AI & Art & Music
As an artist, my works are poetic comments on a speculative future of art and technology. The physical machines that I am creating are mechanical vessels to create sound - an embodiment of the silicon that usually creates electronic music. If the mechanic is the body, then an Algorithm can be the brain. As a live musician and producer I use AI in many ways to control this body. It can create rhythms, voices, and full compositions. I am still figuring out what the best use of these tools is. And the tools are getting better on a weekly basis.
In my work I’m trying to look into the future with the help of speculative design, a way to imagine uses of future technology without the constraints of looking at their actual present-day feasibility. I wanted to get an idea of what the future could look like. One question popped up: How will the actual artistic and creative process be changed by artificial intelligence in 20 years?
So will humans working in the creative field lose their jobs? Yes. Did this happen in the past? Yes. Do we adapt to it? Yes!
With changing tools, and more and more powerful algorithms that automate simple to advanced tasks, the daily life of an artist changes a lot - as in any other field and jobs where machine interaction is involved, as well. This finally gives us the opportunity to focus on the human, random, bodily, preformative, part in being creative. And maybe someday with the help of machines we will find out what actually makes us human after all.
- Moritz Simon Geist 2023
In 1962, Arthur C. Clarke, Author, futurist and underwater explorer introduced us to his three laws of looking at futuristic technology:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
I especially like the last one. Imagine, we have a time machine and can transport Galileo Galilei, multi-scientist, astronomer, inventor of the telescope from late summer 1609 to the 21th century.
Now, we show him an iPhone, and ask him to explain it. Remember, he is a very smart dude, and came up with fundamentals for a lot of technical and physical things we use today. We show him an iPhone: How we can open Skype and see something on the other side of the world - without a telescope and without visible lenses and mechanics. How this strange device can talk to us and answer our questions, and how it can produce light without any visible flames. Mr. Galilei might ask himself: Can this device maybe also convert copper to gold? There are no visible mechanics - can it maybe run forever? This must seem to him like magic and unexplainable to him with his understanding of nature and science.
He can not grasp the limits of this “advanced future technology” and will overestimate its powers.