Mouse on Mars »AAI« live in Berlin

11 October 2022 | 21:00 | silent green Betonhalle
Presented by silent green and CTM Festival

Programme

20:00 Doors
21:00 Marcin Pietruszweski live
22:00 Mouse on Mars »AAI« live AV with Dodo Nkishi and virtual contribution from Louis-Chude Sokei

Groundbreaking duo Mouse on Mars collaborate with writer and scholar of African Studies, Louis Chude-Sokei, a collective of computer programmers, and percussionist Dodo NKishi to explore artificial intelligence as both a narrative framework and compositional tool, summoning their most explicitly science-fiction work to date.

Released as the album AAI (Anarchic Artificial Intelligence) in 2021, the project is based on a text by Louis Chude-Sokei reflecting on an alternative history of race, technology, colonialism, and futurism from the perspective of machine intelligence as a form of ethnic becoming. Chude-Sokei’s voice is also the source for a speech model algorithm which allows the band to interact with the evolving sentience of AAI, and to control parameters like speed or mood to create a kind of speech instrument they could control and play as they would a synthesizer. The album’s narrative is quite literally mirrored in the music – the sound of an artificial intelligence growing, learning, and speaking. Emerging from a primordial ooze of rolling bass and skittering electronics, hypnotic polyrhythms and pulsing synthesizers propel the listener across the record’s expanse. Artwork was provided by the inventor of the computer graphics language Processing, Casey Reas, a further exploration of technology’s application in the context of art.

Opening the evening is Marcin Pietruszweski, a musician who works largely with synthetic sound and uses compositional techniques developed in contemporary electroacoustic and computer music.

AAI was presented at CTM Festival 2021 within the festival’s online virtual environment and also an on-site multi-channel sound installation. This next presentation at silent green presents AAI as an expansive, audiovisual live show.

Programme

Read more about AAI via the CTM Magazine