Tijs Ham 0:00
All right. Perhaps for those who don’t know us, my name is Tijs Ham. A former PhD in artistic research at the Music Department of the University of Bergen. And I'm seated here with Simon Gilbertson.
Simon Gilbertsen 0:29
I'm Associate Professor of Music Therapy here at the Grieg Academy. And involved in the PhD education program, the Grieg Research School for Interdisciplinary Music Studies.
Tijs 0:31
And for since a few months now, I guess we co-founded the Artificial Center of the Imagination. And this is our first official act as the ACI, which is to record one of our imaginary conversations.
Simon 0:55
That's right. And back then, we were thinking about responding to something else that was going on, related to artificial intelligence, and the whole sort of computational algorithmic movement, but we seemed to find a different response to that than just wanting to look at artificial and emergent intelligence. And we thought that this was really, really much more important. And also to create a space, where there's a physical center, but why is it called the Artificial Center Tijs?
Tijs 1:26
I think I mean, at first, it's kind of like a play on [words]. I mean, there's always, when talking about artificial intelligence only two words in the whole term. And both words kind of annoy me. Because intelligence is, I think, very problematic, especially considering the types of research and the type of software and things that are developed. I'm fairly hesitant to label that as something that's indeed intelligent. What is so artificial? Like if something is actually intelligent, I wouldn't call it artificial.
And there's some sort of playfulness to it [Artificial Center of Imagination] as well, like things not being real, but being artificial. It also almost indicates that something does not exist, really, it's not really there, but it's sort of like artificially there. And to not point that to something like intelligence or something like the imagination. It's, it's kind of interesting to point that to the center. Because, you know, a center in itself is usually the most like real and physical and like locatable thing about a [research] center. And to make that artificial, kind of opens up a lot of space for open thought. Like sort of non-fixity, like a sort of floating environment. And I think we both enjoy that as a platform for just kind of letting our minds ramble on a bit and think about current affairs, but then through a lens that allows our imaginations to kind of spoil over and infect one another.
Simon 3:16
Yes, and I remember When we were sort of playing with the concepts in response to the big wave of algorithmic advertising, let's call it, you know, on the web and all that stuff, to make a picture of Snoopy in the style of Leonardo da Vinci. And that sort of popularity was kind of fun, too. But I think what we both noticed was that we had a great interest in the imagination as such. And we've both had the experience of being with people who have both idiosyncratic developmental pathways, but also people (in my case) who have become injured. And I've just been slowly having this the sort of [feeling] after 30 years of practicing music therapy and sort of studying music and therapy with people with brain injuries, I was starting to have this kind of an eerie feeling that was it, maybe those people's capacity for imagination, in a creative practice, in a therapy clinic, that was actually the thing, and not just join the ranks of improving somebody's speech, or also improving their memory or improving their motor skills, but actually making the imagination the thing in the middle point, and not just a part of something else.
And I really, really enjoyed the fact that there is some sort of quirky queerness of having an ecological philosophy that can make the resources of a center. Significant, but not costly, and be aware of those costs, because we know it's not for free, but that sort of aspect of applying for 25 million kronor or more. But the idea of the imagination being a value in many realms, but not always having to have that sort of physical center, you're putting something in the middle, centering it, but actually making it the thing itself as well. And not just some additional topic of interest.
Tijs 5:31
I noticed in my artistic practice, which is very much concerned with playing around and exploring chaotic processes, and exploring those for expressive potentials and meaningful encounters, without them being intentional, but more like discovered or encountered by surprise. I really noticed the value of not just the imagination, but the movement of imagination, and with that I mean, that when you encounter something that you've never encountered before, that is kind of placing you outside of your comfort zone and placing you outside of what you know, you need to develop a sort of opening, a sort of non-judgmental space where your imagination is allowed to expand to kind of start to encompassing those, those unfamiliar things and kind of trying to make new connections, make new bridges between the known and the unknown.
