Photo of Jennifer Walshe © Matmos / by derVisagist.com

CMC welcomes composer and performer Jennifer Walshe to open season three of Sparky Conversations with a discussion drawing on her text: 13 Ways of Looking at AI, Art and Music. In this essay, Walshe deconstructs the idea of AI as "a singular phenomenon", advocating for a multi-dimensional approach to looking at art and music made with artificial intelligence. Delving into the weird and wild world of AI, from "AI is Fan Fiction" to "AI is Relational Aesthetics", Walshe calls for increased engagement with the technology concluding;

...We users, we humans, must demand a stake in these networks, because we will be working alongside them, and we need more involvement in them than tiny context windows permit. We owe this to every being on the planet, and to the planet itself. Do we want to interact with a virtual teddy with preloaded answers, or encounter a model of bear consciousness? Can we think much, much weirder? If AI is to be more than the transitional object to turbocharged exploitation, bias and even, possibly, extinction, we need to get involved. To paraphrase Donna Haraway, we need to ‘shut up and train’.

13 Ways of Looking at AI, Art and Music was first presented in Kraków at Unsound 2023.

Sparky Conversations are free, online events delivered on Zoom. All are welcome! Register for the Zoom event at the link below.

-

Jennifer Walshe

“The most original compositional voice to emerge from Ireland in the past 20 years” (The Irish Times) and “Wild girl of Darmstadt” (Frankfurter Rundschau), composer and performer Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin, Ireland. Her music has been commissioned, broadcast and performed all over the world. She has been the recipient of fellowships and prizes from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York, the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, the Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstadt and Akademie Schloss Solitude among others.

Recent projects include TIME TIME TIME, an opera written in collaboration with the philosopher Timothy Morton, and THE SITE OF AN INVESTIGATION, a 30-minute epic for Walshe’s voice and orchestra, commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland. THE SITE has been performed by Walshe and the NSO, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and also the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra.

Walshe has worked extensively with AI. ULTRACHUNK, made in collaboration with Memo Akten in 2018, features an AI-generated version of Walshe. A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance, her third solo album, released on Tetbind in 2020, uses AI to rework canonical works from early Western music history. A Late Anthology was chosen as an album of the year in The Irish Times, The Wire and The Quietus. Walshe is currently professor of composition at the University of Oxford. Her work was profiled by Alex Ross in The New Yorker.