Intersections, Innovations, and Integrity
“It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing.” — Steve Jobs
One of the largest problems the creative and music industry faces today is about change. Change is simple and hard at the same time. It is a subjective matter, with endless possibilities. Anything which is possible, is driven by the notion of acceptance.
A world where we live in today and in times of uncertainty, the idea for hope comes from the concept of the intersections. This is a space where friction gets created between the old methods and new opportunities, an area of innovations. A place where we get a heightened sense of accomplishment and joy.
The basic thought of intersectional thinking emerges from a state of mind that invokes thoughts between - acquired, stored knowledge x life experiences. The vacuum that exists between the subconscious and the conscious mind is an amazing space for creativity and creative entrepreneurship. Never seen before ideas take shape and get effortlessly noticed because of their uniqueness. Uniqueness classified into innovation thrives in such space. Let’s look at how creativity flourishes with the concept of intersectionality.
The Rationale for Intersectional Thinking
To unlock the power of creativity and innovation, it is important to engage the entire ecosystem, where the full potential can be unveiled. The scalability of imagination and its ability to create an impact can be achieved through an Import — Export mechanism. We have observed that unless creative ideas are not taken outside the ecosystem, they have very little impact.
Researchers indicate that most of the great ideas are locked inside the corporations and the world does not get to see creative innovations. By pushing the ideas out of their comfort zone, we are creating a new environment for collaborations and development of new markets. This is very important for the creative industry. It allows new visualization, simplicity in the storytelling process, and making new fans when this concept is related to audio-visual works and live performances.
Just like Creative Industries, Engineering, and Technology companies also face the same challenge. To enable ideas that can intersect various industries, Cisco had developed a new model titled ‘Speed Innovations’. Incubated under Cisco Hyperinnovation Living Labs (CHILL), it focuses on the commercialization of ideas with agility, creates multi-partnership engagement at the initial adoption stage of the idea, and looks to create a simultaneous impact in multiple industries. Without partnerships, impact creation is not possible.
While the technology sector is primarily going to look at the design thinking module, the creative industry in comparison is going to break that mold. The uniqueness the creative industry is going to present is vastly different as it reframes the intersectional thinking. It works in the import-export order both for intellectual property utilization and engagement commerce with the fans.
The differentiation being the ability to bring an emotional aspect in data science and invoke feelings. This means, in a given moment in time and in real-time, the data insights can go closer to ‘Prediction’. But, it cannot express the actual ‘Reaction’. The creative business can do both — Prediction and Reaction because of its emotional connection. The engagement, therefore, becomes immersive and interactive. It works on human instincts rather than data science.
The Intersection of Art and Entrepreneurship
Memory and Creativity are two very important aspects of any expression that is designed to create an engaging experience. Authors Vlad Petre Glăveanu and Brady Wagoner did extensive research on historical and conceptual intersections for the creative process. Their study reflects, “Creativity and memory are typically considered opposite processes in psychology and contemporary culture. Memory is often conceptualized as simply a register of the past and is evaluated based on accuracy.
In Ancient Greece, creativity was classified under the memory, and memory itself was associated with divine inspiration (Mnemosyne was the mother of the nine muses — the liberal arts). Ahead in time, the appearance of printing reinforced an image of memory founded on the idea of reproduction, it simultaneously offered the very antithesis of creativity: exact replication as the ‘non-creative.’ The implications of this divergence will be explored, as well as modern-day possibilities for synthesis through the accelerated development of the digital age. In our historical context, a vision of ‘repetition’ as reconstruction aids socio-cultural efforts to theorize memory and creativity as the two sides of the same coin.
Deanna Badizadegan, a musician and educator who works at the intersection of arts and innovations, wrote about the art entrepreneurship intersection. In her interview with Tom Byers, a blues guitarist who played with many blues music artists in his youth, expresses.
“To me, they bring the same sort of joy. When performing, I felt in flow, I felt joy, I felt like I was having an impact. Putting together a band and making a living — the feeling that I was doing something I was born to do, that’s the same feeling I got when I decided to pursue entrepreneurship and academia.”
Beyond these feelings of individual joy and passion, the two biggest components of innovation are creativity and teamwork.
