Musical Readymades

 

What I realize is that all generators are a form of gaslighting your creative powers. I think the way I want to go is to use them in an ironic context, but I think that would be the reflexive reaction, as opposed to organic craft.

AI generators are generators of postmodernist approaches, which would of course include satire and irony.

Yesterday I was revisiting an Ellsworth Kelly work that inspired me as a purely postmodern work, Window Museum of Modern Art Paris. In 1971 Kelly said: "Everywhere I looked, everything I saw became something to be made and it had to be made exactly as it was, with nothing added. It was a new freedom, there was no longer the need to compose. The subject was there already made, and I could take from everything, it all belonged to me, a glass roof of a factory with its broken and patched panes, lines of a road map, the shape of a scarf on a woman's head, a fragment of Corbusier’s Swiss Pavilion, a corner of a Barque painting, paper fragments in the street. it was all the same, anything goes."

In terms of metamodernism, we would want to sanctify craft, but the allure of postmodernism might be too strong. The question is how do we use both manual craft and performance with what are essentially musical readymades. There is nothing to make and nothing to perform. If you analyze AI music, the logic seems unclear. If you attempt to play along with it, you begin to find ways of recreating it. If a band performed this live, it would be interesting to find the soul in it, while at the same time, sounding just like the "record". 

AI music might be the new radio and records that young musicians play along with, and will emulate. But be wary that in the shadows of AI is a corrupted sense of intention. In the 70s it was all musical. Now it’s gaming a system. Your music, even if you made it with AI, should reflect that cynicism. AI won't generate that cynicism for you--or any emotions or ideas for that matter.