The third in a series of events hosted by The Wire magazine looking at the impact of AI on contemporary music making. Tickets

Generative music systems were around long before generative AI. This event looks at a previous history of music as a series of inputs, workflows, and rules-based processes, from Fluxus onward. What are the choices that inform generative music systems internally (in scores, programming, and technical possibilities) and externally (in power structures between performers, users, and corporations)?

Generative AI also generates its outputs from massive datasets, and can be ‘trained’ on the work of thousands of anonymised creative artists. Debates are heated about copyright, ownership and originality, and the consent of artists and creators to be used in these massive datasets. What does Generative AI say to the rules we have about what constitutes agency and identity, and the distinction between self and other in relation to information transmission and exchange? Looking into plunderphonics, folk, sampling and copy cultures, were or are other paths possible?

Loré Lixenberg and Elaine Mitchener are both vocalists, composers and improvisors working in the realms of new music, experimental music, music theatre, performance and visual art. For this Salon they will perform a selection of early process-based scores in which the rules are transparent and all too human. 

Vicki Bennett (People Like Us) is a multidisciplinary British artist recognised for her immersive audiovisual collages and unique approach to mass media as contemporary folk art. Her contribution to this Salon will lift off from her ongoing advocacy for open access to creative content, and her practice of freely sharing her work online and championing the principles of the gift economy. Bennett regards sampling as a potent metaphor for culture and consciousness’s interconnected and ever-shifting nature. In her view, everything exists in a state of flux, and meaning is always relational rather than fixed. Through her practice, she draws attention to the fluid dialogues woven throughout cultural production, challenging conventional ideas about originality and the boundaries of artistic ownership.

Mattie Colqhoun (Xenogothic) is a writer, researcher, and biographer of Mark Fisher. For this event they will be presenting on the implications of AI for blogospheric topics from the 2000s-2010s, regarding hauntology, salvagepunk and accelerationism as three different approaches to the cultural production of the new and how the recombinatory processes of AI sampling are changing our relationship to appropriation and sampling in music. 

The event will conclude with a panel moderated by writer and Wire contributor Robert Barry.

https://www.lorelixenberg.art
https://www.elainemitchener.com
https://peoplelikeus.org
https://xenogothic.com
https://www.thewire.co.uk