The broadcast will begin modestly and develop throughout the year, intervened upon by a series of public workshops held with experimental publishing collective Varia (represented by amy pickles, Cristina Cochior, and Joana Chicau), where participants will collectively read, comment, and annotate the broadcaster’s predictions. This process of reparative reading, stewarding, and giving new reference points and expressive abilities to the broadcaster is in the interest of directing the algorithmic process towards one of many preferable futures.
Workshop details are available at the bottom of this page. The stream is available to hear via a public web portal at ahnen.in, which also includes a transcript of generated text and its annotations, with reference to original sources where possible. Visitors may also add their own contributions - thoughts on being »a good ancestor,« suggestions for reading materials and their own annotations.
Concept
The concept of inter-generational thinking is present in many traditional cultures across the globe, but has been most famously espoused by the Iroquois political doctrine »The Seventh Generation Principle,« that emphasises political decisions must be made considering their effects seven generations into the future. Similar themes found articulation in the 20th century with the moral philosophy of American virologist Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine and a renown altruist, who acknowledged the societal importance of long-term accountability in his imperative that »our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.« However, we live in a time where short-term thinking is the cultural norm, a reality that is exacerbated by the accelerating pace of information streams on social media and the pervasive move-fast-break-things philosophy of those who build and promote these platforms. Within such a media space there is little time or space for forethought. Those who champion long-term thinking are drowned out by a driving, ephemeral pipeline of other voices, eager to rapidly displace one another.
»In Search of Good Ancestors / Ahnen in Arbeit« is an experiment in generative radio meant to modulate the attention of the listener, to allow the savoring of slow speech and audible nuance. The stream will feature an artificial broadcaster, a bespoke voice synthesis system that utilizes current deep learning techniques in voice synthesis and style transfer to be able to shift fluidly through speech and song, words and soundscapes, reading the text as if tracing slowly over the letters, probing them and unsettling them. The concept of the work is to explore the idea of long-term thinking, and how this idea is wrapped up in the endeavors of prediction, risk analysis, and memory that happen at many levels of human society and consciousnesses.
In the spirit of this theme, the musical composition is governed by a »zoo« of simulation algorithms, essentially, complex systems that cannot be solved »analytically«, through abstract reasoning, and therefore must be run computationally through imaginary time, as simulations. Classic examples of such simulations include climate forecasts, stock market predictions, dynamics of human brains, and the Lotka-Volterra equations, which simulate the life cycles of predators and prey within an ecosystem. The broadcaster will perform texts produced by a predictive process. Beginning with a small set of texts, including Jonas Salk’s 1977 lecture »Are we being Good Ancestors?« and Chief Oren Lyon's 1992 address to the United Nations, it attempts to predict what words should come next based on its previous memories, an approach to mathematical future-prediction called »autoregression.«
Stay Tuned...
The Kontinuum stream will feature regularly all through the year 2022 on Deutschlandfunk Kultur, the cultural channel of Germany’s national public radio, as well as the ORF Ö1 Kunstradio programme. It will be broadcast whenever there is a gap in the schedule as a way to break from news, talks, radio dramas, documentaries, and music, onto a different but ever-present sonic reality. The stream will be presented at and start in conjunction with CTM Festival 2022.
Commissioned as part of the CTM Radio Lab, led by CTM Festival and Deutschlandfunk Kultur – Radio Art / Klangkunst in collaboration with Goethe-Institut, ORF musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst, Ö1 Kunstradio, and The Wire magazine.