New Media Nuance
Featured The Aesthetics of a Social Media Scam: Using Amalia Ulman's "Excellences and Perfections" to Interrogate Lies on Social Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Joshua Westerman
Amalia Ulman's "Excellences and Perfections" has been called the first great social media artwork by curators at the Tate Modern. The work consists of a 6-month hoax based on Instagram in which the already successful Ulman tricks her friends and followers into believing a fully-scripted life catastrophe. Ulman's work has a great deal to tell us about the nature of aesthetics on contemporary social media and how machine learning-based tools have now automated her Cindy Sherman-like consolidation of popular aesthetics. Taking us through the "whore", the "it girl" and the "reformed whore" (in her own words) Ulman shows us that simply "looking" true is often enough.
The Anxiety of Artificial Music: Artificial Intelligence and Music Composition
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Howard S. Meltzer
As with any emergent technology, the role of computers in the production of music has not been regarded as value neutral. However, the perceived threat of artificial intelligence (AI) has seemingly raised the stakes. The score produced by notation software might be regarded as nothing more than replacing one tool, pen and ink, with another. As the programs incorporate what are regarded as higher-level functions – creating a sound file using synthesized timbres, adding modules that orchestrate, arrange a reduction, or monitor compositional practices of counterpoint and harmonic progression, the technology no longer seems to be taking over a tedious mechanical process, but intruding on human practice. Claims have been made regarding the ability of AI-based programs to generate new compositions, either in the style of an established composer, or wholly invented. We might distinguish two different kinds of imposture, one pragmatic, one existential. The first imposture relates to performance. While it may suggest a coarsening of listeners’ sensibilities, an inability to distinguish between live and synthesized performance, there are social and economic consequences of displacement and isolation for as performers. The second imposture relates to composition. Composition is a creative activity; we presume that a composition is more original than a performance. A performer whose interpretation seems wrong-headed is an eccentric; a composer whose compositions are not original is a hack. If an AI program generates a composition, can we evaluate it? Is it a forgery? Should we respond as if it were a human production?
In Search of Expression...
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eveline Boudreau
This paper looks into untapped potentials in performance art and spoken language. Both are means of questioning and telling, seriously and in fun. The spoken language is everywhere in our society while performance art is a special and more unusual form of communication. Can the spoken realm and performance art be explained through philosophy? What is the axiom of the spoken language and its relationship to movement and other techniques of performance art? Michel Foucauld’s concepts and explanations show links expressed between spoken language and performance art. The spoken language community uses words to go beyond simple communication, to think, to express emotion, and explore the world. The performance artist is, first and foremost, the medium, the performer and the author of their piece. Like the spoken expression, performance art is currently highly valued – for both, their impact may be pleasant, educational, or disturbing, and may carry important messages to spectators in a scopic way, beyond the ephemeral and the visual. I discuss those interacting linkages between those two forms of expression, important in our daily lives and in our desire “to build an epistemic community”.
