Workshop on Interactive AI Systems for Live Audiovisual Performance

The proliferation of generative AI tools has raised important questions around how we (especially artists) create. Using AI tools in the creative process can blur the lines between creativity and curation and change how we navigate our relationship with labor and craft. It can feel as if we do less to do more, synthesizing previous or external inputs into new material with the help of generative AI systems. What does this do to our relationship with our creative labor, with other human beings, and to our aesthetic leanings? In this module, we explore the possibilities of human-centered, humanistic approaches to instrument building, tool design, and audiovisual performance, prioritizing human interaction and sensible curation in the creative process with AI. Our approach seeks to foreground the value of the human artistic process over any lens that views tools, products, or technical novelty as ends in themselves.

In a broader sense, one might ask if audiovisual performance is a “problem” that needs to be “solved”? In this course, we resist the notion that AI tools will “solve” anything about the creative process, but rather that they may provide new possibilities for the artist to synthesize their work via radical new combinations of (multi)-media. 

In this workshop, we will explore a suite of interactive tools, including the ChucK music programming language, ChAI, the Pandora audiovisual live coding environment, and Wekinator. Participants are also encouraged to incorporate any other external tools that may enhance the workshop experience and align with its objectives.

Besides acquiring skills using a variety of softwares, learning about creative applications machine learning, and developing a multimodal understanding of data and is communication,  the most important educational outcome of this course is exposure to a creative mindset that centers process and affords a mode of creative questioning in the use of generative tools.

Details:

Time: 10:00 am - 5:00 pm PT

Location: Gates Computer Science Building, Room 119, 353 Jane Stanford Way, CA 94503

Bios

Celeste Betancur Gutierrez

I am a musician, Digital artist and researcher from Medellin, Colombia, where I have worked in many collaborations, album recordings and live sessions; also I have worked as software developer for Chmusick toolkit, a library to make ChucK language an algorave language. I am the author of CQenze, a DSL designed to be a first experience language for non-coders. Also, I developed CineVivo, a graphics render engine for rendering live coding languages. I am  one of the founders and coders of Algo0ritmos, the first live coding artistic collective in Medellin.

Currently I am PhD Candidate in Computer Music at CCRMA - Stanford working for the ChucK development team.

Ge Wang

Ge Wang is an Associate Professor at Stanford University in Music and, by Courtesy, Computer Science. He is also a Senior Fellow and an Associate Director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. He researches the artful design of tools, toys, games, musical instruments, programming languages, expressive VR experiences, and interactive AI systems with humans in the loop. Ge is the architect of the ChucK audio programming language, the director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra and the Stanford VR Design Lab. He is the Co-founder of Smule and the designer of the Ocarina and Magic Piano apps for mobile phones. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, Ge is the author of Artful Design: Technology in Search of the Sublime, a photo comic book about how we shape technology—and how technology shapes us.

Host or Publisher Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI)