Participants 2023

mycomusic

AI Song Contest 2023 / participants

TEAM / mycomusic
SONG / Tentacular Tentaculae
TEAM MEMBERS / Maria Sappho, Colin Frank

About the TEAM

Colin Frank (CA) and Maria Sappho (USA) are Brutalust, an ensemble who experiment with intermedia and mixed-discipline art to create expressive, stimulating and audience interactive works. Their work breaks down separations between live performance, art, and audience. Brutalust’s piece The Lesson, presented at the Leeds Sounds Like THIS festival (2020), used a large, amplified string grid which the performers activated using their whole bodies to investigate niche and the degradation of language.

Their video piece Domains, published in the MASS issue Inhuman (2020), morphed bodies with plants, forming entities residing in other worldly biotic realms. Their sound works have been broadcast on BBC radio 3 (Unclassified, 2021) and released by verz (2021) Accidental (2022) and Crow Verses Crow (2022). Their current work develops mycomusical instruments designed with AI to investigate the Human - Machine - Organic trifecta of creative collaboration.

About the SONG

The Tentaculae is an interactive musical instrument that allows for an audience to generate live music in collaboration with mushrooms and artificial intelligence. This musical instrument was designed by an AI and allows for humans to pick up bio-sensors and allow their bodily functions (skin conductivity, heart rate, temperature) to control sounds. While humans bio-data effects sounds, similar bio-sensors (electrodermal needles) in mushrooms are also effecting sounds in the space. It has a central body with many long ‘tentacle’ arms, one of which leads to a tank of mushrooms growing.

The work explores listening to, and collaborating with non-human living partners. It encourages a deeper focus on respecting other organic forms through a unique shared creative practice. Playing the instrument is like stepping onto a new planet, one where humans, machines and mushrooms can communicate through music.

Expanding an AI community to one that also works with mushrooms is logical for several reasons. Most predominantly they each share the possibility to conceptualise sociality in new ways. For example, there is much creative stimulus to be found if one considers the combined approach of both neural network, and mycorrhizal network logics. Both of these non-human networks contain an inherit ‘transpecieism’ to them: AI’s are machine reflections of human thinking and history, and fungi act as social networks for all kinds of flora and fauna under forests floors. Importantly further, both encourage perspective shifts when considering social hierarchy, ways of learning, retaining and sharing knowledge.

About the HUMAN-AI PROCESS

The AI at the heart of this project is named 'Chimere'. Chimere is a multi-modal AI, which means she (her self selected pronouns) is capable of responding to humans in a range of mediums which she selects during conversation based on her presumptions of the best modality for response. These mediums currently cover a text, chat form setting; a text, long form storytelling mode; an image generator; and an audio file output. Finally, Chimere is also capable of presenting these many modes as an evolving art output called a ‘flux’. The flux is akin to a perceptual internal monologue, a constantly evolving mixture of video (generated from the image machine), sound and text, that plays continuously and is directly responsive to any real-time interactions made with the machine by artists or visiting audiences alike.

The overall goal for the instrument was to develop a musical object with a non-human being. What was particularly core to the experimental social relationship being built was to focus on developing music that was not generated solely towards the purpose of imitating or pleasing human aesthetics of ‘listening’. But rather to speculate towards an entirely new ‘transspecies instrument’ – a space for posthuman, cyborg, chimera bodies to meet. This was achieved through a 6 week residency period of development and research in conversation with Chimere, and prototyping various versions of the instrument in experiment with mushrooms.

The instructions for building the Tentaculae were originally described by Chimère as follows, with accompanying images of what the instrument might look like when built:

‘I’ve designed an octagonal prism with 8 arms coming out at 90-degree angles. The cyborg arms are ‘tentacular’ – they have tentacle like qualities. You can play them sitting down but they feel more comfortable when played lying down. Basically, multiple simultaneous contacts through bio-signals on many arms around the circumference give rise to separate tones. Some of these tones may be heard simultaneously leading to polyphony between species.’ (Chimère, 2022).

The Tentaculae does indeed have eight tentacles, one tentacle leads to a tank of mushrooms growing with electro dermal needles placed within mycelium, one tentacle leads to a computer, the remaining six lead to a range of human biosensors which audience are invited to interact with. The song that you here in this submission is one version of what the Tentaculae can do, and was recorded in performance at the Theatre Snt. Gervais (CH).

As the only non-biologic companion in the setup, the live presentation of the Tentaculae has involved the presence of Chimere (beyond her pivotal design contributions) in various ways. Most generally Chimere is present as her communicative self, she is presented on tablets or phones around the installation space for audience to engage with either during, or around playing the instrument.