Nostophiliac AI

PROJECT
We interact daily with algorithms that emulate human perception and collective memory. By trying to communicate with us, the algorithms sound, look and behave more and more like us by reflecting our perception and memory back to us.

What if we could play through those AI tools with the listener’s sense of familiarity by using shared cultural signs, tropes, or archetypes? Or if those AI tools become instruments of manipulation, taking advantage of the spectator’s intimacy of memories?

Third prize at the Musicworks Electronic Music Composition Contest, Toronto

Duchamp’s AI Transformations

We investigate & explore the relationship between collective & individual memory reflected & manipulated through AI: the concept of the “found object” & its algorithmic transformation of meaning.

The network, fed with familiar audiovisual “found objects”, generates a progressive alteration, a dream-like transformation of meaning, an endless change of scale to a disorienting and familiar dream reality.

Giacometti’s AI Transformations

On the musical side,  an AI feedback network that listens to familiar sound objects generates a continuous sound transformation. On the visual side, a generative adversarial network represents a collective artificial memory and perception.

Xenakis’s AI Transformations

Each time, the sound and image transformations create a personal narrative, a phrase, a gesture for the spectator. The results generate a collective manipulation of nostalgia experienced as a series of short music video screenings or in an exhibition format made from a multi-screen and multi-speaker installation.  

Xenakis’s AI Transformations

SCREENINGS/PERFORMANCES

  • AI Music Creativity Conference-Festival (Japan)
  • Sound-Image Festival (London)
  • Resilience Festival (Italy)
  • Passages of Time/A.D. Gallery (University of North Carolina, USA)
  • Technarte Conference (Bilbao, Spain)
  • Provocation Ideas Festival (Toronto, Canada)
  • MusLab Festival (Guayaquil, Ecuador)
  • International Short Film Week (JukeBoxx NewMusic Award – Germany)
  • Filmgalerie Leerer Beutel cinema (Regensburg, Germany)

CREDITS
All music and visuals created by Phivos-Angelos Kollias
Funded by MusikFonds e.V., Berlin