Art and intelligence: the conservatory combined robots with musicians
Robot artists, a voice assistant instead of an entertainer, and a meme as a leitmotif. The annual international festival of electroacoustic and multimedia music "Biomechanics" started at the Moscow Conservatory with the concert "Dark Matter", which combined the most experimental and technological forms of sound creativity. However, the visual component here is no less spectacular: the very appearance of the stage, lined with mechanical structures and entangled with many wires, is perceived as an art installation. And when it all "comes to life"... Izvestia listened and took a closer look at the art of the future.
They are robots
Six concerts, five venues. 16 Russian and five world premieres. These are the statistics of Biomechanics 2026. However, the main trump card of the show is not quantitative indicators, but the concept itself: to fill academic spaces, where, as a rule, only classical music is played, with art of a different kind. An art that combines the light of stadium shows, video art, the performative "shamanism" of musicians on stage and sound worlds that did not exist before. Each opus of the program involves not just playing familiar instruments, but a complex mix of acoustic and electronic audio. The know-how is not only artistic, but also technological.
A vivid example of this approach is the composition "Dark Matter" by Nikolai Popov, the founder of the festival, head of the Center for Electroacoustic Music (CEAM) of the Moscow Conservatory, which gave the name to the entire concert and became its main premiere. We see three grand pianos, the covers of which have been removed, and mechanized structures resembling factory manipulators are attached to the cases. These are robots programmed to extract unusual sounds from piano strings and soundboard (metal frame).
But the pianos themselves are unusual: the keys are pressed without human intervention. Such tools are called disklaviers. They "memorize" the pianist's actions in great detail and can then repeat them, either by themselves or by passing them on to their "colleagues." Disklaviers are usually used for distance learning, master classes, and competitions. Popov, on the other hand, used technology for artistic purposes, thereby ensuring perfect synchronization with robots, inhuman virtuosity, and also a futuristic look of "self—playing" pianos, as if they had come to life, with artificial "hands" digging into their insides.
Two double basses enter into a dialogue with the speakers. Live musicians (Vacuum Quartet soloists) are already involved here, but their function is also unconventional. The instruments are on the tables, motors are attached to the strings. The actions of people and mechanisms complement each other, turning the entire essay into a paradoxical reflection on the fragility of the boundaries between natural and artificial.
Meme as a slogan
Even the concert's entertainer referred to the AI topic — more precisely, the "voice assistant", voicing the names of the works and explanations to them, reciting a fictional manifesto of robot musicians and repeatedly repeating the meme phrase "We don't know what it is. If we only knew what it is..." Metamodern banter turns into a succinct formula of everything that happens on stage. We really don't know what it is: is it music? A performance? The triumph of human ingenuity or the fulfilled prophecy of the "Matrix", where machines use people, and not the other way around?
To one degree or another, these questions apply to all the works in the program. In the "Trio (with a Beethoven Remix)" by the German Malte Giesen, the musicians' attempts to play the classical opus are drowned in distortions, glitches and jamming — it seems that the artifacts of digital reality destroy and deconstruct the sample of high true beauty. Or maybe this beauty itself is a fake, an illusion that AI is trying to feed us under the guise of genuine?
The dialogue-dispute of aestheticians turns into a journey through time, a connection of tenses. And to a greater extent, this is typical not even for the "Trio", but for the "Berlin Toccata" by the French composer Rafael Sendo — another Russian premiere of "Biomechanics-2026". The author himself notes: "It is dominated by the sounds of charmans, which bring us back to the imaginary world of popular places of the 19th century, and the sounds of a modular synthesizer rooted in the 1970s and 1980s. It's a story of sounds, it's imagined and played out, it's a story of humanity that we share."
And if postmodernism assumed quoting melodies and motifs, and metamodernism began to juggle intonations, then in this new system, which has not yet received an art label, timbres and sound patterns drawn from different eras and cultures are taken as the basis. In addition, electronics and acoustics are so tightly fused that sometimes it seems strange to separate them at all.
Confessions of a patient
In Daria Maminova's Melchior, vocal samples with fragments of poems by Pasternak and Edward Thomas are interwoven into a duet of two synthesizers — and this blurs the divide between not only instruments, but also genres: echoes of Bjork can be heard in the academic avant-garde. But Popov's aggressive rhythm in "Dark Matter" came close to dubstep at some point. Well, the most ironic opus of the concert — "At first I didn't see anyone" by Peter Aida — turns out to be not so much a musical phenomenon as a theatrical and performative one. Turning the alcoholic's delirium into a recitation (based on the transcript of a real patient), Aidu accompanied it with a quartet playing with breathing tubes in his mouth.
The tubes are connected to the strings: thus, the musicians' mouths become resonators. Repeating individual sentences after the soloist and simultaneously playing with bows, the artists turn violin phrases into phantasmagorical echo comments, which resonates with the idea of the protagonist's altered consciousness. Although the very appearance of the performers evokes an association with the inhabitants of hospital wards.
"We don't know what it is." But, at a minimum, this is an attempt to find out where the boundaries of music and art are. And, more importantly, a way to understand the modern world through creativity — with all its technological breakthroughs and humanistic failures.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
