brutal realities of life. No — his avatar was a technological mirage of a classic rock star, plucked from the golden ages of Glam and New Romanticism. A being with iridescent blue hair, white-painted skin, icy piercing eyes — artificial as a digital simulation, and hauntingly un-human.
As he tells the story, there’s a glimmer of humour in his eye, but also something deeply serious about the way he considers the project — as if he feels he owes humanity something. Super Connected is not just an album to him — it’s a responsibility.
This character, this projection, or TA+, became the ghostly embodiment of what technology companies wish humanity would become: an illusion so convincing that the human being behind it starts to believe it is real, until fantasy and reality become indistinguishable — something Arnold firmly believes companies like Meta and Twitter have set their sights on.
During filming, Arnold found himself increasingly disturbed by ‘TA+’. It was a vision of what corporations might want every human to be — optimised, stylised, and above all, easily manipulated by algorithms.
As the Super Connected album neared completion, there was a question of what image would represent it. For Arnold, the idea of using ‘TA+’ as the album cover was deeply uncomfortable. It was everything he felt was wrong with the way technology had evolved — an artificial mask, a digital deity designed to lure humans into self-erasure.
But then, something shifted.
He realised that this image was not just a symbol of what Super Connected was fighting against — it was a reminder of why the fight mattered in the first place. To turn away from it, to reject it as the cover, would be to forget the urgency of the message.
And so, reluctantly, Arnold placed his own face — as TA+ — on the album cover, knowing every time he saw it would remind him of his battle with digital dependency.
“I didn’t want to use it as the cover at first because it’s everything that I think is wrong with the way technology has evolved, but for me personally, it became important to remind myself what it is I’m fighting for and fighting against with the wider Super Connected project. So whilst I do not like that character or even looking at myself with that make-up on and the blue hair, it serves as a very useful tool to avoid apathy in my efforts to raise awareness around the increasing control and stronghold that big tech has on human nature.”
Arnold has no intention of putting the film out on streaming services.
“That would defeat the object,” he says, with a perverse sense of creativity in his eye. “I only want people to see the film when they are with other people. Not alone on a phone or with a second screen full of distraction. Even if it takes me the rest of my life to show it to groups of people myself, that’s what I’ll do.”
With the first screening and full album performance lined up next week at London’s Roundhouse, we hope it will be the first of many. In an increasingly super connected world, there is no better time for Tim Arnold’s Super Connected.
Get tickets for Super Connected: The Come To Life Tour 2025
