Small Gestures: Generating radical sonic futures in an algorithmic world

Abstract The widespread deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools has created a shift in knowledge culture. The marginalisation of slower, more traditional modes of engagement for quantifiable data easily parsed by mathematical algorithms has resulted in prioritising proprietary or opaque datasets (knowledge) explicitly constructed with measurable parameters. Well-documented concerns persist regarding the narrow range of human data used by algorithmic tools, data that arguably encapsulates the many failures of human society. The inevitable result of the use and priority of this data, alongside very particular notions of value and what is valuable, is a replication of many of the foibles of our history as a species. Cultural practice in general necessitates the communication of what drives our hopes and underlies our experiences. In algorithmic times we can see that this kind of communication supports some of the many critiques of AI and machine learning already extant in activist circles. Through investigating some of the theoretical backgrounds of this resistance, this article uses the first iteration of HEXORCISMOS’S SEMILLA AI project and the resulting album release as one of the many possible ways in which we might use machine learning and AI tools alongside very deliberate and uplifting models of community and community building.