And I sometimes feel like when we have a center that is, let's call it provocatively, overfunded I think there's a tendency for those kinds of forms of openness to decline rather than increase. Because there's certain things that form blockades to these states of curiosity, states of wonder, and one of them is for instance, fixed premises or assumptions or built in judgments that come with like financial responsibilities, reporting, trying to alleviate vulnerability and risk in favor of stability and predictability. And so for my own practice, that's not really a helpful metaphor to think with.
But I think it kind of extends further than that. Too often, people assume that by just throwing large amounts of cash at something that's it will bring all of the brilliant minds together, and then the problem will be solved. And I'm wondering if this kind of thought [Artificial Center of Imagination] that is not constrained by accounting and budget meetings is perhaps also a viable tool of thinking or a viable way of engaging with themes, with subjects, with people and like form like collaborations that are perhaps at least as valuable to uncover new ideas or new concepts?
Simon 8:31
It's really fascinating. Like, the different aspects, I suppose one of the parts that play on let's call it funded center, and an artificial center, like we're sort of messing around with has a lot to do with the sort of promises in the applications. So I wondered sometimes if we would, if we would, write one.
Now, we've decided, and it is officially founded the Artificial Center of Imagination. We've got a research catalog entry. And people can go and have a look at the really pretty logo that you created.
Tijs 9:12
[I didn't create the logo, I wrote a prompt and then Artificial Intelligence created it].
Simon 9:20
And there we go. There's the whole sort of, where's the brilliance lies, but that interaction has made a logo, and we've got a title and a sort of website and stuff, which are some of times, like the deliverables in projects. And I'm wondering if that one of the openings that we have is that we're a bit lucky that we can meet, because maybe some of that funding for the funded centers can bring people together and have time. So there's some aspect of that, that we could maybe in the future conversations think about. If there's other people that like want to join, or create their own, that might be an interesting topic for the future. But another thing is the sort of openness that gets kept.
And I think one of the things that that my more recent work that is that has been if it's been writing, it's been more creative writing or writing that's directed towards in enactments like stage play, and then text like that, rather than reporting on a study. And the material projects that are going around that are more about building stuff. That's more inspired by some of the work that you were doing, that you actually not only look at the chaotic processes, but actually building instruments that inherently hold those properties of being unfinished, non-closed. They're not like one of the programs on my old Korg, behind you, that if you press the button, you know, there's a kind of deliverable. The particular note that a particular frequency with timers that are programmed in the hardware. And so there's something there also about using materials in a collaborative, productive and open manner, which I think we share, but it looks really different.
Tijs 11:11
I guess in my practice, I view technology as a form of post-human co-creator of the musical expressions that I'm intrigued by and it kind of goes back to the thing I think I mentioned earlier, this non-intentionality. So I don't…, my relationship to these technologies are not that I'm sort of persuading these technologies to do my bidding in some sense, but I'm developing them in such a way that they gain this ability to breach my expectations, where I'm kind of decentering my sense of aesthetics and my sense of meaningfulness and my sense of expression, in favor of a kind of discovery of what the interplay between myself and the technology brings forth, w hich, at the same time is also my main critique about mainstream research into artificial intelligence that's very often based on the principle of prompt obedience, as opposed...
Simon 12:23
...Getting back to the post-human, just now I'm interrupting. But before we leave that too quickly with the prompting and the openness there, the post-human sort of postulates that it's something different to humanist attitudes, that if, for example, if this was an artificial center for imagination, and was built on an humanist mode of thinking, this would really probably look like work between people and might involve things but it wouldn't regard them as being in any significant way, co-constitutive of what's going on, which means without it, the going on would not be the same. You can't just take it out, but still keep the human-to-human understanding, it means that the phenomena changes . And I think that's what we share in our work.
Tijs 13:26
For instance, like if I'm allowed to sort of break the fourth wall, we're sitting here at a wooden table, on school chairs, they're comfortable... they're silent, which helps our mission here, we both have a microphone, hanging sort of slightly in front of our faces to get close. And there is a recorder on the table that is taping our very speech. I know that I talk differently, as soon as this recorder was switched on, and we meet, I can't say regularly, but fairly often.
