Workshop on Interactive AI Systems for Live Audiovisual Performance

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Overview

In this workshop, we will explore a suite of interactive tools, including the ChucK music programming language, ChAI, the Pandora audiovisual live coding environment, and Wekinator.

The proliferation of generative AI tools has raised important questions around how we (especially artists) create. Using AI tools in the creative process can blur the lines between creativity and curation and change how we navigate our relationship with labor and craft. It can feel as if we do less to do more, synthesizing previous or external inputs into new material with the help of generative AI systems. What does this do to our relationship with our creative labor, with other human beings, and to our aesthetic leanings? In this module, we explore the possibilities of human-centered, humanistic approaches to instrument building, tool design, and audiovisual performance, prioritizing human interaction and sensible curation in the creative process with AI. Our approach seeks to foreground the value of the human artistic process over any lens that views tools, products, or technical novelty as ends in themselves.

In a broader sense, one might ask if audiovisual performance is a “problem” that needs to be “solved”? In this course, we resist the notion that AI tools will “solve” anything about the creative process, but rather that they may provide new possibilities for the artist to synthesize their work via radical new combinations of (multi)-media. 

In this workshop, we will explore a suite of interactive tools, including the ChucK music programming language, ChAI, the Pandora audiovisual live coding environment, and Wekinator. Participants are also encouraged to incorporate any other external tools that may enhance the workshop experience and align with its objectives.

Besides acquiring skills using a variety of softwares, learning about creative applications machine learning, and developing a multimodal understanding of data and is communication,  the most important educational outcome of this course is exposure to a creative mindset that centers process and affords a mode of creative questioning in the use of generative tools.

The first hour and 15 minutes of this event is lecture-style and open to in person and Zoom participants. After 11:15am, the event will be for in person attendees only.

Attendees, please bring your own computers and headphones. Airpods will not work for the workshop.