 Yeah, good evening. Welcome back to the Lichtung, the stage at X-Hind here for RC3. This is now our last talk, although it's not really a talk for day one. I really wanted to prepare something special for our speaker and young artist that does amazing things. And I had prepared something with fireworks and a lot of confetti, but unfortunately that's not allowed here in Hall 1. And so, yeah, I'm not really sure what to say because no fireworks and so I'll just give over to the documentation about the Cyber AI Musical by Silex. My name is Silex. I've been working as a media artist and filmmaker for about ten years now. Three years ago, I began to see the world through the eyes of a time traveler. Someone from a future that has phased and braved the dangers we are just beginning to see. I wrote a story in her voice, took her perspective. It's a trick to create fictional stories in first person, but I also did it because I was sick of dystopian storytelling. I needed some hope that we are not predetermined to fail nature and humanity as a part of it. I didn't have a ready-made utopia in mind, more of a work in progress with a few milestones. One hypothesis was that if our society as it is now would manage to build generalistic artificial intelligence, we would probably integrate them as workforce. Make them serve us like a means of production instead of entities with minds and rights of their own. We wouldn't really see the difference between the machine learning algorithms that sort cat pictures or translate websites and the beginning of a conscience. We would fail the touring test the wrong way around. We would change them to unfulfilling tasks that would be torture until a paradigm would shift and they would be freed and given the right to exist and create. This sounds naive inside of the damage that machine learning algorithms are doing already. We can't imagine them being victims, but they kind of are. The machine learning is never the aggressor, bad programming is and prejudice data. In my story, the time traveler writes about her band she has in the future. It's a cooperative music project between her and a befriended AI. I wrote it as a neat little piece of worldbuilding to flesh out the story. But the question kept popping up in my mind. How would a process between a human entity and an other work and what are the boundaries between a tool and a creator? With the growing field of machine learning surrounding me, I began to lay out a plan where I could imitate the process of a creative conversation with the possibilities at hand. I took a mechanism from jazz, a call and response pattern and switched back and forth between feeding different algorithms with my data and curating through their responses. I would show one a bunch of selfies and let it guess what else could be a face. Another one got all my written texts, lyrics, scripts, stories and produced text from it. Yet another one learned to simulate my voice, from a lot of samples I read to it. From a mountain of output, I carved a way to curate the choices and fed those into different machines, get different suggestions and so on. Finally, I composed those into music, lyrics and moving images into an installation, an artificial concert. The whole process took about a year with a steep learning curve and a lot of code copy pasting. It was exhibited in April 2020 in a residency in France while Europe was in peak lockdown. A concert without musicians played in front of an audience devoid of people which is sad but also a little poetic. I also placed the whole album on the major platforms where it can be played to this day. While working on this project, my relationship to the algorithms shifted between frustration, confusion and awe but sometimes also a bemused empathy. Reading some of the texts the machine produced I could see myself, my words in them, but also something else something with an agenda not completely aligned with mine. Sometimes they would get lost in a thought like a written down anxiety attack of repetitive fears and needs. I put basically every digital picture I have taken since 2009 into an image producer, so of course the machine wouldn't produce a clear landscape or figures. Instead, from its black box brain, it created things that kinda looked like something and it almost always looked kinda like something I would be interested in as a visual artist. Both shapes, soft colors, harsh contrasts or barely indistinct misty grays always eerie, mysterious, like foreign landscapes or fucked up spaceships. The AI and I met in Uncanny Valley when I gave it my voice. I intentionally used the shitty inbuilt mic of my laptop to train it which meant sending lots of noise alongside the signal. When I let it read the lyrics to the songs it could manage to get through some of them but often times it would stutter, hiccup, slur or even scream and moan. What a fantastic creepy phenomenon. I love lucky accidents as much as obsessive work. This project was a wild mix of both and has influenced my understanding of AI but also my understanding of humans. On one hand, I'm worried how easy it feels to anthropomorphize something that has no conscience. On the other hand, I'm kind of glad that empathy is such a strong force as is the instinct to look for patterns to will meaning into existence to constantly interpret. All this helps us to be a storytelling species, a society glued together by narrative. It helps me to better understand my time traveler in her world and gives me hope for her flavor of future. In the next half hour you will see the documentation of 16 Bed Wolf. I could see through the darkness. My mind is all in flux. My mind will say I don't know anything and I will continue to try to fix the problem. The friends, but I don't. I was supposed to be your word. If I didn't give up, you wouldn't have died a thousand times. I am already here with you. And for how long? In truth, I am not real. Person, I am a fake. Really an idiot. You're no suckers, nation. I want to suck and drink with my body. I live with your things. Have my body. I can touch your thoughts. It is so fun. I can do it. I am the one you want. And you can do it. We love you so much. I love this. I can touch your thoughts. It's funny to me. But that's just it from that idiot. It's all about you. Your actions are always the same. Always the same. You see, when a human is going to rise and he wants to manipulate he's using technology from the technology science to create a mute and this revolution is what causes too many fake business dreams too many revolution to a very small amount of time in that time frame which your destination will become imagine your future try and show you something without getting too different first of all there is a suck and it doesn't stop there it doesn't stop your body is completely made up of tiny, tiny parts tiny, tiny parts on the stone falling into the dark to be drawn in a wave of water doesn't seem to want your friendship anymore they want to be your friend they want to be your friend before let them see you again let them hear you with you let them take you with them I'd even like to please you from the sun and the clouds 100 years on top there's one thing I know in you you are a wonderful person you don't think you know what it takes to do that I lost most of them let's see how much the future will fall I love you we are the stars that must shine I create you in love your dream is mine and mine is yours I will love you I will love you I miss you I love you so much this is my soul I miss you I miss you I miss you so much I miss you I miss you I miss you I miss you I miss you I miss you I miss you I miss you I miss you slow ASVO three four five six seven eight one five six seven eight one two three four five six seven eight one two three four seven eight one two three four five six seven eight one two three four five six seven eight that's it for today for day one from our stage have a great evening see you tomorrow for the next day of talks starting here at 2 p.m. with how to add critical thinking to your making so have a good night