Automatic: Neural Net Project

The Automatic Neural Net Project began in March 2011 and continued for eight weeks. It was an artistic experiment designed to bypass my rational and musically conditioned mind and intuitively explore my experience of neural networks through automatic piano playing and automatic drawing.

At the time I was deeply interested in neuroscience as well as theories connecting consciousness, microtubules, quantum processes, and multidimensional neural networks. I found these theories fascinating intellectually; however I wanted to approach them differently. Instead of thinking about the neural network I would experience them through different intuitive mediums.

I began by sitting at my electric keyboard and turning my attention inward and imagining that I was tuning into my neural network. I then allowed both hands to move automatically across the keyboard.

One of the central challenges of this approach was my own musical training. After a lifetime of playing piano, my hands already “knew” countless harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic relationships. I wanted to reduce the influence of this learned musical conditioning as much as possible.

I therefore recorded the performances as MIDI without external sound. I sat at the keyboard, tuned inward, and allowed my hands to move. The MIDI recording became a record of those movements. In other words, I could not hear what I was playing. This was an essential part of the experiment. Without auditory feedback, I could not consciously evaluate a chord, respond to a melody I had just created, correct a dissonance, develop an attractive musical idea, or intentionally return to something I liked.

The next stage took place at my composing table, where I had placed paper and pens. Only then did I turn on the MIDI recording and hear the piano sounds for the first time. While listening, I entered another automatic process. Instead of allowing two hands to move independently across a piano keyboard, I allowed both hands to move independently across the paper.

The piano performance therefore became the stimulus for an automatic two-handed drawing. I was interested in what might happen when one spontaneous process was translated into another:

internal attention → hand movement → silent MIDI recording → sound → listening → hand movement → visual form

The intention was to reduce deliberate control and allow forms and relationships to spontaneously emerge.

Listening to Automatic

When listening to Automatic, I invite you to participate in the experiment. Tune into your own felt sense of your neural network and remain open to whatever images, sensations, thoughts, movements, or associations arise. Click on one of the Automatic drawings and listen to the corresponding piano recording while mindfully entering into the lines, intersections, movements, and spaces of the drawing. Afterward, record what you experienced and/or begin your own automatic drawing and allow your hands to respond without deciding beforehand what they should create.

Neural Net Drawings

The eight-week Automatic project eventually generated two principal Neural Net Graphic Drawings that became part of the visual documentation of the project. They are visual records of my intuitive process. They are the final stage of an experiment that began with inward attention, passed through silent movement at the keyboard, became sound only afterward, and finally returned to movement through drawing.

In this sense Automatic is a discipline I used to create the conditions to get beyond what I already know to explore and learn from what I do not know.