ℌEXOℜℭℑSMOS – Transfiguración

Transfiguración marks the first full length release from ‘ ongoing research focused on Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence for raw audio synthesis.

The work revolves around the idea of transfiguration, approaching the Neural Network as an alchemical technology for distillation of styles within two sound corpus’.

Taking cues from the technoshamanistic ideas present in the works of Interspecifics Collective and their approach to non-human intelligence, ́, treats the GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) AI architecture as a kind of homunculus able to morph one sound design aesthetic into another, while preserving the audio input’s cadence and long form structure.

The decision to use Antonio Zepeda’s Templo Mayor album as the source audio is that of memory and resistance.
Templo Mayor by Antonio Zepeda marked one of the first albums to perform and record prehispanic sound artifacts and musical forms with media recording technologies.

The practice of using only pre-hispanic sound artefacts as a call to not forget indigenous epistemology and keep these sounds alive through a general widespread of their knowledge acts as a form of resistance, adding to the fact that, since it was performed in 1982, in a musical ecosystem of other seemingly de-localized styles of music, this album is part of a bigger cultural portrait of the pre-1985 Earthquake México.

For example, the artist Antonio Zepeda also collaborated with Jorge Reyes in future releases, another musician experimenting with electronic music and prehispanic sounds as a way to bring these prehispanic ontologies of sound and cosmovisions into the digital future, back in the 1980’s.

The reason to use my own music as the raw sound immateriality to be transfigured by the AI from Antonio Zepeda’s is one of possibility, how can a “statistical hallucination” of the information contained in a recording of pre-hispanic sound provide an insight into contemporary electronic sound practices in the context of migratory modes of sound production.

By history and design, AI is a conceptual framework and technology originating in the military-industrial complex in the Global North. It poses the question on how an artist from Tijuana take hold of these technologies and represent histories of resistance as well as critically approach these seemingly “deracialized” and “neutral” post-human narratives?

́is an album that tries to answer those questions and pose further ones into the development of AI as a new tool for artistic and knowledge production.

The audio datasets used to synthesized ́ where:

– Source:
Templo Mayor by Antonio Zepeda (1982)

– Target Audio:
ℌEXOℜℭℑSMOS – Various Tracks from
OKUPA! [2017-2019]
Desesperanza [2017]
Codex Enteogeno [2015]

Text written by Moisés Horta Valenzuela
Cover art by Anna Phaenareti Lioka

released May 1, 2020

Press
Transfiguración: decolonizing AI, in Hexorcismos’ shamanistic music and art (July 6, 2020)