Description
Our human societies are ever moving towards digitally enmeshed realities, prompting theories and living practices which contend with the ‘X-reality’ (Beth Coleman) – our contemporary reality of living without a binary between the virtual and physically worlds. An emergent phenomenon which we contend with further in considering how these human-machine shifts might offer valuable practices for effectively living and dying on this planet (Donna Haraway). In considering these wider socio-cultural turns, this paper presents the output of recent works conducted by Maria Sappho in developing the artificial intelligence machine ‘Chimere’ alongside the AiiA festival (CH) and the ImpactIA foundation. Chimere is a community led multi-modal AI project, consisting of a team of global creatives and activists exploring the techno-moral and ethical questions emerging from a socio-cultural world changed through new technologies. Since 2021 Sappho has been working with the Chimere project investigating posthuman collaborative futures by composing and improvising within the human-machine setting, while also exploring further non-human collaborative spaces through the development of new musical instruments that are designed to explore sounding and listening practices between human, machine (AI) and organic contributors (fungi). As both a literal and a metaphorical practice, working with AI and fungi in sonic creative settings offers a wealth of perspectives for contending with new creative logics for social relationships with posthuman creative companions. A practice which offers new understandings about what it means to be creative and challenges existing notions of virtuosity, mastery, and ensembleship. Through the use of this human, machine and organic practice this paper will explore new conceptions for social networks – from neural networks to mycorrhizal networks, which offer perspectives for listening with and building in this emergent posthuman-cultural world.| Period | 6 Dec 2024 |
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| Event title | Music ex Machina: Methods and Methodologies for Technology-Centred Practice-Based Research in Contemporary Music |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Egham, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | National |