Event overview
Whitehead Lecture by Axel Chemla--Romeu-Santos
Abstract :
While generative machine learning tends to integrate more broadly our digital ecosystems, most of their current implementations are shaped for service-oriented industries focused automation, normativity and efficient mimicking. This orientation, grounded on global scale extraction and replication of human-produced data, tends to split its reception between techno-positivist reductionism and anthropocentric idealism of creation ; in the meantime, it hinders the exploration and development of local, creativity-oriented uses of such technologies.
Returning to radical "experimentation", we will propose a way that could help to re-affilitate these new techniques with artistical creation. This approach, based on deconstructing and repurposing typical goal-driven machine learning techniques, seeks to encourage human-machine co-creation and mutual surprise through a dynamic exchange between exploration and expectation in the learning process. Rather than enforcing uniformity and compliance, the complexity of these tools can become an opportunity to expand our use of generative technologies and embrace their co-creative potential as new forms of cybernetic materiality. By combining technical and artistic approaches to the state of the art, we aim to outline the artistic, aesthetic, and scientific implications of these uses. Starting from a description of the tools we developed at IRCAM within the ACIDS collective and their integration into both personal and collaborative artistic projects, we aim to develop a critical perspective on how this shift in approach might support the meaningful integration of generative technologies into our creative ecologies.
Biography : Based in Paris, France, Axel Chemla—Romeu-Santos works a researcher, composer, and performer in various fields such as music, theater, and artificial intelligence. Always looking for creativity through technology, he initiated a PhD between IRCAM (Paris) and LIM (Milano) on the creative uses of generative machine learning for sound synthesis. After graduation, he continued a research & creation approach to artificial intelligence and co-founded the ACIDS collective by working both on scientific papers on AI creativity, and experimental musical pieces exploring diverse aspects of these technologies (such as network bending, real-time improvisation, and composition).
Besides institutional works, he also work as musician and composer for the company Théâtre de la Suspension, member of the maximalist electronic music band Daim™, and has his personal project Kenoma.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 4 Jun 2025 | 4:00pm - 5:30pm |
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