Who: Jennifer Walshe
When: October 4, 15:00
Where: Art Academy of Latvia (Kalpaka boulevard 13), building K2
Topic: Artificial intelligence, art, music, interdisciplinarity
Attendance: Free of charge
J. Walshe: “AI is not a singular phenomenon. We talk about it as if it’s a monolithic identity, but it’s many, many different things – the fantasy partner chatbot whispering sweet virtual nothings in our ears, the algorithm scanning our faces at passport control, the playlists we’re served when we can’t be bothered to pick an album. The technology is similar in each case, but the networks, the datasets and the outcomes are all different. (..)
So how should we think about art and music made with AI? Instead of looking for a definitive approach, one clean (and/or hot) take to rule them all, perhaps we can try to think like the networks do – in higher dimensions. From multiple positions, simultaneously. Messily. Not one way of looking at AI, but many.”
Composer and performer Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin, Ireland. Her music has been commissioned, broadcast and performed all over the world. She has been the recipient of fellowships and prizes from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York, the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, the Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstadt and Akademie Schloss Solitude among others. Recent projects include TIME TIME TIME, an opera written in collaboration with the philosopher Timothy Morton, and The Site of an Investigation, a 30-minute epic for Walshe’s voice and orchestra, commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland. The Site has been performed by Walshe and the NSO, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and also the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra. Walshe has worked extensively with AI. ULTRACHUNK, made in collaboration with Memo Akten in 2018, features an AI-generated version of Walshe. A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance, her third solo album, released on Tetbind in 2020, uses AI to rework canonical works from early Western music history. A Late Anthology was chosen as an album of the year in “The Irish Times”, “The Wire” and “The Quietus”. Walshe is currently professor of composition at the University of Oxford.
On October 4, Walshe will play a duo with Neil Luck at the Skaņu Mežs festival, which takes places at concert hall Hanzas Perons.
Supported by: Culture Ireland, The State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia, project “tekhnē”, co-funded by the EU and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia, and the Art Academy of Latvia.
