Commenting on the visual world created by Artificial Intelligence, Aron Kitzig says, "The Internet is full of data of every possible type. Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) are algorithms that, without setting specific goals, use the data produced by each of us every day in order to ‘learn’. You could also say that they (re)produce ‘ideas’ of objects. It is essential to explore how intellectual creations are linked to sensory experiences. That is what I will call here the 'feedback loop' or the game of ping-pong between sender and addressee, between machine and recipient, between music and image. GANs increase the figurative aspect to an unrecognisable extent by producing feasible compositions and textures that defy coherent explanation. These 'GAN images', already in use in recent works of art, can be understood in their vagueness as a perceptual process. Consequently, in this respect GANs offer a potential tool for art by making it possible to shape the essence of perceptual vagueness.”
The planned work is radical in its intention of exploring an art form which is neither concert nor video nor primarily theatrical. The point is not to illustrate the music, or to underlay or overlay the video with music, but to create of a new area for perception. According to Aron Kitzig, "The GAN brings our fragments of memory to the surface and links them together into a new narrative. The most exciting artistic issue is not the aesthetic configuration of the objects created by GANs, but the observer’s sensory recognition within the digital space and the expansion of our perception through our interaction with these objects. 'Natural perception' and its conditions are what phenomenology declares to be the norm. These conditions are existential coordinates that define the manner in which the observer is 'anchored' in the world, their sense of being in the world, an opening to the world expressed as 'all awareness is awareness of something'. Accordingly, in my work the perceived or actual motion is certainly not meant in the sense of an 'idea' that is visualised in matter. It is meant as a form of recognition that organizes the field of perception according to an intentional awareness."
In the second part of the project, a stage version will be based on this material, but with the relationship between the visual and musical media reversed, as it were. Here the visual component will be integrated into a live on-stage presentation, thus expanding considerably the concert experience through the inclusion of contemporary processes of visual reception. The planning for the second part, which has yet to be finalised, may employ a large number of screens distributed throughout the stage area. These would follow a centrally controlled choreography, with the ensemble of musicians placed behind the audience. Also possible is a video projection onto a translucent surface behind which the orchestra is placed. In any case, cultural habits will be called into question and the concert ritual altered in two provocative ways: on one hand, simply by the displacement of the music from the stage (which corresponds to the partial concealment of the concert images by other video material in the first part of the project) and on the other by the audience’s confrontation with a stage event employing material generated by Artificial Intelligence. Thus the combination of Mahler’s music with a visualisation of the aesthetic possibilities of the Internet age reaffirms freedom as the essence of all cultural activity.
The following musicians are collaborating with Sylvain Cambreling and the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra to create the musical collage: Nicholas Angelich, Martha Argerich, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, Daniel Behle, Julia Kleiter, Andrei Ioniţă, David Orlowsky, and Michael Volle.