An art project using the Twitter platform to post hourly generative graphic scores. More fully explained here, the bot is designed as a jumping-off point rather than being prescriptive or instructive, and generates score-like images (and occasional extracts from Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies) which can be interpreted by anyone, regardless of musical experience.
Users are free to take into account or ignore everything from shape, colour, opacity, and position on ‘stave’ (or, occasionally, lack thereof) in their interpretations of what the bot posts. I plan to manually retweet any creations based on the generated scores that are sent to me, and also intend to add more features to the bot in the future.
Graphic Score Bot is a superficial attempt to make sense of my own complicated feelings about sound art and experimental music, which I view as simultaneously more and less accessible to listeners and artists without a ‘conventional’ musical background. Despite the fact that experimental music can be played and created with no knowledge or understanding of Western art music whatsoever, the fact remains that the culture surrounding it is often intimidating. I wondered if I could take some of the self-consciousness out of composition by imposing limitations which are generated beyond my control, other than the parameters I feed into the bot in the first place (which I am well aware is another layer of complexity in play - although the meanings of these may equally change at the point of reception). Graphic Score Bot both limits the field of creativity and expands it infinitely, depending upon how it is interpreted.
A live variation of Graphic Score Bot was performed from at BotSummit 2016 at the Victoria and Albert museum, and later, in a more developed real-time form at Abandon Normal Devices’ festival The Art of Bots at Somerset House in London.