Road Ahead
Completing three pieces in the space of a summer has been an immense learning experience. Now I need to look ahead to see if I can find a path forward in my research among the fog and thickets of ideas, academic papers, and possible technologies available to me.
I am toying with the idea of "decentralized layered logics" or "creative multiplicities". From "The ethics of creative AI" - Catherine Flick and Kyle Worrall, I found resonance in the statement "Given that the outputs of creativity are frequently expressions aimed at affecting the audience's emotions, helping the audience to understand another's perspective, or similar, creative AI has a lot of potential to positively affect the audience and increase their empathetic concern for the subject."
Another resonance is with Broeckmann 2020 (via L. Santaella) with AI art there is a "noticeable emphasis on the technical and the social, rather than the particular aesthetic and artistic aspects, placing an awkward, and at times, playful or dilettante-like focus on the technical medium. Art criticism perpetuates this tendency when it highlights the societal concerns instead of engaging with the artworks and their aesthetic affordances."
While there is nothing wrong with highlighting and putting a societal issue at the forefront of an artistic work, I can't seem to get excited about using AI in an obvious way in order to showcase this. For me creating with advanced technologies can create entire worlds, offer alternate realities or open a window into imaginary, other-than-human worlds. Something that really gets people to re-think things. Kind of like science fiction, but musical, not literary or cinematic.
What is interesting for me about AI: it has got us away from the assumption that intelligence can be measured in terms of language use. LLMs have taught us that. Also, the ability to express oneself symbolically and with the abstraction of language can no longer be assumed to be a marker of consciousness, and that gives way to other ideas of what consciousness might entail (even ones like R. Penrose's idea of quantum consciousness, which might sound whacky, but it may have more truth to it than we thought back in the 1970's). Researchers and artists are now more aware of non-human intelligences, decentralizing the intellectual monopoly humans have thought to hold over the rest of the natural world. To me the most interesting question it makes us ponder is - what it is it that makes us human? No clear answers yet, just half-baked ideas about empathy and altruism, knowing that humans probably don't have a monopoly on these either.
In short, when things get all shook up, where can my musical thought take me? While I understand the need for audiences, artists (and funding organizations) to engage with burning societal issues, and to be presented with an open platform where there is "informed consent" (knowing what you are about to see/hear is AI generated), my end-game is making something aesthetically pleasing (to me, at least), a work that resonates emotionally and gives food for thought. In short, to create an artwork, not to reveal or sonify some kind of data set, or to transfer the style of composer x onto my work, or to serve someone's political agenda. I am into old-fashioned narrative and storytelling. This is likely where my music is going.
After reading several books on AI artworks, I realize that these works are rarely purely musical. Rather it seems the bulk of AI artworks inevitably have some visual (video, sculpture, material) or textual, or robotic (using real robots) elements. Is a purely musical work that engages with AI, but is not a style-transfer project such as a 21st century Bach cantata or such, acceptable to festivals, museums, and funding bodies? Can I present a creative AI work without resorting to text, visuals or robotics? There are relevant examples of purely musical works that engage with ML, for example by Giotti and Einbond. For myself, though, I am tempted by the challenge to expand into the textual and visual.
This concludes today's thinking out loud.