Oct 29

the medium, the mirror, and the music

generative art in the age of ai

marshall mcluhan, the philosopher often described as the father of media studies, famously observed that “the medium is the message.” his point was simple yet profound: technological innovations are never merely tools. they reshape the structure of human experience itself.

when humanity invented the chair, it didn't just create a piece of furniture. it invented "sittingness." that posture gave rise to new possibilities, including the table, which extended sitting into a medium for writing, dining, and collaboration. centuries later, the printed book transformed fluid oral language into a durable physical form. social media and algorithmic networks continued this trajectory, creating new architectures for communication, attention, and identity.

artificial intelligence is not an anomaly within this lineage. it is an extension of it.

where previous media amplified human speech, memory, or connection, ai amplifies pattern recognition and synthesis. it absorbs traces of human experience, processes them through digital architectures, and returns new combinations for us to encounter and interpret.

this lineage forms the backdrop for my latest project: impermanence series a.

created in collaboration with scorsbt4, a program i engineered with the help of claude code, the project functions as a daily generative musical experiment. every twenty-four hours, the system gathers sounds from around the world:

• live fm and shortwave radio broadcasts
• internet radio stations and public audio streams
• underwater hydrophones, atmospheric monitors, and nature feeds
• randomly selected recordings from the internet archive

using chance operations inspired by john cage, the software transforms these sources into a new album each day. as cage observed, "all computer programming is basically question asking, rather than choice making." the algorithm asks endless structural questions through randomness. the listener provides the answer through attention.

at midnight, the album is permanently deleted.

the process then begins again from scratch.

each day also increases the probability that the current album will be the final one in the series. eventually, the project will end forever.

my role is simple: i listen. from each day's album, i select a single track to preserve. when the project concludes, the final release will consist entirely of these human selections, gathered from a sea of computational possibility.

every generated album is temporary. most tracks will never be heard again. the final release is therefore not a comprehensive archive of the system's output, but a record of attention itself: a collection of moments in which a listener encountered abundance and decided, "this one."

the project has led me to think differently about contemporary ai.

much of today's discourse frames artificial intelligence as either a miraculous breakthrough or an existential threat. both perspectives risk overlooking a more familiar reality. ai mirrors a process that has always existed within human culture.

every one of us is a collage of inherited biology, accumulated experiences, cultural influences, and remembered ideas. creativity itself is a combinatorial process, recombining existing materials into new forms. ai performs a technological version of that process, refracting fragments of collective human expression into unfamiliar arrangements.

the questions surrounding artificial intelligence are therefore not entirely new. how do we relate to the past? what do we preserve? what deserves our attention? how do we make meaning from abundance?

these questions sit at the center of impermanence series a.

the software can gather signals, generate structures, and produce endless musical variations. but it cannot determine significance. meaning emerges through participation. the act of listening remains irreducibly.

recently, i encountered a definition of faith from a unitarian universalist congregation: faith as attendance. faith not as certainty, but as the simple act of showing up and being present.

i find that idea increasingly relevant to art, technology, and creation itself.

the machine output, the shortwave signal, the ocean hydrophone, and the human ear all participate in the same unfolding process. creation is not a finished object but an ongoing event.

we engage with new media not to dominate them, but to enter into relationship with them. not to conquer the medium, but to attend to it.

the challenge, and perhaps the opportunity, of ai is the same as it has always been: to remain present, to make meaningful choices, and to participate consciously in the endless improvisation of creation.

in a culture increasingly defined by limitless generation, creation and attention become inseparable. the machine can generate possibilities, but only attention reveals what is worth carrying forward. peace, love, and joy may begin there: not in conquering complexity, but in participating consciously within it, in the eternal romance between the witness and the witnessed.