Simon 14:09
Frequently but not regularly.
Tijs 14:10
Yeah, exactly. So we, we are familiar with how our discussions usually go,
Simon 14:13
we'd never talk like this…
Tijs 14:15
but there's now like, there is another thing in the room that is listening in, and which has a very different kind of memory compared to our human memories. I'm a huge fan of not being impressed by the human capacity to remember things. I don't think we actually remember anything with any sort of accuracy. It's the way I see it, whenever we access our memories, we sort of try to retrigger a certain experience, and then we relive a different experience that is somewhat inspired by something that happened before. It's not as infallible as some people have you believe. I'm very interested in forgetfulness, and in, miss-remembrances, and hallucinations, and all of those kinds of things. But this zoom recorder that's here on the table is just recording the vibrations that happened. But then when we listen back to that it will not be the discussion that we're having at the moment. It will be a document of that discussion, which will, maybe I'll start noticing certain ways that I phrase things that I like, just came up with on the spot, I just imagined some words and put them together. And that triggers something in you and you're also influenced by this whole kind of recording apparatus that we have around us. And in my view, this all becomes one kind of interconnected system of my personal thoughts, imaginations, ideas, vocalizations, then this whole recording apparatus and then my discussion partner here, Simon, with his associations his reading list, which is mightily impressive and his lived experiences. And I don't think you can untangle these things. I think it's a mistake to view this interaction as if it is in a sort of laboratory where we're kind of isolated from the environment and isolated from the fact that I can look out the windows here and see a tree and a building that I have certain relationships with, and I think all of those things, infuse this discussion, rather than being sort of transparent or invisible to it.
Simon 16:48
Yeah. And that's, for me, that's fascinating. Now in the situation where we're talking because we're in, in my room, which, about two and a half years ago, I was in a different part of this building in a room that was called my office. That was where I was sort of instructed to go from the institution, and I had my name on the door. And inside it was it was a desk where I could put my computer and a chair and a bookshelf.
And I took that at that time, because of what I was reading, as the sort of an expression of the expectations of me, you know, to go in there and do things and then come out and go home. Now, I've moved here about two and a half years ago. And we're sitting at a table, which is basically moving every three or four weeks in a different spot in the room. And I can see that I've literally covered the walls with phrases and terms to help me maybe not remember everything, but to focus, the seeing of those things a bit easier than like the one bookshelf, which has got some objects in it, plus books, in the other bookshelves that are actually specific collections. So they're grouped with, with a very defined purpose. But there's toys, and there's an old Japanese robot from my childhood, and there's tools and paint brushes, and drills and things hanging around. And all of these objects kind of look crazy. But for me, they've all come from a particular type of practice, like you've been describing. And that's not just to acknowledge them, but to actually involve and I think I've written it somewhere. I could read it out loud. It says: “it's not just that I'm interested in the central and peripheral nervous systems. But in my material research, I'm using the efferent and afferent signals. And both the central and peripheral systems in the elicitation of knowledge”.
So for me, the objects are ways of being involved. But they're not just geeky, funny objects, they're actually ways of thinking. All of the different objects.
Tijs 19:15
For me, it feels like this, this room has a sort of, inbuilt permission to play. It is a playground, and a playground in the sense of Ian Bogost, where he describes play not as sort of anything goes mentality, but rather taking fairly strict constraints very seriously. And, and kind of figuring out what that does to a space, to a situation, to a relationship.
