tgiFHI | John Supko, "Maybe Modernism Can Save Us: Reflections on Complexity, Ambiguity, and Serendipity in the Age of AI"

Please join us for the next speaker in the tgiFHI series, John Supko.

This talk proposes a rediscovery of certain aspects of modernism--its elevation of complexity, ambiguity, contradiction, formal experimentation, and the art-science nexus--as an antidote for a culture increasingly intoxicated by speed, convenience, and quantification. While not caused by AI, this condition is epitomized and exacerbated by AI's widespread, uncritical adoption. The irony is painful: we have never had more powerful, accessible computational tools, yet we use them to litter the internet with forgettable mediocrity. If we want a world in which matter for reading, looking, and listening holds and repays our attention, we will have to consider AI as a tool that only works with extensive--and iterative--human intervention. But this intervention cannot be done at speed; in fact, working with AI's vast capacities for serendipitous connection and discovery should only slow us down further. Drawing on works and ideas from modernist literature, art, and music, I will share my own approach to composing music with AI, including software systems I have designed, and how I believe revisiting modernism can guide our use of technology to discover pleasurable difficulty, generative ambiguity, and a way for artmaking and delectation to exist meaningfully in the future.

The work of composer John Supko explores intersections: chance and intention; conventional music notation and real-time score generation; sound and spoken text; installation and performance; human and computer creativity. He is a recipient of the Fulbright and Georges Lurcy Fellowships, both for Paris, France, where he studied at the Ecole Normale de Musique. His music has won numerous prizes and grants, been performed across North America, Europe, and Australia, published in collaborative editions with the poet Philippe Denis by Collection Mémoires and by Harpo &, and released on the New Amsterdam and Cotton Goods labels. His 2014 album s_traits (with Bill Seaman) was named in "Best of 2014" recording lists in The NY Times and The Boston Globe. Supko and Seaman's THE_OPER&, an evening-length multimedia opera, was premiered by the Lorelei Ensemble at the Duke University Rubenstein Arts Center in 2018. He is currently Associate Professor of Music with a secondary appointment in Theater Studies.

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