The Creators Magic Bullet
Where do we draw the line? Stephen Wilson explains this concept through his book — Intersection of Art, Science, and Technology. This is perhaps one of the first comprehensive work on the artists who work on the frontline of the technology transformations and scientific inquiries. The important aspect of this study is, while there are similarities in arts and science, there is a unique role art plays in the evolution, distribution, and deployment of technology. This unique role unfolds many interesting things. It is the space of the intersection.
To complete his final thesis, Stephen had to evolve his thinking. His new thinking was about, “Think Like an Artist and not as a Scientist”. The reason being, it was easier to bring results out through data science in a scientific manner but there was mystification in science and technology intersection, which could not be justified.
While principles of science were understandable, the friction between technological imagination and scientific inquiry was the space of art, much like poetry. He saw this space as a revolution weaving ideas and a bold sculpture of matter creating new possibilities. This new dimension of his thoughts came only after studying how the Radio business works and the role of music, artist, playlist, advertisers, and listeners.
Stanford University’s ‘Unexpected Intersections’ interdisciplinary environment thrives on creating unique combinations between science and humanities. This collaborative intersectional space blurs the lines of traditional mindsets and opens new dimensions for creative excellence.
Bailout
Historically at every point, whenever we have seen a commotion in the world, we have relied on intersectional thinking. This is driven by the creative process and creative imagination plays a significant role. While the bailout is designed by the creative thinking process, the value does not translate to the creator of the industry in the same proportion.
At Stanford, Liza Hayes Percer created an interesting thesis on the intersection of Poetry and Research. As expressed in her thesis, “She supports the move toward research writing that breaks the constraints of traditional academic writing but raises the concern that such writing must not casually adopt the form and name of poetry without studying the craft. Work that introduces poetry into research to be done effectively, researchers must study the craft of writing poetry as critically as they study the craft of writing research. Therefore, instead of attempting to map poetry onto research, researchers may be better served by borrowing from the poets to more accurately define the goals, quality, and purpose of experimental writing. In this way, researchers may learn from poetry to further enhance their own critical art.”
Microsoft does a lot of innovative stuff with the creative artists in their effort towards combining Technology with Music. They partner artists on special projects who want to create new innovations that can create exciting fan engagements.
In a special reference to music and music artists, it is interesting to see how the intersections worked as the technology advances. The bailout curve is the blind spot where multiple decisions are made. These decisions shape the future of the industry, artist-fan relationships, and consumption of content.
Human Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence, and Interference by Technology
The debate that continues to grow, whether humans are going to be replaced by machines or if there is common ground to co-exist. For the creative industries this is a very interesting space, the intersection of Human Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence.
Marcus du Sautoy, Oxford mathematician and author of The Creativity Code explains the scenarios where machine learning helps in creative projects or legal services. To augment human creativity, artificial intelligence can enhance creativity in the sectors of data insights, art, music, live concerts, production of content, dance, design, choreography, publishing, etc.
The future of work which is a focus area for most of the AI studies, Marcus talks about new technologies that give us a glimpse of a future where humans cohabitate with machines. Face recognition, Photo recognition, Photorealistic Humans are some of the daily usage products and extremes of technology that are unveiling.
Popular musicians are using tools like Sony’s Flow Machine or IBM’s Watson are the kind of tools music producers, content producers are leaning towards. Bernard Marr in conversation with Grammy-nominated producer Alex Da Kid analyzes “emotional temperature” for the hit music he produced. Alex explained, “IBM’s Watson scraped millions of conversations, newspaper headlines, and speeches — all of which showed me how emotionally volatile humans are, particularly in the last five years.”
Similarly, Dance and Choreography requires a lot of human interaction and intelligence. Here AI brings multiple dimensions predictions and creation of unique styles sniffing through hundreds of hours of video footage. British choreographer Wayne McGregor along with Google Arts & Culture created an AI that could predict his dance moves.
The use of technology by creative artists is becoming interestingly intense as we move forward. The musical works of Imogen Heap, design works of Andrea Laur and Art AI work of Aparajita Jain are some of the examples where the intersections are taking place. Poem Portraits, a trained algorithm that brings together > 20 MN words, 19th-century poetry, and creates a unique output.
The Story of creALT and Ananya Karthik
Human Computers vs AI Composers
In the time of Transformation
Of the greatest musicians, Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach are considered to be ‘Genius’. Their style defined perfection and their different approach had interesting insights on how the neurons work in machines and the brain.
The neuron’s differentiation between AI and HI expressed by Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder is split into ten parts: Form & Function, Size, Connectivity, Power Consumption, Architecture, Activation Potential, Speed, Learning Technique, Structure and Precision.
