00:33:39 · Ruby Justice Thelot
[00:33:39] S0: I think what's interesting, right, is that this this idea of the selling out, I don't think makes sense historically because Mhmm. Bell Labs was so big and so powerful at its peak that, like, it literally led to the antitrust rules that, like, like, first antitrust rules were because Bell had a monopoly. Bell, of course, invented the phone. And so, like, a lot of the infrastructure for telecommunication was owned by Bell. So this was, a big tech. Like, it was a a good analog for it. And so it was just a matter of fact that, like, if you wanted to have access to computers, to plotters, like, those are not things that an artist could acquire by themselves. Of course, sometimes you had the university space. I'm thinking of Joan Shrogan, potentially the first ever digital artist. This is a highly debated topic, but Joan in 1963 made some of the first drawings with a computer. And she was working at the university, I think, of San Diego. Was like a secretary at the time. So you wouldn't have access to these things previously, so that's why I think it's important to recognize, like, these were important collaborations. And I mean, whether it be, as I said, Mona or Frank or any of these people, I don't think they were selling up. I think they were curious as to what this new technology could do. And, I mean, people were still making paintings, and they're still making sculpture, whatever they wanted to do. Like, they... Nobody was forcing people to use technology. Just there's certain people who were interested in seeing what these things could do, and that's really what they were able to do with the support of Xerox, Bell. Or EAT was a bit more grassroots. It was less company based, but I think there's quite a bit of of history behind that practice. Have you seen, like, the public reaction towards these collaborations?
00:35:27 · Sofia Puccini, Ruby Justice Thelot
[00:35:27] S1: I think... Okay. So it depends on the kind of collaboration. But I think, like, a reason that I mention Grime so often is because she's sort of, like, taking it to its limit. Like, she is, like, very publicly, like, you know, talking to people in the AI space and then doing... Like, she's starring in an AI movie. I don't know if you saw that today. So she's, like, kind of on the frontier of, like, being an artist and then also being, like, willing to engage with, like, whatever comes up. And then she gets, like, attacked all the time. Like, in her latest music video, I think, that was called Accelerando, which is very much about, like, the feeling of, like, interacting with Silicon Valley, like, leaders about... It's about AI. Some of the comments were still like, why did you use AI in this? Like, you you know what I mean? Like, there's still a lot of people who just feel like it's a, like, hard moral stance. And I think there's been, like, a lot of... At least in the music space, there's been, like, a lot of... There's a weird thing where, like, older musicians who are kind of aged out, who are more, like, unk, who are a bit more, like, their career has already, like, passed, are more pro AI. And then a lot of the younger musicians are, like, super anti AI. And so I feel like the older musicians find it's a way to stay relevant in a way. [00:36:39] S0: Mhmm. [00:36:39] S1: Like, they're like, oh, you know, we're hopping on the, like, the next boat or the next trend or whatever.
00:36:39 · Sofia Puccini, Ruby Justice Thelot
[00:36:39] S1: Like, they're like, oh, you know, we're hopping on the, like, the next boat or the next trend or whatever. [00:36:43] S0: I think there are... At any point in time, right, in the sixties, there were artists who were doing abstract expressionism, and they wanted to stay doing that and stay in the studio making paintings. Some artists were working with printing techniques. So I'm talking about talking about the work of, say, like, an Andy Warhol or whatnot. Yeah. But then there are some artists who saw the rise of these new technologies and are like, that's what I wanna work with. Yeah. And I think it's just... We just accept that sometimes the role of the artist is to see what is at the margin of society, technology, or culture. Like, that's what they do. Yeah. And so I'm often reminded in the space of music of, well, people really disliked auto tune. Right? [00:37:23] S1: Yes. Sampling.
