Description
Book SynopsisTrade 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
