April 4, 2024 by Tara Maher and David Rokeby
BMO Lab for Creative Research in the Arts, Performance, Emerging Technologies and AI Director David Rokeby joined multimedia performance and installation artist Laurie Anderson to present one of the lab’s research projects as part of her sold-out show on Friday, April 5, 2024, at Koerner Hall in the Royal Conservatory of Music. Anderson has been engaged with innovative technologies throughout her career and became fascinated by BMO Lab’s Voice Scroll during informal Zoom sessions hosted by BMO Lab’s AI as Foil residency program with mutual friend and current lab artist-in-residence American poet Nick Flynn.
The Voice Scroll project is an AI system that transforms spoken voice into a continually evolving visual panorama in real time. It is a product of BMO Lab’s continuing exploration of AI in the context of live performance.
“Conventionally one might think of Voice Scroll as a system that illustrates the words that you speak,” says Rokeby. “But really, I think it’s more helpful and honest to think of it in these terms: Through its training, the AI model has constructed a world… something called the ‘latent space’… a world of possibilities linking words and images, and we can use our spoken words as a means of navigating this remarkable, and remarkably strange, landscape.”
According to Rokeby, Anderson has been thinking about and working in AI-related spheres for many years, which makes her a great collaborator. “She comes from a position of decades of knowledge and experience in this space, but also with a really generous curiosity,” says Rokeby. “It’s been wonderful to wander through the crazy set of possibilities and strangenesses of what these AI systems can do with her.”
After a recent exploratory zoom session, Anderson surprised Rokeby by suggesting she feature Voice Scroll in her upcoming Koerner Hall concert. And so, it transpired that half-way through her concert, Anderson invited Rokeby on stage, and together, they spent ten minutes exploring Voice Scroll together, discussing its possibilities and implications, and offering some audience members the chance to interact with the system. According to Rokeby, it was a wonderful experience, and a wonderful opportunity to share the work the Lab does with a broader public. Given that we are all affected by AI technology, sharing insights into these technologies beyond the bounds of academia is an important part of BMO Lab’s mandate.
Anderson will be working with the Lab as part of the AI as Foil artist-in-residence program in the near future. Rokeby is very excited about this prospect as he believes that working with Anderson, with her creativity, her depth of experience and her curiosity, will lead to some very interesting new directions and possibilities for the lab’s research.
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