I did a clap
Our triptych is called 'strange loops'
so what makes a loop strange?
Well a loop clearly joins back to the beginning
but a strange loop is one where
there seems to be a climbing hierarchy
things seem to climb higher and higher
until suddenly you find yourself back right where you started
I think my favourite example of a strange loop is that classic picture of Escher's
where people seem to be climbing a staircase and they're climbing higher and higher
but suddenly the staircase doubles back on itself and they're right back where
they started
In Douglas Hofstadter's, book he references Escher as
a visual representation of the concept of a strange loop
What I'm trying to do in my work is to
add a time element to that
so that you can experience in the Barbican, the transformation
actually take place, and to create feedback loops within the space so that
you can actually kind of enter into the work and experience it from a new perspective
I make music with algorithms and machine learning and sometimes it's
interactive, so I think the area which I'm most
interested in with 'Strange Loops' is how if you make a piece of music which is
intelligence in an intelligence system and you're listening to it and you're
reacting to it and maybe it's reacting to you
that creates this kind of feedback loop which is this very sort of strange perceptual experience
Strange Loops are really important to me as a mathematician because Kurt Gödel
an Austrian logician use them to prove that mathematics has limitations
there are true statements about mathematics which can't be proved
true within a system of mathematics
Mathematics and music have always had
some sort of eternal connection, the notes we find harmonic have some
mathematical relationship, rhythm is all about number, but actually I think
it's the structure of a piece which actually has a mathematical shape to it
and that's why someone like Bach is using ideas of symmetry and little
algorithms to create his work
Imagine we broaden that question to saying how a
sound and mathematics linked and I think there's so many parallels between the
two, the obvious one perhaps being the patterns that exist in parallels
I think one of the most important things about music which might be very difficult to
describe mathematically is how we perceive it and how we listen to it and
then what that is what their changes over time in relation to the work
because I think that's a very big part of what a piece of music actually is
Didn't that happen ages ago?
There's definitely a certain percentage of
anyone's practice that can be replaced by machines but there's something about
intuition and inference, which were very very hard to replace
I'm gonna say no,
but that I think at some point machines will make great art for other
machines and I think that humans will like quite a lot of that, but really the
things that will like it the most will be machines
um
The reason I say that is
that to make a human art, human art comes from human perception, so, in order to
be able to make human art, you need to perceive the world as a human being, so
we already know how to make human beings
Computers, AI, and machine learning are
becoming so sophisticated it's almost developing its own kind of
intuition, and we're beginning to see many interesting examples of music, art,
poetry, literature, even maybe mathematics, which is being created by machines
I still think there's a long way to go before they can really challenge the
great artists, but it certainly is an exciting time
As technology develops faster and faster, I certainly have a sense that we live in
an increasingly complex world, and I think the arts actually is going to be
very important as a tool to help us understand that changing world that we live in
Art will always be something where we use tools and really
just the latest set of tools that we're developing are intelligent and we've
been using these kind of machine learning, and very intelligent
algorithmic processes for a long time, but now we're kind of consciously
thinking about them as that, I think you know as we start to use them more
extensively, they'll just become part of our creative process
I think the future for technology and the arts is that technology is going to help us to
explore areas of our creative world that we don't realise are out there, I think
we're a little bit like in being in some huge great big room but quite often
we're just stuck in one corner and we don't realize how much else is out there
and the machine is going to help to be like a torch to shine on our own
creative process. I think sometimes we behave too much like machines and the
machines are going to help us behave more like humans
you