Fine Arts and Music Collected Works - Research Publications

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Expanded AI: Interdisciplinary Human-Machine Collaborations

Walton, R ; David, P ; Lim, M ; Macindoe, A ; Cornish-Ward, S (Art and Australia, Issue 58, 2, 2023)

Expanded AI: Interdisciplinary Human-Machine Collaborations was hosted by Art + Australia on November 9 at Science Gallery Melbourne. The panel, led by artist and researcher Robert Walton, was an interdisciplinary discussion between Monica Lim, David Pledger, Alisdair Macindoe and Stanton Cornish-Ward. The panellists from theatre, dance, music, film and art share recent and current projects that emoploy AI, from architectural interventions, algorithmic choreographic processes, the development of a piano-based AI-generated echo chamber and the use of image generating technologies in film and history projects.
[S+T+ARTS Prize Honorary Mention] Child of Now

Walton, R ; Pierce, J ; Coleman, CG (Ars Electronica, 2023)

Child of Now is a mixed-reality artwork that calls on citizens to co-create, shape, and nurture an indigenized, sustainable, and fairer vision of the next century for an imagined child born in 2023. Jury Statement: What will we pass on to the next generation? For those of us living in the present, it is crucial to have a future-oriented mindset that considers those who will live in the next era. The Child of Now project has the potential to bring about a significant social impact by addressing global challenges based on unique linguistic and environmental history, starting from the Australian experience with a possibility for further regional development. Referring to the concept of ‘everywhen’ and collaborating with the First Nations and author Claire G. Coleman for creating the storytelling, the artists built an immersive experience. Through the use of the volumetric capture system, the “digital holograms” created can be experienced in a VR environment. In this way, the project enables people to know the past and see the future through an installation, providing an important opportunity for individuals to think about their personal situation. Experienced as an immersive tactile audio-visual installation, Child of Now invites visitors to enter the Aboriginal concept of the ‘everywhen,’ a place where all time is present, to observe the last 10,000 years of life on the Birrarung river and acknowledge the resilience of First Nations peoples who survived climate emergencies and settler invasion. The experience continues by inviting visitors to imagine all the children being born in the present moment, now. It then accelerates time to the year in the future that the Child of Now is the visitor’s age. In this moment the artwork asks the visitor to imagine themselves as, and to become, the Child of Now in the future. It creates a portrait of their performance as audio and ‘digital hologram’ (volumetric video) recordings. Each holographic portrait of the visitor as the Child of Now is replayed in the final section of the experience: a VR archive set beneath the river where all the Children of Now are located in age order in the stream of time. Collectively, visitors crowd-source the ‘future archive’ of the Child of Now’s life, populating each day from birth to death, with a body in the form of diverse holographic portraits. The novel approach to volumetric video data, as well as other biodata, informs a symbiotic collective portrait of the current population in the process of imagining the lives of those who inherit our society. The project aspires to democratize and increase participation in future thinking by fostering accessible new tools at the intersection of art, science, and demographics.
The Heart (Video Documentation)

Walton, R ; Joukhadar, Z ; McAtomney, M (IEEE VISAP, 2023)
Stilled Tongues: Performance Protests Silence Surrounding Ghana’s anti-LGBTQ+ Bill

Walton, R (IATC, 2023)

Review: "Mis-sing Reality—The Beast unleashed" by Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi (aka crazinisT artisT). A performance intervention at the Closing Ceremony of the International Federation of Theatre Research, 28 July 2023, The Great Hall, University of Accra, Ghana.
The Heart: Automated Intuition Not Artificial Intelligence.

Walton, RE (Victorian College of the Arts, 2023)

The more I discovered about the machine learning algorithms we were deploying to process the thousands of sensor readings from across the building moment to moment, the more I appreciated that The Heart and its processes would be less about Artificial Intelligence and more precisely what I call Automated Intuition. The Manifold Learning and GAN algorithms produce a residue on a par with habit, similar to how organisms become accustomed to their senses stimulated by their experiences moment to moment, day after day. While the same algorithms are often used to produce so-called ‘artificially intelligent’ results in other applications, I see the automated sifting and sedimentation of live data into persistent shapes and structures formed over long durations more like accruing the circumstances for an immanent intuition. This intuition enables the ability to understand sensations (inputs) instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning, and is therefore more akin to the secrets of the heart than the head. Indeed, as I considered other, more commonly encountered AI applications manipulating text and images, I began to appreciate them as productive forms of automated intuition, not artificial intelligence.
Trauma is...

