It’s 1961, and actor David Wayne has sat down to watch SAGA, the debut play by TXO, a new computer that was set to become the TS Eliot of artificial intelligence. “I am concerned with the world in which we are going to live tomorrow,” he says in the MIT documentary “The Thinking Machine”, “a world in which the digital machine may be of even greater importance than the atomic bomb.” Wayne went to MIT University in Massachusetts to draw up a moral compass for this new technology – a tinder flame he ruled “the closest thing to magic I have ever seen”. One boundary established was that machines can’t truly be intelligent until they had offered the world a new idea, planting a flag in unseen territory. “Until then,” said professor Patrick D Wall, “I will not agree that machines think.”
Sixty-one years later, in Barcelona, not one Holly Herndon showed up for her first-ever Ted Talk, but an invisible army of them. The musician had come to demo the second series of Holly+, an AI-powered tool that magicks any sound submitted to a website into a wheezing, somersaulting Herndon vocal. She was joined by a choir, who performed alongside synth lines chewed up and polished through the tool, elevating Herndon to some kind of mythical, machine learning Hydra.
Herndon has long looked to AI for creative possibilities. Her third LP, 2019’s , used machine-learning methods to play havoc with her musical identity (on the track “Godmother” with Jlin, Herndon sounds
