Video Premiere: Andrew Janss Performs ‘Humanoid’

WATCH AT I CARE IF YOU LISTEN

Andrew Janss performing Vivian Fung’s Humanoid for cello and electronics in a video created by filmmakers Tristan Cook and Zac Nicholson.

Here’s what Andrew had to say about the video for Humanoid:

Humanoid, described by the composer as a “song and dance of technology and cello,” gives us a chance to step back and examine the act of creating art through an artificial lens. As unusual as the piece’s digital track can sound to the human ear, it is no doubt far less strange than how the human element of this piece would seem to a primitive Artificial Intelligence attempting to decipher what it is capturing with the tools available to it.

The AI’s examination (carried out by the camera itself) is depicted by indifferent white frames and employs facial and object recognition software in an attempt to identify and contextualize what it is observing (note: the descriptive labels in these frames were generated using 2019 Amazon Web Services open-source image Rekognition software, including its explicit-content Image Moderation filters. The filmmakers uploaded each white frame individually to be analyzed by the AWS algorithm.) Under the weight of attempting to reverse engineer and make sense of what we know as performed art, its CPU eventually overloads and crashes in a fit of incomprehension.