00:37:23 · Sofia Puccini, Ruby Justice Thelot
[00:37:23] S1: Yes. Sampling. [00:37:24] S0: Yes. Sampling, auto tune. And so, you know, like, zero eight and heart and heartbreak, the Kanye record, like, that using the the t Pain's auto auto tune method and his workflows, bring that into the pop pop culture. I mean, it ended up, like, working. It just... It... You just need the experimentation. Yeah. Or, like, if you... Like, when Dylan went electric, I'm sure people were, like, very mad at that. But it is just a part of artistic progress that sometimes you re... You recognize that a tool has immense capabilities that are underexplored. Right? A big thing with what T Pain did with Auto Tune is that it wasn't to voice correct. It became in of itself an instrument. Yes. And so Auto Tune was not about the output, but it was about now having another tool to modulate one's voice. And I think what I like the most about creative technology, like, if I had, like, a vision for it, it would be that AI enabled technology isn't in service of making an output. It's not to make an image. It's not to make a video. It's to build new tools with which we can now make new things in the future. Yes. And that's something that I'm very interested in. Like, I'm very, like Yeah. Bullish and excited by that vision. [00:38:42] S1: Yeah. Do you, I mean, do you practice any kind of art? I know, like, you know, show... Doing a show is an art form in a way. But do you have any other, like, practice that you engage with a lot that you've, like, tried to use AI in or, like, use some sort of tool?
00:38:55 · Ruby Justice Thelot
[00:38:55] S0: I mean, yeah. I mean, people who are familiar with my work... Of course, I'm I'm I'm a new media artist. I've been making work for... I was just talking to to someone on the phone. 2017, I had my first gallery show. So Yes. We're coming on ten years now of of of... And I had my first museum show this year. Yeah. And, you know, in '20... I wanna say 2022 or '3 or '4, I made a film called A Single Spartan Girl that was made with AI. We toured it, went to a bunch of festivals, won a prize at the film festival in Marseille. Mhmm. This is an experimental film festival, but, like, I Yeah. I was really curious. Like, my whole process with this, and it ended up becoming this talk called What is Truth, was, okay. Well, I've noticed that this is the place where we're gonna get information now. And there's there's certain pieces of information that are kind of conflicting that are, like, contentious. And so if I'm wondering, for instance, what was the cause of the Trojan War? What is is gonna tell me? What is the different LLM gonna tell me? And how does that mimic, of course, the process through which we made history, in, say, the antiquity? So I'm I'm using here the example of of the Trojan War of the Iliad, where there's a couple of different accounts. And when we're trying to do a historiography or, like, we're trying to figure out what happened, we use parts of the somewhat fantastical accounts with the gods and whatnot. We use the archaeological records, and we build our Western historical canon piecemeal through a lot of these different voices. And what I thought was very interesting with doing this with AI is, like, AI is, like, literally polyglossal. Like, it's taking all the different voices, bring them together. And so in the film, the script or the poem that's kind of the epic that's behind it is in part Homer, in part an LLM, in part Sappho, who, of course, was, one of the diverse female poet, and my own interpretation of what had happened during that time because I wanted to recreate enmeshment and a layering of different potential stories altogether. Because I think that's what... Imagine, like, you're you're a villager and, like, there's a different bard coming every year to tell the the the story of the Trojan war. They're gonna, like, change it up
00:41:14 · Sofia Puccini, Ruby Justice Thelot
[00:41:14] S1: a little Yeah. Yeah. [00:41:16] S0: So that was, like, that movie, and then there's another short film that I made called Why Aliens Love America, which also uses AI, and we showed that earlier this year at the White Hotel. [00:41:26] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [00:41:29] S0: Yeah, I think that's... Especially, like, once again, like, I'm I'm writing about aliens. I'm making a movie about aliens. It makes sense that I want to think about this alien superintelligence. [00:41:37] S1: Yes. Yeah. Totally. I completely... I mean, I totally see that as, like, a use case. I just feel... I feel like if you remember when Dolly first came out, and it was such a cool experimental thing. And I remember I was, like, writing... Like, I did a lot of short story writing in the past. And then I was, like, starting to do stuff with music. Mhmm. And I was, like, a lot of the things I naturally want, the stories I wanna tell are about future scenarios. Or... And they involve AI as a character. And so I I just remember that era when AI was still very nascent and weird, and it was like an indie thing. Mhmm. And so I used it a lot and, like, talked about it a lot and referenced it. And then now it's become, like, such a meta character in, like, everything that we do. And it just kinda feels like it was never supposed to be the main character. [00:42:25] S0: Mhmm.