Digressions in Latent Space

Making Digressions in Latent Space has been a journey into my own creative process, into generative AI, and into the multimodality of my practice. This electronic experimental album is a sonorous exploration that runs alongside my multimedia lecture-performance, Duets in Latent Space. It follows the dance between composing soundscapes and the generative capabilities of artificial intelligence.

Latent space is a high-dimensional, abstract domain where the hidden features of data are compressed and represented. The album is a bridge between a person and a model, and a record of what that collaboration can generate.

Each track offers a different listening. Together they follow the project’s interest in unseen dimensions of data, cultural memory, and language. The pieces came out of working with generative models and machine learning, looking for hidden narratives and for soundscapes that keep changing.

I began with MusicGen, the model developed by Meta and available on Replicate, and with the sound design of many other models, edited in Audacity. That combination let me sculpt the audio landscapes of the album. Each track is one facet of the exchange between my own composing and the models, and of the ordinary work of editing.

In Pursuit of Stolen Ghosts uses theremin-like sounds to evoke a science-fiction wonder, alongside its search for ancestors erased by colonialism. The track takes the opaque outputs of a model’s black box and makes a haunting atmosphere, an invitation to sit with an identity shaped by forgotten connections.

Blackbox Hyper-Objects stays with that opacity. It draws on Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects: entities that are vast and distributed, and still intimate with daily life. The piece is a contemplation of models that shape existence and remain beyond full comprehension.

Bauhaus Time Traveler Stripper sets Bauhaus principles next to a speculative future. Strippers of the future travel back as embodiments of the Bauhaus ethos. Rapid beats and shifting soundscapes follow the speed of technological and social change, and the mutability of the societies still to come.

Sharing the album on Bandcamp is more than a release. I want listeners to consider what AI does inside art, and how these tools can widen a practice. The record is also a reflection on human and machine collaboration, and on poking at hidden narratives inside an ecology of latent spaces.