Gérard Assayag
in Bernard Lubat, Gérard Assayag, Marc Chemillier. Artisticiel / Cyber-Improvisations. Phonofaune, 2021, Dialogiques d’Uzeste. ⟨hal-03542917⟩, 2021
Abstract: Is it possible to conceive a kind of musical significance that would be carried by both human and artificial agents, cooperating together, especially if it is supported by a vision unfettered from rigidity of genres and disciplines? Such an approach would be truly “indisciplinary”, allowing thinking and practice at the fringes of arts and sciences, while staying clear from anindistinct form of fusion (music is music, science is science) or a simple utilitarian distributionof tasks between engineer and artist (as is commonly practiced in the music industry for the development of new production tools or recommendation technologies). The music gathered in this CD is the result of a full experience of collective indiscipline, exploring free improvisation as a domain of expression for a shared musicality between humans and “machines” (including abstract mechanisms such as algorithms) in a context where each learns from and progresses with the other, and where they challenge each other. The release of these pieces, recorded over many years of close-knit collaboration between Bernard Lubat, Marc Chemillier and the author (with their respective machines), offers an opportunity to revisit these ideas and attempt to conceptualize them to some extent, even if our claim of “indiscipline” as pertaining to the freedom of improvisation might seem contradictory to abstract reasoning: this is why we ask the reader to regard this reflection as a rather free improvisation (of thought), an attempt to give oneself relevant tools to apprehend what has surfaced from all this music—sometimes noise—and these ideas, in the course of years of experimentation.