At this juncture of humanity, fighting CoronaVirus, we live in times of rapid transformation. Global Tech, Creative and Entertainment industries are reprogramming. This is a good time to look at lives and learnings from the past because there are similarities in transformations of that era. Fear is the biggest one.
The intersection of fear and opportunity is best broken when a genius is at work blending creativity and innovation.
The 360 View of the Digital Ghosts
Off late, there are a lot of debates around the transformation theories of creative businesses. The media and entertainment sector is agnostic to many such theories due to its nature of being an early adopter. The copyright owners, financiers, and distributors started to witness the all-inclusive negotiations aka 360 deals in the last decade.
While many parts of the conversations focused on the world of transactions and ownership of the ideas, what went missing was the intellect and creativity within the intelligence. We have started to witness such similarities when Humans and Machines cross paths.
Creativity, the backbone of the innovations at the intersectional ecosystem invokes a new framework of thoughts and processes.
Daniel Bonner of Wunderman when asked at AW Europe about the meaning of creativity in context to AI and it’s complete originality. ‘No’ is the straight answer because he feels humans have a great sense and control over creativity and creative thinking. But they lack in insights, need assistance and efficiency. To become more effective. AI can be a great tool in such situations.
Evolving with Music is Fashion. There are many inspirations, opportunities, and use cases around the integration of both. The way Fashion and Music intersects, we clearly see a lot of new lingoes appear as well. The lingo becomes a new behavior and identity a community starts to become a part of. With large groups forming smaller clusters, we see many waves of movements that appear, typically called the scene aka Indie-Scene.
As we progressively go deeper into intersecting subconscious and conscious minds, we are creating new patterns, processes in philosophical planes. Some of which may look esoteric at this moment, but it’s a reality in the making, as, we can visualize a blueprint in the imaginary world.
The concept of blurring the lines between Brands, Artist, and Music is beautifully explained by Jennifer Frommer of Columbia Records and Danilo Boer of BBDO. In reference to U2’s Bono and the intersection of life experiences with his artistic aspirations, they created works reflecting his foundation built on the influences he received from Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Mother Teresa. Similarly, in the Billboard Magazine case, Music — See what it is made of? = “Magazines are made of Dots and Artists are made of Influences”.
While in the natural course of our human life we use many mental shortcuts to find solutions using brute intellectual force. This is very important for the development of the creative process.
Stanford University’s Dr. John McCarthy in his interview in the History of Intelligence explains, The central problem now is how do we aggregate external intelligence for intelligent behavior from the knowledge that exists in the world. Mathematicians and Researchers in the 1970s created a theory of non-monotonic reasoning, which unlocks the power of mathematical logic.
To formalize logic we have to overcome the problems with common sense and reasoning, which could use brute force but it is yet to be figured out. The intersectional area of logic and common sense is going to be a fascinating space for the artist and the creative works. What this means is that when we relate to the work of Dr. McCarthy’s mathematical explanations, Ordinary logic can draw conclusive conclusions from certain facts. By adding more facts, more conclusions can be made. But, when we aim to combine Human reasoning and what we want computers to do, such facts are not always available. This is the non-monotonic structure.
The creative community can look at this from the logic of how it can work in the following condition:
Goal — Package a protected music product
The conclusion is Drawn -
Music is available
Or, create an encrypted digital asset or a physical cover
3. Now, additional inputs get added to the above: the music file is a single song and not an album. Then do we need a physical over and album sized encryption as it may or may not be released as a product in a structured pricing environment
4. Thus, the conclusion that music file needs a cover (encryption or physical case) is non-monotonically based on the facts that were available
This becomes complex when we take the above logic and intersect with the copyright and language of expression eg. English. The interpretation of the language and music within the copyright can be perceived in two different ways by the judges.
The Age of Artificial Intelligence [You Tube Series]
Elon Musk vs Artificial Intelligence
While we all understand that creativity and creative artists never go out of style, < Intersections > are a great place to innovate.
Edwin Herbert Land states, “Industries function best at the intersection of Science and Art.” As long as we can keep our gates shut to the factor of control and leave them open for multiple paths to intersect!
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By, Vivek Paul in collaboration with Dr. Vandana Sharma
- The contents of this post are personal views of the author and collaborator.
- The source of information is tagged in the links.
