Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,
I want to share a few thoughts with you on the peculiar
relationship our society has with Artificial Intelligence. It
confronts us with the uncanniness of how it’s taken on an almost
religious-like quality—why else would the phrase curse and
blessing instinctively come to mind when talking about it? To
make sure the ideas I present to you are not completely out of
touch, I would like to share a few video clips we’ve published on
our ex nihilo Substack, created in collaboration with Dall-E and
Google VEO using our in-house, proprietary Company Machine. This
software is quite unusual insofar as it transliterates classic
essays and transcribed conversations into visual metaphors, and
because our brain—or more precisely, our language—is a veritable
magic box, these produce the most daringly audacious image
compositions—things that even the most fantastical mind could
hardly conceive. In a curious way, a remarkable reversal can be
observed here. When we talk about the power of imagination, when
some extremely daring theorists of the 1990s conjured up as the
visual turn, it must be said that advanced image production had
long since left the visual sphere—and gone to our heads. This is
noteworthy as we are witnessing the return of a medieval concept
of Signs. At that time, it was believed that the closer a Sign
was to God, the more valuable it was – or, as we would say today,
the more abstract it was. Consequently, thought was considered
the most valuable Sign, followed by the spoken word, then the
image, and finally the worldly traces one leaves behind. This
changed with the Renaissance, which actually brought about the
visual turn that cultural theorists of the 1990s diagnosed with
considerable delay – and Leonardo da Vinci reflected on the fact
that music is the little sister of painting, simply because it
fades away, while painting releases works of eternal value into
the World. So today, while claiming we live in a visual culture
may still appear to be true for large parts of the population,
the intellectual and aesthetic drive that feeds this world has
shifted its metamorphic form. If Hollywood’s dream factory went
on strike recently, it’s because the advances in our computer
culture are truly revolutionizing filmmaking. You only have to
think back to one of those epic historical films of the 1950s and
1960s, where entire small towns in southern Italy were recruited
as extras – and you see the difference. Today, CGI
(computer-generated imagery) provides directors with a whole
armada of hyper-realistic, malleable actors. And this rationality
shock affects not only the extras, but also the set and stage
designers, as well as the musicians, whom Bernard Hermann once
invited to the recording studio in the form of an entire symphony
orchestra. All this is now accomplished by someone like Hans
Zimmer or by anonymous CGI artists who conjure up the most
phantastical things on screen, which means that what used to be
called a set is now little more than just a studio warehouse
where a few actors perform in front of a green screen. Now, this
threat of rationalization posed by Artificial Intelligence
affects not only the immediate production process but also
post-production. Today, when voices can be cloned at will, and
even translation and dubbing can be done by AI with perfect lip
synchronization, the radical revolution of the dream factory is a
fait accompli.
Now, I could launch into a dystopian tirade about the changes to
our audiovisual tools—and I would be justified in doing so,
insofar as the coming surges of rationality are likely to affect
the entire industry. But that is not what I want to do right now.
Why not? Well, simply because I am convinced that a) this is a
matter of inevitability, and b) well, I personally find the
aesthetic and intellectual possibilities opening up with this
world both sublimely wondrous. The dilemma we face is more
intellectual, if not philosophical, in nature—a humiliation that
surpasses anything Sigmund Freud recorded in his Civilization and
Its Discontents. As you may recall, he identified three
intellectual humiliations: 1) The Copernican Revolution, which
meant we could no longer feel like we were the center of the
Universe; 2) Darwinian Evolutionary Biology, which called our
Anthropological Supremacy into question; 3) The Subconscious
self, which made it clear to individuals that they cannot even
feel at home in their own thoughts, that they are no longer
masters in their own house. Now, let’s keep in mind that when
these upheavals happened, they only really affected a small
number of people (the so-called elite, if you will), but with the
Digital Revolution, we are now facing a new and much more serious
situation: it impacts everyone, absolutely everyone in this
World.
The dilemma we face today can best be compared to what Günter
Anders once aptly called Promethean Shame—which can be understood
as a form of schizophrenia: I am, but I am not. If Blaise Pascal
once said that all human unhappiness stems from the fact that
humans cannot remain quietly in their rooms, then it’s evident
that networked humans are, by definition, social creatures—or, as
I would put it: dividuals who thrive on their divisibility and
their urge to communicate. But because that sounds so harmless, I
will tell you, who are largely familiar with the practices of our
public broadcasters, a little personal story. It has to do with
how, as a young man, I couldn’t quite decide whether I wanted to
be the next Thomas Mann or a composer. In any case, I realized
quite early on that the heroic history of the modern author
belonged to the tempi passati. That was in the mid-1980s, and
since I had been working with a musician from Tangerine Dream for
many years and was deeply involved in the world of recording
studios and electronic sound processing, I eventually realized
that some unquestioned fundamental assumptions had exceeded their
shelf life. When you have a sequencer in front of you that allows
you to chase your fingers across the piano, or more precisely,
the keyboard, at unprecedented speeds, you wonder why you ever
bothered with scales and Czerny’s School of Velocity. Even deeper
than this doubt about virtuosity was the discovery that, with
sampling, the whole world had actually become a musical
instrument, that even the sound of a toilet flushing could be a
great aesthetic experience, not to mention that a sampled sound
is actually a multitude, a multiplicity. In short: What caught my
attention was nothing other than the threat of proliferation
posed by digitalisation.
Fast forward three or four years, when I conducted an intensive
seminar at the University of the Arts together with an editor
from the RBB [Berlins public Radio], where I was working, and
Johannes Schmölling, the musician from Tangerine Dream, during
which we prepared actors and sound engineers to work together—and
because it was going to be broadcast, this wasn’t just any
ordinary practice session, but the real deal. And then my
colleague from the station, Wolfgang Bauernfeind, had the idea of
showing the sound engineers how the professionals at the station
work. But since I had worked as a director in large companies and
knew that the sound engineers weren’t even willing to touch the
multi-track machine in the studio – whereas the studio at the
University of Fine Arts was already fully digitalised – I told
him that wasn’t such a good idea. But he insisted – and so, at
some point (it was around 1992), half a dozen sound engineering
students entered the hallowed halls of the station, the T5. But
after just fifteen minutes, barely had the professionals begun
their work, the first student came up to me and whispered in my
ear: »Tell me, Martin, are they serious? « Which was, of course,
a very valid question. At any rate, a few years later, I ran into
one of the sound engineers in the station hallway, who asked me
if I thought someone like him would be employab…
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