From April 20th to 27th, La Nuit Sauve, by Etienne Chambaud, will show at CuratingAI at the 120710 gallery in Berkeley. Graduate student Luke Dzwonczyk worked with Etienne to create the sound of the installation, which uses Carmine Cella's Orchidea software to endlessly generate orchestrations of the film's sounds. 

La Nuit Sauve, which opened at LaM, Lille Métropole Musée d'art moderne, d'art contemporain et d'art brut in Lille, France in October 2022, is a video installation focusing on the animal body and the apparatuses that capture its visibility (zoo, diorama, and cinema). It has been filmed in natural history museums, various aquariums and zoos, as well as on a theatre stage where a motion control camera tirelessly follows a geometrical motif traced on the floor. The soundtrack is intermittently taken over by an orchestration algorithm that analyses and transforms the direct sounds documented in the film into a musical version played by generated symphonic instruments. As a result, a film focusing on the classification and confinement of bodies becomes a vehicle for the emergence of an ever-changing music, both classical and algorithmic.

The audio of the installation is created through a custom software program made specifically for this piece. At the core of the program is Orchidea, a tool for computer-assisted orchestration, which has been developed by CNMAT’s Carmine Cella. Here, the sounds of the film are input to Orchidea, and melodies emerge that mimic the sounds of the film. Probabilities and randomness determine the evolution of various parameters that affect the orchestration. A single instrument may play a virtuosic solo, but as time goes on this can be transformed into sparse, static chords from a brass ensemble. These decisions, such as what instruments are used, are made by the program, not by the human user.

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CuratingAI (https://www.curatingai.art/):
When artists work with AI's new generative tools, are they creators, curators or collaborators? While AI operates in the abstract digital field of information, this exhibit highlights artworks with physical materiality, often handmade, that utilize AI as a key element in the creative process. This juxtaposition of the intangible with the tangible opens the opportunity for viewers to reflect on the timely debates about training data, bias, ownership, and the transference of creativity between digital and physical realms.
Location: 
120710 gallery, 1207 10th Street, Berkeley
Dates: 
Saturday April 20: 4-8pm  (Opening)
Monday April 22 to Friday April 26: 12-3pm
Saturday April 27: 4-8pm (Closing)