Simon 19:52
And that's really funny, because a lot of people who come here, different than when we met, see funny things, strange things, things that perhaps they might consider don’t belong to an office. Which I always find curious, because I feel misunderstood and misrepresented. Then when I hear a second colleague telling a third colleague, oh, they were in that room. And it looks like a A, B, and C when in fact, because maybe I haven't been involved in conversations with them, like we are, that these are very straight engagements with either physical properties in physics. And like you say, for example, just the concept of things that come together and stay together, or for me, then I, in some phase would then directly very close relationship to the concept of adhesion. And so I go off to the hardware store and buy a bottle of glue. And I start sticking things together. And I realized there's a vast range of not just stickiness, but within the one type, which I've stuck with for a year and a half now, which is almost the cheapest type of wood glue that I could buy. And one that's safe for children's skin, like me, that within that, over a year and a half, I've learned sort of spectrum of adhesion, through the engagement with just the one glue for with different other objects. And for a long period for about four months, I literally only use that glue with the same type of bamboo sticks. But I've realized, I've experienced them at a completely different resolution, like on a screen or something, that's much, much finer, and my fingers and my skin and maybe sense of smell and vision, and sense, the adhesion. In the first few seconds, that's different to last time, I brought those things together with the same sort of liquid as the same bottle, but those incidences are so different in so many different ways each of them. And so the it's like that a multiple of a multiple of a multiple, which then gets so complicated that it gets closer to some of the things you've been talking about and what you don't expect, because I'm not able to predict at a certain increase of resolution, my level of experience doesn't, hasn't been that far. And so what happens is I'm having to redescribe my experiences in terms of the new predictive scope, maybe your range or repertoire of expectation.
Tijs 22:43
I'm picking up on two terms that you've dropped in this section here. One is you are mentioning a spectrum of stickiness. A spectrum. So spectral thinking, the other thing is the complexity. And both of these things have a fuzziness to them so there's these infinitely fine gradations from one after the other. It ranges from things so complex that our inferior human brains have absolutely no way of processing something at all, to these edge cases where, where you feel like there's some sort of structure or order or patterning happening, but you're unable to really put your finger on how that pattern comes into being emerges or how it dissipates. And then there's these vast areas that we can understand or learn to understand. Where I would kind of draw the line between difficult and complex, where difficult is something that takes a lot of effort. But then after you've put that effort into that you can get to a level of understanding that you can create things like repeatability and doing things over and over again and getting the same or at least very similar results. Whereas in complexity, that is not possible. So it's like, however much time you put into trying to learn and understand it, there's always going to be some level at which the process has these kind of emergent properties that could catch you off guard or place you in a state of the unfamiliar.
Simon 24:37
I can see my personal preferences to one of those.
Tijs 24:40
Me too.
Simon 24:41
And I wonder if that's what we might sense that we share.
Tijs 24:49
I think there's a real usefulness to the predictable and the understandable and the kind of simplicity and that this is where you can see kind of the success of areas, fields of research like science, where things are being reduced in lab situations, and you get very comprehensive and very elaborate understandings of how difficult processes work and it allows you to get cell phones to work and allows you to fly planes that allows you to travel to the moon and back with living people in it.
Simon 25:28
So is that where maybe the playfulness comes because of these options or dimensions? In one sense of repetition, so that it suddenly becomes predictable, but with an awareness for me, I think the predictiveness is just shifting a level of resolution at which you're having to make a compromise. So, I can go in and then and then and then. And then I'm not really expecting to get to a final point, what I'm doing is I'm trying to find what is the resolution at which I elicit a claim or, like a proposal, and its opposition or qualities. And it might be that if I go too far, you know, if it gets finer, and finer and finer, what's going to happen is the oppositional qualities get so many because it is in possibly infinitely varied, that I can then back off, and this is what I would suggest, like you've just suggested with the lab, happen sometimes. And in the plan and the deliverables in a plan center is you have to kind of ontologically back off to a to a resolution that gets acknowledged as a little bit more like pixel size instead of nano or quantum. Which then the oppositional arguments aren't that strong. So it appears that the tools and the processes and the technology that they use, deliver what was expected and provide support for an argumentation, which functions for a purpose. But the purpose for most of the painfulness that I'm think we're engaging with is, for me, it's become an...
