Algorave

For techno musicians, oddly "AI" is something we've been playing with for decades, at least since Stockhausen and Shaeffer brought us into the era of aleatoric music middle of the last century. For a very long time, sound artists have leveraged electronic systems and computers as aides to composition. These tools, that we refer to as "generative", "procedural", and "stochastic" have been popular for everything from Avant Garde to Dance (IDM) and Pop.

In the traditions of "Computer Music", "Sonic Art" and "Electroacoustics" we've long used 'intelligent' sequencers, expert systems, Markov models, linear predictive coding, /decision trees/and all kinds of strange and complex technologies borrowed from adjacent fields in signal processing and cybernetics.

Using these tools as "Intelligence Amplifiers" (IA) requests and requires:

• Understanding
• Control
• Creative Vision

In this episode we talk about our daily use of such tools in the studio, and on stage in the live "Algo-rave" scene.

But there is something palpably different about the new wave of gradient descent systems now flooding the world with push-button slop, while robbing artists of their life and works.

What is deeply disturbing is not their capabilities, but the breathless cultural hype, the aggressive post/anti-humanistic megalomania of those advocating them - mostly from the "BigTech" technofascist stable.

This is clearly not the same as "when printing presses replaced scribes" or "when photography replaced portrait artists". Such arguments are specious and ignorant. So many questions hang in the air:

What does it feel like to be so devalued as artists now?

Do people really care where their music comes from? Is the human-to-human connection vital?

How do we remain curious and engaged with new creative technologies when they are being so abused against us?

Can we ever use such tools in good conscience?

If "AI" wants to compete with human artists, then isn't the destruction of "AI" the greatest, most sincere artistic expression and project for Art in this century?

What new art forms will emerge in reaction to the present situation?