The second night at Bodeek will open the playground for Ato No Mae and their innumerable mobile musical objects and the bass bray harp of Rhodri Davies, preceded by a lecture-performance by Jennifer Walshe on making art and music in times of AI.
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13 Ways of Looking at AI, Art & Music (Talk)
In early 2024 Walshe’s long-form essay 13 Ways of Looking at AI, Art & Musicwas published by Unsound. The essay offers a unique framework for looking at artwork made using AI, arguing that we should regard such artworks from multiple positions, simultaneously. In this talk, Walshe discusses 13 Ways of Looking at AI, Art & Music, and why AI can be viewed as fan fiction, an energy drink, and, however improbably, boobs.
Over the past decade composer and vocalist Jennifer Walshe has worked with, through and around AI, creating a body of work by turns playful and anarchic, serious and thought-provoking. ULTRACHUNK, a collaboration with the artist and technologist Memo Akten, involved Walshe spending a year creating a bespoke dataset of videos of herself vocalising, in order to train an AI to generate an audiovisual version of herself to improvise with live. In A Late Anthology of Early Music, Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance, an album of the year in The Wire, The Quietus and The Irish Times, she used machine learning to re-imagine the early history of Western music. For The Text Score Dataset 1.0, Walshe spent five years collecting over 3,000 text scores to test the ability of different models to produce Fluxus 2.0.
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Ato no Mae means “Before a Trace”, and is the collaborative unit of Takako Minekawa – who debuted as a singer in the early 1990s and has since become a leading voice in the field of improvisation – and Takahiro Kawaguchi, active since 2004 in both improvisation and sound art. Their performances fluidly cross boundaries, incorporating found objects, self-built instruments, keyboards, and voice. What they create goes beyond music itself, leaving behind an atmosphere, a presence, and traces within the space. Particularly in site-specific works that activate the entire venue, their performances are often described as resembling scenes from theater or cinema. The name “Before a Trace” reflects their philosophy: the traces that emerge after a performance are not mere remnants, but vital components of the work itself – an essential outcome that defines their artistic practice. Co-curated with In vitro.
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Telyn Wrachïod
“It appears that on the old Welsh harps of the sixteenth century there were pegs or brays emerging from the string-holes, in Welsh called gwrachïod, (Mersenne called them harpions), which could be adjusted to press on the strings. In later times these brays caused a buzzing effect which added a percussive sound for dancing…” – Osian Ellis, The Story of the Harp in Wales
“Precise, angled brays / Speaking every profound feeling.” “Ceimion wrachïod cymmwys / Yn siarad pob teimlad dwys.”
(From a cywydd requesting a harp by Huw Machno FL. 1560-1637)
Rhodri Davies is a harpist, improviser, composer, and multidisciplinary artist. He plays harp, bray harp, horsehair harp, and electric harp, and builds wind, water, ice, dry ice, and fire harp installations. His work explores experimental sounds, extended techniques, and collaborations with other artists, continually expanding the expressive possibilities of the harp across solo and ensemble contexts. For this performance, he will play the bray harp.
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