Pianographique is an artistic collaboration between pianists Maki Namekawa and Dennis Russell Davies and media and visualization artist Cori O’Lan. The collaboration began in 2013 and specializes in combining piano music in a concert setting with digital imagery.
Bedřich Smetana “Vltava” for four-hand piano
Bedřich Smetana and Adalbert Stifter devoted their masterpieces to describing a landscape that encompasses the Czech Republic, Austria, and Germany in geographical, historical, and cultural terms. In the piano version in particular, many passages from Smetana’s famous cycle Má Vlast take on a nostalgic, fragile note, and the self-confident national pride of the 19th century gives way to uncertainty about where we actually stand and how we want to define ourselves as societies and individuals in today’s world.
The visualizations for Má Vlast are both an attempt to capture the special atmosphere of the four-hand piano version and a visual, aesthetic accompaniment as well as an artistic exploration of the use of generative artificial intelligence.
All images (with the exception of a few historical drawings for Tabor) were created with AI programs using the original work descriptions by Smetana and Zelený, landscape descriptions by Adalbert Stifter, historical reports on the trial of Jan Huss in Constance, and conversations about Smetana’s music with ChatGPT.
This means that all images, however realistic they may often appear, are completely imaginary; they are the imagination of the “collective cultural archive” with which the great AI models of our time have been trained and which they use as the basis for their creations, be they texts or images. They do not respond to our inputs with exact facts, but with similarities, sometimes very stereotypical, sometimes full of fantasy, with virtuoso hallucinations.
Just as Smetana evokes memories of a bygone era in his music and descriptions, reviving myths and ideals of history from the perspective of his time, these AI-based visualizations are another iteration in the ever-necessary reinvention and interpretation of our history and cultural identities.
Credits:
Bedřich Smetana, Má Vlast – for four-hand piano
Piano: Maki Namekawa and Dennis Russell Davies
Visuals: Cori O’Lan
Selected texts by Adalbert Stifter