Anton Bruckner, Scherzo from the 4th Symphonie

Preview of the visualisation for Ars Electronica Concert Night on Sept.8
All images that you see in the visualization of Bruckner’s music are solely created with generative AI systems after several weeks of conversation about Bruckner’s music held by Ars Electronica curators with ChatGPT. At the end of these conversations, ChatGPT was asked to describe Bruckner’s music as a landscape or as a building, but also as musical instruments, machines, or as simple brushstroke.
ChatGPT was also asked to describe some of the typical stories of Bruckner’s life.
These descriptions were used as prompts for the image creation. A few thousand images were created in this process, with only a few selected and animated live by the sounds of the orchestra.
After Images of Sacre du Printemps (by Stravinsky and presented in the piano version for four hands by Maki Namekawa and Dennis Russell Davies in Innsbruck’s Haus der Musik) The Surface of Bruckner is the second experiment aimed at exploring possibilities of co-creation with AI systems. This takes the form of active collaboration, exploring the grey zones of interpretation between basic forms of expression and communication like music, language, and images.
The results, however, expose the very stereo- typical and often superficial nature of common- ly available AI systems and demonstrate once again that the starting point of true creativity can be rather found in the glitches, imperfec- tions, and shortcomings where our common view of reality becomes fragile and breaks open.