Lauren Flood: "AI and the Ethnography of Musical Futures"

"AI and the Ethnography of Musical Futures: Prototype, Update, Real-Time, and DeepDream." Lauren Flood is a postdoctoral fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center, University of Pennsylvania. In this talk, she considers the intersections between the Maker Movement (the practice of building do-it-yourself (DIY) projects) and growing trends in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly machine learning. Drawing on fieldwork in Berlin, she shows how Makers working with machine learning are constantly engaged in a tug-of-war between past, present, and future. Words that capture this struggle-prototype, update, real-time, and DeepDream (the latter of which describes hallucinatory computer-manipulated art)-particularly dominate how Makers build musical machines and instruments.