Detail of Refik Anadol’s Infinity Room: Bosphorus (2023) at the Museum of Modern Art, Istanbul, Turkey photo by Steve Paul)
Some months ago, I found myself mesmerized in a room full of pulsing blue waves. It was an immersive, multimedia installation by the Turkish artist Refik Anadol in Istanbul’s Museum of Modern Art. As with Anadol’s monumental, eye-candy creation for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, this production combined the artist’s scientific inquiry — in this case into the life and health of the Bosphorus Strait — with the technological workings of artificial intelligence.
Now some people (notably the art critic Jerry Saltz) dismissed Anadol’s MoMA creation, which was based on the metadata of every object in the museum’s collection, as something like a lava lamp on steroids. But it’s clear that generations of people nurtured by video screens can’t help but be absorbed by these bulbous, oozing, kinetic wonders. Yayoi Kusama’s polka-dotted Infinity Rooms provide another example of funhouse wandering in the guise of art.
Maybe such experiences have become the new opiate of the masses, and maybe that explains the weird, commercially driven and essentially silly attraction of immersive art shows that promote spending a few minutes awestruck while surrounded by projections of, say, oversized paintings by Van Gogh. I mean, looking at a mere canvas anymore is so 20th (or 19th) century.
In any case, Anadol’s work, as I’ve experienced it, is a clear creative advancement and an exception to my general repulsion toward the creative use of AI. I’ve been thinking about his work lately in light of what seems like an alarming invasion of creative activities by the purveyors of AI and the blasé normalization of how the technology is taking over our lives. (See those cuddly ChatGPT commercials on television.)
I posted a mini-screed on Substack a while back where I illustrated the error-strewn, hallucinatory ways of Google’s incessant AI “assistant” (more like a pest). And I fielded an inquiry from a Reuters reporter who wanted to talk about some ill-informed judge’s opinion that writers of biography would be most vulnerable to the impending dominance of AI. But, as I replied, hack writers, including AI, will always hack. The difficult archival and investigative work of the kinds of serious biography that I and my colleagues in the field produce are beyond the ability and hoovering reach of generative AI. (And, yes, I will share in the settlement fund that one AI giant, Anthropic, agreed to finance as a result of the lawsuit that challenged its theft of intellectual properties to train its machine brains.)
The AI debate and critical hand-wringing has been everywhere of late. It even arrived recently at the Linda Hall Library of Science and Technology, whose current exhibit, “The Alchemy of Knowledge: Science and Mystery from Shakespeare to AI,” traces technological change through the words of the bard and the gems of scientific history from the library’s antiquarian book collection. One room of the exhibit presents a metaphorical overload of texts and images, some of it produced with the help of ChatGTP, about artificial intelligence and human culture.
While mulling over the implications of AI, my radar picked up signals from a musician friend in Kansas City, Shawn E. Hansen, who occupies an underappreciated but important place in avant-garde circles. He is a composer and performer of what can be called ambient music but should really be known as something like contemporary abstract concert music. His credentials are impressive — a student of the composer Pauline Oliveros and the jazz musician George Lewis, among others; an expert pipe organist; a professional piano tuner; and a skilled operator of technical wizardry and audiophonic tools.
Hansen recently released a record (downloadable on Bandcamp) of an improvisational session that he, generally on keyboards and synthesizer controls, and guitarist Sterling Holman, of Independence, captured on audiotape some 10 years ago. The tracks on SHSH (a multilayered title derived from their shared initials) are meditative, spacy, and often haunting with their machine-like waves, swells, percussive pellets and accessible rhythms. You’re not likely to dance to them, but you get the idea that the music speaks warmly and intriguingly to a specialized audience. In my mind it seems to reverberate with Refik Anadol’s wavery pulses.
Many years ago, I got acclimated to cutting-edge music while hosting a radio show on KCUR that aired ultra-modern and electronic music by such varied composers as Edgard Varese and Morton Subotnick. Just recently it struck me as positively quaint to see the pipe organist Jan Kraybill operating an electronic keyboard and synthesizer in a profoundly modern (though dating to 1990) and percussive piece (by Kaija Saariaho) played by the Kansas City Symphony.
Shawn Hansen has also been releasing on Bandcamp a series of electronic soundscapes he composed and recorded in a collaboration with visual artist Laura Jacobs for a strikingly original multimedia exhibit in New York. It would take more space than I’ve got to describe its full dimensions, but poetry, color and graphic patterns are among the elements that come into play. (Find videos on YouTube — search for Colored Pathways.)
Given the electronic origins of Hansen’s music, I wondered what he was thinking about the onrush of AI. Of course, he wants nothing to do with it. The current preponderance of soulless, mercenary music generated by AI on streaming services should be a warning sign that something is very amiss.
After a long discussion over coffee, Hansen sent me a pertinent posting about AI and music creation, which took the form of a writer’s interview with Anthropic’s AI creature, Claude. He also sent a quote attributed to OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman: “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.”
It was all rather chilling and enlightening to read, causing Hansen to conclude: “I see ai as a crisis and the attitude in this quote illustrates why. The humans in charge of ai are profiteers, plunderers and colonizers mining our personal data and all of human culture and knowledge, ready to gate it and sell it back to us.”
Musicians, artists and writers generally possess something AI does not, which is the lived human experience out of which they create. That experience includes the accidents, serendipities and epiphanies that shape our arts.
I take my writing nuggets where I find them, and it so happened that as this column was coming toward its close, I switched on Guillermo del Toro’s film adaptation of Frankenstein. A pertinent question it offers is this: “Can you contain your fire, Prometheus?”
Of course, as we’re reminded by the Linda Hall exhibit, technological and scientific paradigm shifts have long disrupted and defined human existence. We can choose to participate, or not, in the complexity of technology, but tell it to the masses who can’t seem to walk their dogs without staring at their pocket computers, er, phones.
I can accept that AI can be a useful tool in some quarters, but not in mine. And not in the way it seems to be invading at least some of the arts. The tech bros want nothing more than to turn their AI brains into human equivalents. Sad to say, but I’m not sure any of us has the power to stop them.