digital

AI the way it should be by David Korchin

Image created by Dall-e 2. Prompt by David Korchin.

Glitchy, surreal and not of this world. I’m trying to avoid perfectly rendered imaginings done by a mystery hand—keeping this output to a lo-fi experiment, means (for me) ensuring the viewer will always know who and what is behind the image-making.

These photos were not created through a lens of my own taking—a machine generated the scenes. I wrote the prompts, converted the results to B&W and removed the watermarks. It left me thinking about collaboration; no longer with assistants and models and producers and retouchers (don’t forget editors and reps) but with lines of code, with a system beneath my touchpad and at the end of a wire.

Though I had less to do with bringing these subjects into the world, I feel empathy with who they are (or were; the algorithm assembles from images it’s fed). But I asked a machine to usher them onto the screen. I guess I feel responsible for how they’ll inhabit this world.

music in the making by David Korchin

The composer Mathieu Lamboley prepares a manuscript. Paris, France.

I had a chance to work in Paris recently with director Eric D'Amario on a cool project documenting artificial intelligence-generated music. The assignment involved running sentiment analysis on thousands of words from the top stories in business and technology in the French Press, to learn what people are saying about subjects like Cloud, the Internet of Things, digital currencies, security, etc. From that analysis, the creative coder Hannah Davis used her Transprose algorithm to turn those sentiments into musical motifs, from which a human composer—Mathieu Lamboley (above)—built a three-movement orchestral work entitled Symphonologie. The data visualists at Rare Volume added pre-rendered visuals married to real-time input from the 52-piece orchestra at the début performance under the pyramid at Le Louvre on 20 September, 2016. 

Watch Eric's films and experience Symphonololgie: The Music of Business

The director Eric D'Amario

Oliver Imfest, Director of Photography

Composer Mathieu Lamboley

Mathieu Lamboley leads the recording of Symphonologie at Studio Davout, Paris.

The Symphonologie stage and data display, Le Louvre.

Brian Jones of Bang Music, discusses the Symphonologie project with French media.