I'd love to hear what you use in your work with, maybe in the PhD itself, and not the stuff after or before.
But I'm just getting to the stage when I think I'm learning how to identify some sort of qualities or properties that enabled me, because I think that's part of my sort of expectations and my position and my job is I'm interested to find out what do I need to do to find out where the claims and their opposition's inhabit Or where can they be played with, to understand them better? And that's why I can shift from thinking about discrimination as a topic into a material property of some sort of design or sculptural.
Tijs 28:12
It's kind of like where art or the act of creation becomes philosophical. And vice versa.
Simon 28:18
Yeah, but it's at that point. And I'm really interested because when I saw your performances with the musical instruments that you've built, and the difference between my room, and some of your work during the PhD was that it was public, and their audiences in real time.
Tijs 28:43
That was an important factor for me, the act of sharing.
Simon 28:47
Tell me about that a bit.
Tijs 28:50
So, for me, one really important thing is, is a notion of aesthetics, that is about learning-to-like, instead of the idea of aesthetics as a measuring stick. So when I go into these performances, I don't know how they're going to unfold. So I'm in a certain stage level with the audience that experiences because we all listen to the sounds as they come in for the first time, not knowing what they're going to do. Of course, there's a slight difference where I'm seated in front of an instrument that has knobs dials, different forms of possible ways for me to influence what is happening, but that influence that I have is also kind of like flying blind or a shot in the dark because any change that I make will most likely change things but they're not like changing them into something that I know in advance. I make a change and then I have to figure out what that change did.
And that brings me to one of the kinds of values that I find interesting within this work, which is a notion of learning to explore, investigate, and appreciate the unfamiliar. So, to go into an encounter with something that you don't know, what it is, how it's developing, what is emerging, how long it will last, if it's going to be there for a long time, or if it's just going to disappear. When it disappears, it might never come back. There's this fragility to it. But to find the poetry in that, to find the beauty in this kind of volatility, which I think is a really important kind of human value to have, because I think fundamentally, or ontologically I do think we live in a complex world. We live in, we bathe in complexity around us. And unfortunately, these complexities outside of the art realm can very often be destructive, damaging, life threatening, but then I see art as this kind of arena where you can explore those kinds of things in a safe environment. And appreciate kind of the value of nuance and detail and how exceedingly minor things can suddenly amplify and become structurally important. And vice versa, that like, extremely big walls of noise can suddenly dissipate because some disturbance kind of blows up and takes a performance into an entirely different direction. And I think those things remain interesting to me. Throughout my career, I've been making music in all sorts of different ways from extremely controlling, like placing every minute sound in its place within a composition to this kind of very open and very, it's like a different level of like, you could call it improvisation. But in a lot of, for instance, jazz improvisation, you still know how to respond with your instruments. But here the instrument this is part of this instability. So it's like a another step in improvisation. But then, to still get to results that become extremely just beautiful and meaningful, just like, out of all of this chaos, there's suddenly this melancholic melody that comes out of all of these processes, and I have no way of really pointing my finger to where that melody came from. And that, to me is something that that just keeps me interested in this sort of this play with complexity.
Simon 33:02
Thank you for sharing your thinking about are the meaning of the word artificial, and then center and then imagination, then we've got into the sort of the realm of maybe shared values of acknowledgement of complexity. But also maybe, I think something that we share, is that it's more on the exciting, interesting side than the scary and dangerous sort of side of interaction and responses.
Tijs 33:30
Especially within the confines of the arts!
Simon 33:33
And maybe that's also what we've got to contribute more with and through, because maybe it does, like you say, (we'll take that off in the future relationships), two fields of philosophy, but also maybe different fields of meeting, like human cognition and perception. And you know, what it means to lead a good life as well. Probably something that actually is not separate from what we've been talking about today.
Tijs 34:04
No, no, it's There's so many relationships there that we can hopefully explore in a new episode.
[Transcribed with the help of https://otter.ai]