A Flow Of Serosities November 2019 (Haus der Kulturen der Welt)

Automation has also entered the creative world. Companies are striving for more profits thus increasing the use of artificial intelligence for the production of content because – supposedly – works created by algorithms don’t have authors. Yet behind every computer output is human input. Musician Dan Bodan has teamed up with programmer and sound artist Scott Carver for Right the Right to demonstrate this process in practice. Bodan was inspired by his work as a composer for Google’s royalty-free audio library. Now, Carver has developed a series of algorithms that process Bodan’s original scores and produce “new” versions, variations and approaches to the original works. Both the composed and the algorithmically processed scores will be premiered at HKW by the Kammerensemble Neue Musik on piano, bassoon, clarinet and recorder. The presentation raises questions: What is the actual moment of artistic creation? How are these variants of authorship – that of the composer, that of the algorithm and that of the developer – valued and assessed both artistically and economically? What does authorship mean in the age of big data?

Composition

Taking several compositions by Dan Bodan for the Kammerensemble Neue Musik ensemble as a starting point, I crafted a set of algorithmic music processing tools to re-compose the original scores into new forms. Rather than engaging with algorithm-as-automation, or through the lens of machine learning as a way to eliminate human labor, we chose to approach the construction of algorithms as a bespoke, artisinal, and creative practice - not geared toward efficiency or elimination of labor but rather as an esoteric, intuitive, and wastefully laborious process.

Dan Bodan’s original compositions and the algorithmic recompositions were performed side-by-side at HKW Berlin as part of the Right The Right: Ideas for Music, Copyright, and Access conference.