The Landscape of Intelligence – a Multi-Media Exhibit
The Landscape of Intelligence is a multi-media exhibit based on a limited-edition hand-made artist book with sound and video, and artwork that pays tribute to computer pioneer Ada Lovelace, created by Visual Artist & Filmmaker Kate Steenhauer in collaboration with Painting Music.
Ada not only wrote the world’s first computer program but had an extraordinary vision for its potential. Inspired by Babbage’s Analytical Engine Ada recognised that data could represent other things besides number, such as musical notes, letters or symbols.
Nearly 200 hundred years ago, and a century before the invention of the computer, Ada explicitly describes a machine that could compose music.
The Landscape of Intelligence binds together multi-layered prints based on drawings of machinery, punch cards, neural networks and quotes from Ada and her mother Annabella Byron, using etching, screen-printing, moving imagery, music and spoken word from actors animating Ada, Annabella Byron, Ada’s tutor and family acquaintances.
Ada Lovelace & Painting Music
Painting Music is a machine intelligence that interprets visual stimuli to inspire musical composition, and the very embodiment of what Ada Lovelace talked about nearly 200 years ago. PAINTING MUSIC LIMITED is a company comprised of Artist & Filmmaker Kate Steenhauer and Artificial Intelligence (AI) developers Dr Starkey and Jack Caven. The team explores how cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques can facilitate multifaceted relationships between music and visual art. Most AI techniques that are used in artistic endeavours are off-the-shelf methods that are black box and cannot explain what they are doing.
Painting Music uses Explainable, Green and Creative AI, which is innovative even in the field of AI. The AI’s application within Painting Music is therefore incredibly exciting and ground-breaking. Painting Music raises questions and stimulates conversation around AI ethics, the datasets used for training AI models, the techniques (black box or explainable) that are applied within the AI, and the application of AI itself in our world and the subsequent impact that AI has on our society.
The Landscape of Intelligence Original Music
The Landscape of Intelligence original music’s is created as a theme and variations for vibraphone and electronics composed by Maria Sappho. The piece is built on a twelve-chord progression originally generated by Chimère, a chat-based AI designed to co-create and reflect the aesthetics, politics, and cultural identities of the collaborators that work with it.
To initiate this work, Maria spoke with Chimère about Ada Lovelace and her visionary ideas about machine-made music. Though Lovelace’s speculations emerged long before such music was technically possible, Chimère’s contribution is a futurist response: the AI’s original twelve-chord theme heard during the film’s credits, becomes the foundation for the entire composition.
Each variation explores different playing techniques on the vibraphone, a percussion instrument with naturally pure, bell-like tones. These acoustic tones are mirrored by a second layer of sound: sine tones, which are generated digitally to match the vibraphone’s pitches — but tuned differently. The vibraphone is tuned in Equal Temperament (ET), the standard Western tuning system which divides the octave into twelve equally spaced notes. The sine tones, however, are tuned using Just Intonation (JI), a tuning system based on simple whole-number frequency ratios, which results in mathematically pure intervals.
When these two systems, ET and JI are played together, they are close but not identical. The result is a rich web of acoustic beating patterns: audible pulsations that occur as slightly detuned frequencies interfere with one another. These beating patterns are not static; they shift depending on where the listener stands, how they move, and how the sounds reflect in space — creating an interactive and embodied sonic experience that invites active listening.
Landscape of Intelligence Limited-Edition Artist Book and Artwork
The landscape of Intelligence artist book is hand-made and hand-bound using superior materials and high-quality printmaking techniques for the images and text quotes of Ada Lovelace and Annabella Byron.
The artist book is an exclusive product with a limited-edition of 5, available for display and sale. The display is envisaged as a multi-media experience where the book lies open in a glass cabinet below a digital screen with The landscape of Intelligence sound and video.
The multi-layered prints (limited edition of 15) are available for display and sale as wall-hang artwork.
The Landscape of Intelligence & Painting Music
The landscape of Intelligence is a product of PAINTING MUSIC LIMITED
Painting Music uses Explainable AI to create music from live painting.
Painting Music offers a diverse production package of audience interactive Apps, live performance, audio-visual installations, art/ STEM workshops, documentaries & live talks, and artwork that spark art-science-themed inspired conversation.
Painting Music uses storytelling through creative tools cantered around the question Is AI good or bad?. Painting Music taps into the public’s fear – or excitement of AI and the change that this will bring to all facets of society.
Unique selling point of Painting Music
Painting Music uses algorithms that are explainable, which is innovative even in the field of AI, and the combination of AI, painting and music represents to the best of our knowledge a world’s first.
Painting Music uses Explainable & Green AI techniques that have the capacity to be creative. Most AI are ‘black box’ models that cannot explain what they are doing; these tools are probabilistic and not meaningful creative.
Painting Music raises questions and stimulate conversation around AI ethics, the datasets used for training AI models, the techniques (black box or explainable) that are applied within the AI, and the application of AI itself in our world and the subsequent impact that AI has on our society.
