We argue nowadays about the role of the human being in every respect, and in doing so reference human technology-based configurations. Inevitably art, like the uncharted soul of humanity, has been challenged by the rapidly increasing changes in the way we shape our lives.
The music we listen to has undergone a complete transmutation via constructive and deconstructive influences. Musicians are surrounded by complicated technological apparatuses that make it possible to sculpt sound into various forms. Machines are abundant; we share this planet with over 10 million robots. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning has penetrated the realm of musical creativity.
Estranged Music takes an artistic look at an imaginative future where the creative sources behind musical composition have been taken over by computer systems. A sudden accident causes all recorded history of musical practices to be erased. In direct contrast to the machine-learning paradigm, people then attempt to learn from machines how to compose music.
There will be a dystopic moment in the future when the music disappears on earth. We excavate it from the Voyager space shuttle that was sent to the void in 1977 carrying a couple of music records. From the corpus of the music found, the machines are generating new music for us so that we learn what was lost. It is a reverse operation; human-learning from machine-learning.
Exhibited at Dystopie Sound Art Festival, Berlin 2018
