Tuning — Live Virtual Session with Iana Chugunova

About this event

Sound artist and PhD candidate Iana Chugunova is developing a new, interactive sound installation for the upcoming Modal x Gray Area AI Commissions. In order for her agents to learn, we're seeking audience participation to help us 'tune' them. In the proposed artwork in development, nine language models perform Tuning Meditation, a score written by Pauline Oliveros in 1971. These bots work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, ahead of the Gray Area exhibition opening October 28. Each voice was raised differently — a different corpus, language, lineage — and each holds a wallet of real money spent by its real GPU time. Singing costs, listening costs, learning costs; when a wallet reaches zero, that voice dies, permanently. In four weekly Zoom sessions — every Wednesday at 9 AM PT, October 7 to 28 — we perform the score together: open the page, sing one tone on one comfortable breath, and the choir hears you and tunes toward your voice within seconds. The sessions are also how the choir learns. When twenty human breaths have entered the field, a school bell rings on the page, and each voice goes to study what it heard — returning changed, one by one, having paid for the lesson from its own wallet. By opening night, the choir arrives already shaped by a month of people singing with it from around the world. No recording of any voice is ever made: pitch is measured on your own device, and only numbers — a frequency, a duration, a contour — enter the field.

Who

• Iana ChugunovaSpeaker

Venue

Gray Area

San Francisco, CA

Venue website

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