13 Ways Of Looking At AI, Art & Music
Jennifer Walshe
Fundacja Tone Pbk 52pp

“I’m both sublimely excited and blackly horrified about what is coming,” wrote Jennifer Walshe in “Ghosts Of The Hidden Layer”, an essay she delivered at Darmstadt in 2018. If the last two years have seen AI software expand from being a tool of enthusiastic nerds to mainstream ubiquity more rapidly than many anticipated – or are comfortable with – Walshe would be one of those most prepared and least surprised.

As a musician and composer working with extended vocal techniques, her interest in machine learning was fired by the release in 2016 of WaveNet, a neural network that could synthesize the sound of the human voice. Soon, AI-generated versions of Walshe sang on A Late Anthology Of Early Music Vol 1: Ancient To Renaissance, a collaboration with the coding duo Dadabots, and ULTRACHUNK, an audiovisual performance developed with Memo Akten where she duetted live with a glitchy, spectral composite of her own improvisations.

Originally published online in December 2023 by Unsound festival, 13 Ways Of Looking At AI, Art & Music distils much of Walshe’s recent music and writing into an essay infused with her characteristic big ideas, dry humour and gritted teeth. She wisely swerves tidy encapsulating narratives, instead taking cues from Wallace Stevens’s imagistic 1917 poem Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird, and from neural networks’ own messy, multidimensional architecture. For this book edition, Eurico Sá Fernandes and Wooryun Song contribute perky design and witty blackbird themed illustrations that may or may not be AI generated but convey an apt mix of playfulness and glossy unease.

In brief sections that each could have easily been an essay, she offers smart approaches to issues that are fast becoming entrenched arguments. “AI Is Fan Fiction” tackles the questions of artistic ownership that anger AI’s critics, finding both expressive and exploitative potential in audiences’ new generative powers. While many bemoan AI’s use as what Walshe dubs a quick-fix “energy drink”, she maintains that it can provide creative stimulus as much as decay. For her, AI variously teases with the as yet unimaginable (“just over the horizon of the vibe shift”), offers ghostly manifestations akin to Electronic Voice Phenomena, and spawns a whole body of what JG Ballard called “invisible literatures”, inviting a peek behind the technical curtain. Her own experience with ULTRACHUNK – “like improvising with someone in an altered state of consciousness, if that person was also me, high on a drug I’ve never taken” – also prompts her to adopt Donna Haraway’s concept of “companion species” for how humans and AI might co-exist despite vastly different ways of perceiving the world.

If some details, such as the assertion that all AI art draws attention to the means of its creation, have already dated since 2023, Walshe’s main concerns are more salient than ever. “AI Is Boobs” considers the respective computational resources devoted to porn versus breast cancer research, yet she hardly needs to spell out that human capitalist greed is the Scooby-Doo villain behind the mask in a world where search engines are clogged with self-generating gunk (her term) and government appointed fascists use AI to dismantle the mainframe of civil society.

Today’s landscape may feel bleak, but Walshe frames it as a call to take responsibility and demand more control over AI than that offered by a small prompt window. “Can we think much, much weirder?” she asks, issuing a challenge as much to herself as to her readers.