Over the weekend, Germany’s Dresden Sinfoniker presented a concert in which the orchestra’s musicians were conducted by a robot.
The highlight of this “Robotersinfonie” program was Andreas Gundlach’s “aptly named ‘Semiconductor’s Masterpiece’ for 16 brass musicians and four percussionists playing wildly diverging time signatures,” The Guardian’s Deborah Cole reports.
The orchestra’s artistic director, Markus Rindt, “said the intention was ‘not to replace human beings’ but to perform complex music that human conductors would find impossible,” Cole writes:
The Dresden concert, also featuring another robot-conducted work, Wieland Reissmann’s “#kreuzknoten,” can be seen and heard here:
Meanwhile in Britain, the London Standard (digital successor of the Evening Standard) is planning to run an artificial intelligence-generated “experimental review” credited to the newspaper’s longtime art critic, Brian Sewell, who died in 2015. “The London Standard is a bold and disruptive new publication,” its interim CEO, Paul Kanareck, told The Guardian’s Dan Milmo. Sewell’s “estate is delighted,” Kanareck added:
Some sort of AI capacity was added to my computer in its most recent update. I haven’t gone for it, but, who knows, it may be coming for me. I’m not dead yet, as a friend used to say (before he died), and everything you read on Letter V is produced by a human being. So far.