The Uncanny Muse: Music, Art, and Machines from Automata to AI
by David Hajdu

What does it mean to be human in a world where machines, too, can be artists? The Uncanny Muse explores the history of automation in the arts and delves into one of the most momentous and controversial aspects of AI: artificial creativity. The adoption of technology and machinery has long transformed the world, but as the potential for artificial intelligence expands, David Hajdu examines the new, increasingly urgent questions about technology’s role in culture.

From the life-size mechanical doll that made headlines in Victorian London to the doll’s modern AI–pop star counterpart, Hajdu traces the fascinating, varied ways in which inventors and artists have sought to emulate mental processes and mechanize creative production. For decades, machines and artists have engaged in expressing the human condition—along with the condition of living with machines—through player pianos, broadcasting technology, electric organs, digital movie effects, synthesizers, and motion capture. By communicating and informing human knowledge, the machines have exerted considerable influence on the history of art—and often more influence than humans have been willing to recognize. As Hajdu proclaims: “before machine learning, there was machine teaching.”

With thoughtful, wide-ranging, and surprising turns from Berry Gordy and George Harrison to Andy Warhol and Stevie Wonder, David Hajdu takes a novel and contrarian approach: he sees how machines through the ages have enabled creativity, not stifled it—and The Uncanny Muse sees no reason why this shouldn’t be the case with AI today.

About the Author

David Hajdu is Professor of Journalism at Columbia Journalism School. Currently the staff music critic for The Nation, he served as music critic for The New Republic for 12 years. In a career spanning more than 30 years, he has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Harper's and other publications. Hajdu is the author of eight books of cultural history, criticism and fiction. He is a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and four-time winner of the ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for Music Writing. His book Lush Life was named one of "Hundred Best Nonfiction Books of All Time" by The New York Times.

About the Speakers

Ahmed Elgammal is a professor at the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University. He is the founder and director of the Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Rutgers, which focuses on data science in the domain of digital humanities. He is also an Executive Council Faculty at the Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. Prof. Elgammal published over 180 peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and books in the fields of computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. His research on knowledge discovery in art history and AI art generation received wide international media attention.

Mark Hansen joined Columbia Journalism School in July 2012 and took on the position of inaugural director of the east coast branch of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation. Prior to joining Columbia, he was a professor at UCLA, holding appointments in the Department of Statistics, the Department of Design Media Arts and the Department of Electrical Engineering. He was also a Co-PI for Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, an NSF Science and Technology Center devoted to the study of sensor networks. Prior to UCLA, Hansen was a Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey.

George Lewis is an American composer, musicologist, and trombonist. He is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music and Area Chair in Composition at Columbia University. In 2020-21 he was a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study), and he currently serves as Artistic Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin, and an Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society. Lewis’s other honors include the Doris Duke Artist Award (2019), a MacArthur Fellowship (2002), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015). Lewis is widely regarded as a pioneer in the development of AI programs that improvise together with human musicians.(Note: George Lewis will be joining the panel remotely)

Alisa Solomon is Professor of Journalism at Columbia Journalism School and, through Columbia’s Prison Education Project, at Sing Sing. She began her journalism career as a theater critic at the Village Voice and, while continuing in that role in her 21 years on staff there, also covered such areas as U.S. immigration policy, LGTBQ issues, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and women’s sports. As a freelancer, she has contributed to magazines, newspapers, and radio stations ranging from Glamour and Poz to the Guardian, New York Times, and WNYC, and nowadays, to The Nation, Jewish Currents and elsewhere. Her award-winning books include Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender and Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof. She works with the playwright/performer Anna Deavere Smith as dramaturge.

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