Lucy Duncombe & Feronia Wennborg - Joy, Oh I Missed You

Lucy Duncombe and Feronia Wennborg unite for a concept-driven exploration of vocal synthesis and AI voice manipulation that asks a few pertinent questions about the boundaries between the 'real' and the 'synthetic'. The current discourse around AI, creativity and human agency is hitting some kind of tipping point right now, and probably for good reason when you've got generationally talented artists living hand-to-mouth while auto-generated music made by non-human avatars clocks up millions of streams. The modern world is a cursed one, though there's still art to be found in the mess. If Joy, Oh I Missed You stands at a precipice within this knotty debate, then it does at least have some historical precedent, recalling in various ways Laurie Anderson, Robert Ashley, Hiromi Moritani's numbers station experiments, or even Bjork's Homogenic. There's an old adage that feels relevant here: it's the singer not the song. This is how we express uniqueness. And thus, by extension, there's the question of what is more human than the human voice? What Duncombe and Wennborg are formulating here doesn't explicitly offer any answers to what is actually the existential threat at the heart of AI generated art, though it does in turns sound eerie, beautiful, serene and unnerving, a mix of textures and emotions that does a fine job in showing how the human hand (and voice) can offset the best (or worst) intentions of any robot mind that might mis-serve it otherwise. 
 
FFO: Laurie Anderson, Holly Herndon, Robert Ashley, Phew