Jung In Jung and Lynda Clark
Traumgraz is inspired by the anthropomorphism term ‘hallucination’ used for artificial intelligence’s confident response but unjustified false information. An interactive story is written between a large language model (Bard AI) and Lynda Clark based on pictures sent from Graz by Jung In Jung during her Styrian Artist in Residency (St.A.i.R) and is set in a building with escalating levels of weirdness. Jung performs live with the randomly generated story by choosing paths along with sound materials recorded in Graz and generated by AI. First, the same pictures sent to Lynda were fed to vit-gpt2-image-captioning and then the generated word tokens were used in MusicGen to generate audio. Jagdeep Ahluwalia supported finetuning the result of audio with Jung’s four past sound compositions to apply the moods classified by Jung for each fragment of her compositions.
Jonathan Impett and Juan Parra Cancino
Three States of Wax is a project of the ‘Music, Thought and Technology’ (MTT) research group at the Orpheus Institute, Ghent, Belgium.
The late philosopher of science Michel Serres drew many of his metaphors from music or from the natural world. In L’interférence (1972) he sought to identify the objects of study of modern science, and looked back to Descartes’ example of a piece of wax. Early modern science would have described it in terms of its shape, colour and texture, says Serres – geometrical description. In the later nineteenth and early twentieth century they would have referred to its properties of transmission of heat, of deformation and transformation – physical description. Now, he says, we would more appropriately find an informational description. We should understand it as a carrier and embodiment of knowledge: the feeding habits of the bees, the conditions of its formation, the process of its separation, the entire history of its subsequent use, handling, and environments. And in doing so, we add to that history; every interrogation and knowledge-use becomes part of the material.
Three States of Wax considers improvisation in that light: how can the human and computational responses to material generated in improvisation be based not only on figural or gestural interpretations, but on an understanding of that material as embodying a broader history and environment of its emergence? In Serres’ terms, as the product of a time-based, situated modulation or interference pattern of heterogeneous sources of information?
Artist biographies:
Jonathan Impett is Director of Research at The Orpheus Institute, Ghent, where he leads the research group “Music, Thought and Technology”. A composer, trumpet player and writer, his work is concerned with the discourses and practices of contemporary musical creativity, particularly the nature of the technologically-situated musical artefact. His early (1992) development of the ‘metatrumpet’ constituted one of the first projects to explore instrument, performer, interaction technologies, and composer as a single creative space, necessitating new conceptual models. As a performer, he is active as an improviser, as a soloist, and in historical performance. His recent monograph on the music of Luigi Nono is the first comprehensive study of the composer’s work. Jonathan is currently working on a project considering the nature of the contemporary musical object, ‘the work without content’. Activity in the space between composition and improvisation has led to continuous research in the areas of interactive systems, interfaces, and modes of collaborative performance. Recent works combine installation, live electronics, and computational models with notated and improvised performance. Juan Parra Cancino studied composition at the Catholic University of Chile and Sonology at the Royal Conservatoire The Hague (NL), where he obtained his Masters degree with focus on composition and performance of electronic music. In 2014, Juan obtained his PhD degree from Leiden University with his thesis “Multiple Paths: Towards a Performance Practice in Computer Music”. As a guitarist, Parra has participated in several courses of Guitar Craft, a school founded by Robert Fripp, becoming part of various related guitar ensembles such as the Berlin Guitar Ensemble, the Buenos Aires Guitar Ensemble, and until 2003, The League of Crafty Guitarists. His work in the field of live electronic music has made him the recipient of numerous grants such as NFPK, Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, and the International Music Council. Founder of The Electronic Hammer, a Computer and Percussion trio, and Wiregriot (voice & electronics), he collaborates regularly with Ensemble KLANG (NL) and Hermes (BE), among many others. Since 2009 Parra has been a fellow researcher at the Orpheus Institute (Ghent, BE), focused on performance practice in Computer Music. Juan has been appointed as Regional Director for Europe of the International Computer Music Association for the period 2022-2026.