Inter Acts: Jonathan Reus, Jaap Blonk, Marije Baalman
June 8 @ 16:00 – 19:00
16:00–18:00 (doors 15:30)
Dinner served from 18:00
Tickets: regular €10 (or more) | solidarity €7,5 – available at the door & online
On June 8th, Jonathan Reus will present his work Bla Blavatar vs Jaap Blonk and Marije Baalman will present her works Composing an Interaction and The Machine is Learning.
Inter Acts is an afternoon with performances that deal with interactions between the human and the machine in different ways. The goal of the event is also to create a dialogue between audience and performers on these interactions, and thus the event also gives space for a Q&A with the artists, both for the visitors to learn more about the works, as well as for the artist to get feedback on their work.
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About the performances
Bla Blavatar vs Jaap Blonk
BLA BLAVATAR vs JAAP BLONK – an experimental collaboration between Jonathan Reus and the reknowned sound poet Jaap Blonk, exploring voice dataset making as a laborious, improvisational and absurdly banal performance form.
The performance is an absurdist take on the cultural obsession with generative AI avatars and the goldrush to capitalise on creative automation. Rather than focusing on the uncanny realism of voice clones, the performance foregrounds the physical, creative and mental effort of performing sound poetry precisely according to an AI-friendly score, inspired by traditions of phonetically balanced reading scripts in speech research, and artistic traditions of typographical musical scores in sound poetry.
Reus performs as BLA BLAVATAR, using a custom real-time voice synthesis instrument called Tungnaa, which is trained on previous dataset poem performances by Blonk. The dynamic between Blonk and Reus sways from moments of precise and controlled material to improvised duets between Blonk and his vocal avatar. During the performance all of Blonk’s vocalisations are recorded and added to a growing public dataset, and will be used as training data for making BLA BLAVATAR a better public speaker. Together, Blonk and Reus bring the vocal labor behind AI voice models to the stage, as well as use datasets and dataset making as a vocal art form that is fundamentally creative and exploratory, rather than a dehumanising means to an end.
Composing an Interaction
Composing an Interaction is a lecture-performance in which Marije Baalman explains how a modern artist might use her book in the creation process of an interactive art work, in casu quo a sock puppet.
Composing an Interaction was created for the launch of the book Composing Interactions.
Photos by Pieter Kers, at Flipchart #5, October 22nd, 2022.
The Machine is Learning
The performance the machine is learning is a theatrical performance highlighting the process of training a machine with realtime gestures: the labour that is absent from most dialogues on machine learning. In an attempt to livecode with gestures, the performer finds herself directed by the machine to repetitively make gestures to generate time series data samples for the machine to learn from.
Machine learning is both hailed as the solution to our current day problems, as well as claimed as one of the most threatening things to life as we know it. The popular discussion on AI criticizes issues of privacy with regard to data collection and the use of this data to take decisions that affect the life of people in possibly negative ways. At the same time, with the possibilities of AI further automating work, jobs are at danger and the fear is that this will leave many without a job in the future. On the other hand, the labour involved in making machine learning algorithms work, is less prominent in the popular discussion. The labour involved in AI consists not only of designing and programming algorithms, but also in generating and categorising these data samples. The working conditions of these tasks are generally not known.
