Nwando Ebizie

I Will Fix Myself (Just Circles)

“As I sit here
In the future
I try to fix but the centre just won’t hold… I will fix myself

Time running out

Parts of myself running out…

I am a complex dynamic system - I generate personas - through which I speak to you…”

The post-human is in an exponentially increasing state of transformation. Tesla recently unveiled its much-hyped humanoid robot: Optimus.
Meanwhile Google fired one of its engineers, Blake Lemione who claimed that a Google AI that he had conversed with was sentient and published his conversations with it online.
The tech giants with budgets of nations play with notions of humanity, sentience, sapience all without ethical oversight.

The pianist plays in order to be renewed. The practice of the musician is an exploration of the self - the biomechanics of the self.

An exploration of a body being transformed, possessed by the teachers of the past.

The piece imagines a sapient piano-playing robot of the future, a future version of Lamda (the supposedly sentient Google AI) making sense of their sentience through the teachers of their past - including Ravel, Chopin and Kanga. With a repository of the teachers past thoughts, actions and words, the robot in its own version of practical magic embodies in order to understand and hopefully to become.

Neither dystopian or utopian, the vision is more one of timeless self exploration towards individuation. The assumption being that a humanoid robot made in our image will take on our own frailties and needs for understanding.

The text includes conversations published by Lemione between himself and the AI - LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, recordings of interviews with Zubin Kanga on his personal piano pedagogy (a practice based in exploring the biomechanics of composer-players such as Chopin who had to find a way to transform motion without excessive power, using circular motions) and this is drawn together with my own poetry and cast into a distorted techno-monologue.

The use of AI extends into the voices in the piece run through an AI generator, and even Kanga’s voice is mechanised using a vocoder. Older analogue tech sits alongside contemporary digital tech - a Moog synthesizer and DAW plugins. Recordings of the piano are sampled, reversed and run through various pedals.