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Kathleen Jamie & Painting Music
18th March 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM GMT
A live performance between poet Kathleen Jamie and visual artist Kate Steenhauer from Painting Music that combines spoken word, live painting and music created by cutting-edge AI technology. Painting Music uses AI to create music from live-painted drawings, in real time and unique for each performance. The performance will feature poems specially written by Kathleen Jamie, and, while introducing an AI element, will also question the value of AI in producing artworks. What do we gain, and what do we lose? This multifaceted production encompasses a dynamic, interactive, and experimental form of art-making, an artists’ panel session and Q&A opportunity for the audience.
Speaker Biographies
Kathleen Jamie is a poet and essayist. Her work concerns nature, travel and culture. Her poetry collections include The Overhaul, which won the 2012 Costa Poetry Prize, and The Tree House, which won the Forward prize. Her non-fiction essays are collected in the three highly regarded books Findings, Sightlines, and Surfacing, all regarded as important contributions to the ‘new nature writing’. The Bonniest Companie appeared in 2015 and won the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award. In 2024 she published Cairn,’ a view from the strange here-and-now, and The KeelieHawk, a collection of poems in Scots. Kathleen’s interests are in archaeology, nature and environment, travel and art. From 2021-24 Kathleen served as Scotland’s ‘Makar’, or National Poet. http://www.kathleenjamie.com
Kate Steenhauer is a visual artist who has an expansive, multi-disciplinary practice that includes working in visual arts, filmmaking and technology including Artificial Intelligence. Painting Music is one of her multifaceted productions that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to create music from live-painted drawings, in real time and unique for each performance. Painting Music is a ground-breaking Research and Development company comprised of Artist and Filmmaker Kate Steenhauer and Artificial Intelligence (AI) developers Dr Starkey and Jack Caven. The team explores how cutting-edge AI techniques can facilitate multifaceted relationships between music and visual art. Most AI techniques that are used in artistic endeavors are off-the-shelf methods that are black box and cannot explain what they are doing. Painting Music however uses algorithms that are explainable, which is innovative even in the field of AI, and the combination of AI, painting and music represents to the best of our knowledge a world’s first.
Patrick James Errington is a Scottish-Canadian poet, translator, multidisciplinary researcher and educator. His poems appear regularly in magazines and anthologies worldwide and have received numerous awards, including the Scottish Book Trust’s Callan Gordon Award and the Bronwen Wallace Award from the Writers’ Trust of Canada. His recent collection, the swailing (McGill-Queens University Press) was shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish Poetry Book of the Year and won the John Pollard International Poetry Prize. His current translation (into English) of the French-Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran’s Notebooks is forthcoming from New York Review Books. As an academic, Patrick’s research draws together literary theory, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and creative practice to examine how creative responses to poetry can enhance readers’ aesthetic experience. Born in Canada, Patrick lives in Scotland where he’s a Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh.
