Jennifer Walshe is one of the coolest people we know. Her artistic work and thought has broken our brains for years, leaving us shipwrecked in its torrential waves of reference and irony and joy and conceptual viscera.
We talk about her recent piece for the Unsound Dispatch, 13 Ways of Looking at AI, Art & Music — a series of vignettes that in their totality assemble into one of the most coherent accountings of what it is we’re all experiencing.
Some references from the ep:
- Listen to Things Know Things on RTÉ Lyric FM.
- Hopefully you’re aware of the music duo Matmos — Jennifer references this record in the context of discussing conceptual work. Jennifer also speaks often of her close collaborator Jon Leidecker (Wobbly), who has a few absolutely killer sets with Matmos, including this one.
- You can interact with Walshe’s Text Score Dataset here.
- We continue to enjoy references to Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s Have I Been Trained (https://haveibeentrained.com/), a way to search for your (or anyone’s) work in large, public, AI training datasets.
- Two movies everyone should see: Catfish the Movie and HER. (We’d also recommend Catfish the TV show, of course).
- Jennifer mentions the computer scientist Kate Devlin’s work, especially “Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots.”
- If you haven’t googled a picture of Paro the Therapy Seal, do it.
- Jennifer’s record “A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance” is a top lifetime record as far as we both are concerned. Check out track 16 for that Palestrina. It’s CRAZY.
- To wrap it up, check out Ted Gioia’s Substack and Bruce Sterling’s writing (the concept Walshe references is "Dark Euphoria").