Rose, S ( 2021)

This is a fixed media work with sound and image composed using the Wave (Genki Instruments 2019). It was germinated through collaboration work with Little Songs of the Mutilated's April 2021 composition game based on Exquisite Corpse (Tanguy et al. 1925). I took from my finished and unfinished audio generated during the week’s contributions. Self-prompts centred on the phenomenology of trauma and exploring embodied experiences through definitions, stimuli (bushfires and other natural disasters), motivations for immortalising horrific moments in media and art of any kind, and how speech alters throughout the duration of an experience. Movements in this piece explored my soma-sensibilities as pertaining to 'flow' (Csikszentmihalyi 2009). Flow remains a sporadic occurrence; though it was fully present in 'First, there was nothing, then it exploded' (Rose 2020).
Crumble

Rose, S ( 2021)

This piece captures the mind splitting apart in attempts to reconcile abuse spiritually and intellectually. The overwhelming anxiety and self-blame give the impression of swimming through memories and fragments of the brain, unable to find a solid footing to concentrate. Some lines are emotionally charged; others intellectualise the experience to neutralise the emotional content. A final layer is taken from a Somatic Experiencing exercise, a trauma-informed therapy developed by Peter Levine. This text is a reconciliation and reaffirming text to reintegrate and own body, mind, and space for the damaged person. The text works through the different states and layers of thought that can arise following sexual trauma. This work was inspired by Laetitia Sonami’s Dreams of Control, Dreams of Chaos (2014) keynote presentation at NIME2014.
Drowning in the Weight of Your Expectations

Rose, S ( 2021)

This is a fixed audiovisual piece which explores the experience of grow-ing up “girl”. The societal pressures and expectations to be this and do that, as contradictions to societies expectations of girls and women. This work was created using gestural controllers to manipulate audio samples and live recordings. The piece begins with low frequencies created to mimic whales and clarinet is altered to mimic bird song. These progress over time to become field recording samples of real birdsong. There is a distant group of female singers singing “Tōhjvo”. The spoken word describes the frustrations growing up female through childhood, adolescence, and into the adult experience in male-dominated professional and academic environments. These experiences are additionally reflected in the private, personal lives of women as everyday sexism. The constant pressure to perform, to be “authentically” and “naturally” feminine – the bearers and organisers of life, with our intellectual contributions to society often dismissed and criticism of the system to be demanding, and “too much”. This work uses sample banks generated by four female or non-binary artists (Sage Pbbbt, Carol Robinson, Zineb Soulaimani, and Laryssa Kim) and was written in collaboration with the Fair_Play and Tsuku Boshi. Self-generated audio was also used in this work. I used two hand-based gestural control systems to manipulate all audio for this piece. The first was GLVD (Rose 2020), and the second was Wave (Genki Instruments 2019). Separate takes were recorded manipulating audio samples in isolation and pairs. The spoken text was effected using GLVD. The video shows an unexpressive woman slowly painting their face white while staring directly into the camera. The image ghosts as black eyes mirror the back-ground. A prismatic effect gradually becomes prominent over time. These references societies expectations of feminine presentation, plastering over issues rather than making the effort to larger changes, and the role that media structures perform in maintaining the status quo.
Feed the Machine

Rose, S ( 2021)

This work was written in collaboration with LSotM. This was a mass collaboration where all project participants were asked to submit 5-second samples for anyone (in the group) to use as sampling material. I used the following anonymous samples: “Feathered Industrial”, “Rhythmic breastfeeding Loop”, “Drums Hits for Dicing”, “SPACELOOP 2021”, “Banjo Glide”, “slow shower drone”, “Big Skip Door”, “Wavy Grass Sound”, “5 sec sound (plane)”, “Playing a Seesaw”, “Gold Pearls Brigid Burke”, “Vocal bird sounds”, and “Reverbed vocal sample” (13 total). I also used my contribution, “MassLSotM2021 sslllllllrrrrwwp”. I clipped around 2 seconds from each sample. The intro section is a wall of noise containing all sounds used in their entirety before any manipulation. This piece is a hard-pop-electronic work, edging onto a retro hip-hop feel in the drums and percussion. It leans heavily towards experimental music through these more contemporary genres. The instruments and some vocal lines and effects were built from the samples provided. Samples were gesturally and non-gesturally manipulated in various ways, including time stretching and pitch shifting. The lyrics explore the constant pressure in modern times to feed the content beasts (Id Est, traditional media companies and social media).
Ode to My Frayed Nerves

Rose, S ( 2021)

Ode to My Frayed Nerves is a composition that metaphorically represents the sensations that occur in my left hand due to a physical trauma. I have nerve damage in my left hand on the outer side of my palm and fifth digit because of a catastrophic slip with a utility knife while working. When the area is touched, electrical signals fire in my hand in places where I am not being touched. If the touch is unexpected, I go momentarily blind, in that I can’t concentrate on what I see with my eyes I can only “see” the sensation. To reflect the current physical situation and a simplified version of the journey from normal functioning to not, the vocal line builds through looping outward-to-inward phonation (including overtones, undertones, and multiphonics), stacking chromatically as a filter gradually exposes audible frequencies over time. As the filter opens past 10,000Hz, the audio quality is degraded through fuzz and grain delay effects which become a fuzzy noise, like dialling into television static. The piece uses the technologically mediated female voice, the singer uses extended vocal techniques. Please listen to this piece with headphones for the best experience.

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