Concluding notes
“By transposing us beyond the confines of bound identities, art becomes necessarily inhuman in the sense of non-human in that it connects to the animal, the vegetable, earthy and planetary forces that surround us." (Braidotti 2013, 107)
I believe that two principal conclusions can be drawn from this project.
First and foremost, the interviews brought me to the conclusion that what we consider music to be is highly dependent on the language we use. Since there is still this fear that humans are going to become obsolete by the emergence of machines in the only "untouchable" realm (i.e. art), it is interesting to note that, none of the interviewees knowing that the last song was made by AI, they did not find it shocking. I believe that had I told them that beforehand, their reactions would not have been the same. As Coeckelbergh (2017, 296) argues: "today, we are not used to talk about machines in terms of art and ‘artists’; it is not very common to speak of ‘machine artists’. It is still a provocation, especially in the eyes of those who see it as their mission to defend ‘humanity’ against ‘the machines’—who setup humanity as against machines." Isabella Sandes (2012) similarly argues that "the hybridization of technology and art has brought forth challenging ethical and ontological questions concerning uncanny entities […] These uncanny entities appear ‘foreign’ because their visual representations oscillate between familiarity and uncanniness, in which a feeling of uncertainty challenges our traditional definitions of human, machine, and thing."
Second, I believe that once we realize that to be human also means to be technological, we can think of machine-art as a human extension (considering our materiality too), and it becomes "not the expression of only one human individual perhaps but an expression and extension of our techno-humanity. Then one may still discuss whether or not a particular object is a work of art, but it is no longer possible to have a principled, fundamental objection to calling anything produced by a machine art by saying that it is not made by a human.” (Coeckelbergh 2017, 298) Indeed, we encounter an unfolding interaction of bodily and technological elements, and therefore enact "the transformation of one’s sensorial and perceptual co-ordinates, in order to acknowledge the collective nature and outward-bound direction of what we still call the self" (Braidotti 2013, 193)
