Short report on today’s work:

A four hour session started as quick 20-30 minutes regrouping – that’s a synonym for checking on the plan so far and readjusting it. I haven’t looked into all the stuff I have layed out in Asana (all online courses and reading I’m in delay with), I wanted to refresh my memory and plans about the Jitakami instrument project. That is why I didn’t fiddle too much with the study line.

Let me first go over what was done further on today and then come back to evaluation of past two months.

I worked a bit on basic general concept that the Jitakami engine prototype should follow. The idea is that basicly there’s some kind of top conductor process that overlooks the composition. Conductor is controlled by the user via a touchscreen GUI. Conductor is able to intelligently launch and control agents/workers/operators/sequencers – these are possibly separate algorithms or functions that in turn create actual sequences of events – probably SuperCollider’s Patterns (or Events or Streams?) and deploy them to the concrete timeline.

I arrived at the question “can a function generate a pattern somehow” and off I was into SuperCollider Help system where I started to work on “Understanding Streams, Patterns and Events” tutorial and few hours took me to go through a first part (out of 7). I learned some basic stuff about Streams but the feeling is I don’t know enough yet, so I think I should be working on this tutorial daily for few hours.

To go back and reflect on this last month or two especially with regard to installation at Kapelica and A.I.:

At the beginning of the month (August) I managed to work on pretty difficult rephrasing of the project – kinda refocusing and trying to find more narrow path to produce material and then to rework on the audio-visual of the installation. I came with some interesting material on the area of rare earth elements, did a lot of research, but then felt like I’m not sure how to proceed and kinda left it there. So the installation was not upgraded into another version that I would be satisfied with and today, just few days before the closing of the exhibition, I feel like I failed to do something I liked, something that said something articulated (in an art’s own way) about Artificial Intelligence.

Next week I’m leaving for Linz to be at Ars Electronica festival, and especially their AI x Music part, but I must say I’m very frustrated by the term. It’s just too loaded with hype and it encopases too huge range of disciplines and approaches to actually mean anything but hyper-bloated phantasm.