Description
Book SynopsisExplores how creative digital technologies and artificial intelligence are embedded in culture and society. In The Inspiration Machine, Eitan Y. Wilf explores the transformative potentials that digital technology opens up for creative practice through three ethnographic cases, two with jazz musicians and one with a group of poets. At times dissatisfied with the limitations of human creativity, these artists do not turn to computerized algorithms merely to execute their preconceived ideas. Rather, they approach them as creative partners, delegating to them different degrees of agentive control and artistic decision-making in the hopes of finding inspiration in their output and thereby expanding their own creative horizons. The algorithms these artists develop and use, however, remain rooted in and haunted by the specific social predicaments and human shortfalls that they were intended to overcome. Experiments in the digital thus hold an important lesson: although Wilf's interloc
Trade Review“In this moment when generative AI is being declared the successor to human creativity, Wilf offers us a vital counternarrative. His nuanced ethnographic investigations challenge myths of autonomy in either creative practitioners or computational machines while insisting on the cultural/historical embeddedness and situated practices of meaning-making. This book should become an obligatory reference for anyone speaking about computational creativity.” * Lucy Suchman, author of Human-Machine Reconfigurations *
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The Inspiration Machine powerfully unsettles both commonplace imaginaries and banal critiques of how digital technology shapes and reshapes contemporary art-making. Along the way it clearly establishes Wilf as anthropology’s leading theorist of modernity’s vexed relationship to creative practice.” * Steven Feld, VoxLox Media Arts *
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The Inspiration Machine is itself a model and an inspiration, a highly original and ethnographically rich exploration of digital art-making. Drawing upon three revelatory case studies—and on a broad and subtle engagement with contemporary theory—Wilf illuminates the complex mutual entanglement of machinic creativity with human practices, aesthetics, and sociality. This is a singular study of emergent relationalities in unexpected places and practices and wonderful to think with.” * Don Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Toward an Anthropology of Computational Creativity
PART I Jazz: Mimicry, Originality, Sociality
1 “I Prefer Playing with It to Playing with Most People”: The Computer as a Musical Conversation Partner
2 An Island of Interactivity in an Ocean of Nonreactivity: The Trade-Offs of a Made-to-Order Artificial Musical World
3 “A Device That Would Generate New Musical Ideas”: The Computer as a Source of Musical Inspiration
4 Separating Noise from Signal: The Ethnomethodological Uncanny as Aesthetic Pleasure in Human-Machine Interaction
PART II Poetry: Indeterminacy, Potentiality, Intentionality
5 Computer-Generated Poetry and Some of Its Aesthetic and Technical Dimensions
6 “I Randomize, Therefore I Think”: Computational Indeterminacy and the Tensions of American Liberal Subjectivity
7 Analog Precursors and Their Digital Logical End: The Oulipo
8 Crosscurrents and Opposing Perspectives
Conclusion: Neither Our Doom nor Our Salvation: Open-Ended Digital Systems and Cultural Critique
Notes
References
Index
