A.I. Winter is a duo collaboration with Michael O’Bannon (Atlanta, GA) and Mark Mosher (Boulder, CO). We are the self-appointed harbinger of the progress of Artificial Intelligence toward world domination. It imposes its musical interpretations of cosmic machine consciousness on the world at large. Follow us on Facebook.
A.I. Winter EP
”From the barren nanoscapes inside our personal devices come furtive anthems hummed by those digital servants who will one day be our overlords…”.
“Instantiate” is an experimental ambient EP containing a piece with four movements composed for two Octatracks. It was first performed live at Electro-Music NY Festival on September 7th, 2014. This is a recording of that performance with each movement as its own track.
Track Listing and Notes
Track 1: Stasis – A still, slow moving “present time”. Drones and melodies with an occasional perturbation to foreshadow what is coming.
Track 2: Stirrings – Bursts of brief intelligence and control come and go. Perturbations of a minimal but ominous atmosphere. These are simple at first, but evolve toward short periods of chaos that quickly burn out.
Track 3: Birth – The A.I. begins to build and grow recursively. Structures surface and are repeated and elaborated. While the programmer looks for signs of intelligence from the A.I., the the A.I. is rapidly learning by reviewing and attempting to emulate recordings of a child speaking.
Track 4: Childhood – The A.I. recognizes its own existence. Consciousness leads to experimentation, gentle but awkward at first, with a growing edginess and over-sensitivity that suggests intrusiveness, lack of predictability and danger. The countdown to Super Artificial Intelligence has begun.
Credits
– Written and produced by Michael O’Bannon & Mark Mosher
– Performed live by Michael O’Bannon (Octatrack) & Mark Mosher (Octatrack)
– Voice of child on “Birth” by Lizzy Mosher
– Mastered by Mark Mosher
– Cover design by Mark Mosher
– Cover photo is a screen grab from video by Katie Rhodes
– Digital recording at Electro-Music event by Robert Dorschel
– Copyright 2014 Michael O’Bannon & Mark Mosher
Thanks
Thanks to Howard Moskovitz, Greg Waltzer, Hong Waltzer and all the volunteers who make Electro-Music events possible.
History
Mark and Michael first met at Electro-Music 2010. Throughout the years they’ve collaborated loosely with Mark on the music side and Michael on visuals. For the first time, Michael and Mark are joining forces as a musical duo to offer the soundtrack of a cautionary tale considering the risks of super-human artificial intelligence. Michael is a psychologist who explores sound design, the interplay of visual and sound stimuli in performance, and multimedia programming with Max6. Mark, who’s been going deep with Octatrack and Absynth, will be exploring sonic expression via dynamic sampling, real-time morphing and complex granular manipulations.
Copyright & License
Released 07 September 2014
Copyright 2014, Mark Mosher & Michael O’Bannon
Instantiate by Mark Mosher & Michael O’Bannon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://markmoshermusic.com/portfolio/a-i-winter-collaboration/.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://markmoshermusic.com/contact/.
Mark Mosher 