CTM 2021: Mouse on Mars & Louis Chude-Sokei – AAI

A virtual installation based on the Berlin duo’s new album, an exploration of artificial intelligence.

On their recent album Anarchic Artificial Intelligence (AAI), Berlin duo Mouse on Mars collaborated with writer and scholar Louis Chude-Sokei, a collective of computer programmers and frequent Mouse On Mars percussionist Dodo NKishi, to create an album that explores artificial intelligence as both a narrative framework and compositional tool.

The duo enlisted AI collective Birds on Mars and former SoundCloud programmers Ranny Keddo and Derrek Kindle, who created bespoke speech-modelling software that fed text and voice from Chude-Sokei and producer Yağmur Uçkunkaya into the system, allowing Mouse on Mars to control and play their speech like a synthesizer.

“We have to let AI develop qualities that we attach to humans, like empathy, imperfection, and distraction,” Mouse on Mars’s Jan Werner explains. “Not to avoid machines becoming competitors who will do things faster or better, but because we’ll stay stuck in our selfishness, fear and xenophobia if we do not open up to those new concepts of life machines are able represent.”

In order to present AAI as part of CTM Festival 2021’s online programme, Mouse on Mars reimagined the album as an installation that can be experienced through the festival’s virtual space, Cyberia. The piece is accompanied by visuals, based on computer generated stills by Casey Reas, inventor of the computer graphics language, Processing. Above, Fact presents a video walkthrough of the installation, which you can access through Cyberia until March 14, 2021.

Find more highlights from CTM 2021’s programme in our archive, and look out for more in the coming weeks.

Credits:

Andi Toma: Instruments, Electronics, Production
Jan St. Werner: Instruments, Electronics, Production
Dodo NKishi: Drums, Percussion
Louis Chude-Sokei: Text & Voice
Yagmur Uckunkaya: Voice
Tunde Alibaba: Percussion
Drumno: Drums, Percussion
Nicolas Gorges, Yagmur Uckunkaya, Florian Dohmann, Rany Keddo, Derek Tingle: AI programming
Jürg Andreas Meister, David Meyer: Unity programming & audiovisual design
Casey Reas: Computer Graphics
Rupert Smyth Studio: Art DirectionWritten and produced at Paraverse Studios Berlin 2020