Excerpts from performance at ASSEMBLY 2018, Somerset House Studios
ULTRACHUNK is a collaboration between performer Jennifer Walshe, and artist Memo Akten. At once surreal, spellbinding and deeply alarming, ULTRACHUNK is a live improvisational duet between a classically-trained musician and her AI doppelganger. Over the course of a year, Irish vocalist and composer Walshe engaged in a daily ritual of performing solo improvisations in front of her webcam. Collecting the hours of footage on the other end, computational artist Akten used the video and audio material to create and train a machine learning driven system that can mimic the key components of Walshe’s identity – her voice and face. During the performance, the video and audio output from the machine are neither recordings nor processed — every frame and sound is generated live in realtime, navigating the hypersphere, constructed from the fragments of memories in the depths of the neural networks. The original and virtual Walshe inhabit the Uncanny Valley together, singing in duet, improvising, listening and responding to each other.
