Automation and Us

In this talk, I confront the automation in my artistic practice: From cellular automata to surrealist automatism to "f*** off ai music" and beyond.

Let’s travel through a forest of contrasting artistic devices through the lens of automation. This includes the automation I get my computer to do, but also the automation I get myself to do, and I'll examine the relationship between these. What does it mean to let go of control and give something or someone else the wheel? What kinds of automation are we’re happy to use, and why?

I’ll address the London Live Coding scene’s relationship to AI, and how outsiders keep mistaking manual live performance as being generated by an AI agent. I’ll observe how the early days of cellular automata were done by hand on pieces of paper. I’ll compare this to surrealism’s preference for “automatism”: How artists try to lose control to access their inner feelings. And I’ll connect it all to the growing collaborative movement of Pastagang that ‘automates’ creative work by promoting interdependence within a global community.

About Lu Wilson:
Lu is a creative technologist from London with a background in teaching. They make slightly surreal films about their cellular automata and coding projects, often involving heavy use of recursion. They're an organiser of Algorave London and a member of the global live coding community, as well as being a key part of the mass collaborative leaderless group known as "Pastagang". In their day job, Lu designs and builds experimental prototypes, and is currently working as a designer at the Wikimedia Foundation.