Zoé Aegerter – I’m not a cowbow, daisy. music for laboratory

At the heart of the designer's process is Daisy Bell, a popular song from the end of the 19th century that has become a sign of a change of era, of a technological mutation whose effects we are only just beginning to measure. Originally known as On a Bicycle Made For Two (Harry Dacre, 1892), it was the first song reproduced in voice synthesis (Bell Laboratories, IBM, 1961). A few years later, it appeared in 2001, A Space Odyssey by director Stanley Kubrick, played by HAL 9000, a character embodying the threat of an artificial intelligence devoid of empathy. In this way, Daisy Bell succeeds in creating a dialogue between the festive spirit of the music hall and the undeniably ambivalent spirit of a technology that seems to want to compete with humans. It is this discreet icon of artificial intelligence that Zoé Aegerter has chosen as the textual and sound material for her research. Invited to a creative residency at the Interdisciplinary Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Université Côte d’Azur), the designer was interested in the machine learning mechanisms of current AI systems. These learning systems are based on two movements: on the one hand, the mathematical interpretation of the functioning of biological neurons: these are artificial neural networks. On the other hand, the digital interpretation of the traces of our activities: this is the work of data, the purpose of which is to feed these learning networks. Does this mean that these systems resemble us? Can we resist such reductionism? Without forgetting their great complexity. Also, beyond the obstacle of explicability, can we still share a little common sense with these technologies with anthropomorphic pretensions? For Zoé Aegerter, the very high level of performance of these systems in creating predictability is based above all on their ability to “network”: they are relational machines. If we can question their creative performance, the designer has chosen to reverse the situation by inviting the researchers of the Institute to “become a neural network” in turn, and to try to collectively learn Daisy Bell’s refrain. A network performance - according to her expression - that the designer invites us to inhabit for a few moments by listening, drawing and writing. If the human mind is neither material nor immaterial, but essentially relational, perhaps we will encounter the little music of our minds there?