Losing language
There is much talk on AI, and it’s influence on the arts, specifically to music and paintings. A great focus seems to be inaccuracy and deleting mistakes, to perfect sound and shades of color. But wasn’t the beauty of paintings the people behind its mistakes and the beauty of sound the mixed vibrations mastered by fingers? When did we say as a collective it’s ok to reproduce Rembrandt without him being present? How did we accept that’s it’s ok for the creator to lose the influences before the Art is formed.
“…Then we may be left with the body, but risk the loss of the most important thing to those who truly know and love art and history: the soul.” – Noah Charney, Zocalo
Greg introduced us to the history of drums and their language of rhythm. The various percussions where through hand pressures forms high and low wave frequencies that have now mainly been transferred through digital. No one is arguing that the digital sounds should go but when did we decide that the drummer should not be on stage, that the audience who is paying to see Live music should hear various stitched together playbacks? I guess what saddens me the most is not the advent of technology but, the loss of hearing a true live concert where nothing is pre-recorded, and how the painters are competing with computers in art spaces just because viewers can’t tell the difference between a human painting or machines. Maybe I’m still old school.
I accept that for the preservation of Persepolis or the Chauvet cave or the Mona Lisa is best to have replicates but as mentioned in Day 7, allow me to be a part of my own decisions of what’s best for me. I enjoy human mistakes, like the LIVE 8 concert in the UK where you can hear the breathing and breaks and the improv. There is an authenticity in live mistakes, in highs and lows. Maybe I can say there is a value that can be gained or added. Isn’t there value in the human process to reach or earn their achievements, an authentic journey in discovery? Would it not be a shame for the new generation to not go through the experience?
I sometimes feel with certain quick accessibility we can lose its value. If we only have heard drums from a digital machine in an enclosed space and not experienced the various tablas in nature around a fire topped by the screams of sparrows – wouldn’t the value of those tablas be lost? Should we not discuss how our choices can have an effect?
Reality is not always based on Truth, – as the group reminded each other.
“‘Personally I think humans are still special. I like to think we are special,’ said Korsten. “These algorithms have to be steered in the right direction. We are like a father teaching a kid how to write – you will need the father. In teaching a computer these algorithms about what is Rembrandt and what isn’t, they still needed us’ …” – Tim Nudd
At the end of it all, I truly hope we don’t lose the human process of the original. That value in authenticity.