Inspiration Machine

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A01=Eitan Y. Wilf
Age Group_Uncategorized
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algorithms
art
artificial intelligence
Author_Eitan Y. Wilf
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=JBCC
Category=JFC
Category=PDR
computational creativity
computer-generated poetry
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
digital computation
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eq_non-fiction
eq_science
eq_society-politics
ethnography
jazz
Language_English
PA=Available
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
robot
softlaunch
United States

Product details

  • ISBN 9780226828336
  • Weight: 340g
  • Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
  • Publication Date: 27 Nov 2023
  • Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
  • Language: English
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Explores how creative digital technologies and artificial intelligence are embedded in culture and society.
 
In The Inspiration Machine, Eitan Y. Wilf explores the transformative potentials that digital technology opens up for creative practice through three ethnographic cases, two with jazz musicians and one with a group of poets. At times dissatisfied with the limitations of human creativity, these artists do not turn to computerized algorithms merely to execute their preconceived ideas. Rather, they approach them as creative partners, delegating to them different degrees of agentive control and artistic decision-making in the hopes of finding inspiration in their output and thereby expanding their own creative horizons.
 
The algorithms these artists develop and use, however, remain rooted in and haunted by the specific social predicaments and human shortfalls that they were intended to overcome. Experiments in the digital thus hold an important lesson: although Wilf’s interlocutors returned from their adventures with computational creativity with modified, novel, and enriched capacities and predilections, they also gained a renewed appreciation for, and at times a desire to re-inhabit, non-digital creativity. In examining the potentials and pitfalls of seemingly autonomous digital technologies in the realm of art, Wilf shows that computational solutions to the real or imagined insufficiencies of human practice are best developed in relation to, rather than away from, the social and cultural contexts that gave rise to those insufficiencies, in the first place.
Eitan Y. Wilf is associate professor of anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of School for Cool and Creativity on Demand, both published by the University of Chicago Press.