Kathleen Jamie & Painting Music

A live performance featuring new poetry from Kathleen Jamie and music created by AI from live drawings by Kate Steenhauer.

18 March 2025
6pm - 7:30pm
Hybrid event
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Kathleen Jamie & Painting Music

18th March 6:00 PM 7:30 PM GMT

Free

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

Headshot of Kathleen Jamie

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 FindingsSightlines, 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 

Headshot of Kate Steenhauer

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. 

Headshot of Jennifer Williams

Jennifer Williams is the Creative Projects Manager at Edinburgh Futures Institute. She manages a portfolio of creative projects that connect the work of the Institute to communities within the University of Edinburgh and beyond its walls. Utopia Lab, for instance, is a project in which people from many different places gather to dream futures that inspire our experience of the present and allow us to see the world in new ways that enable change. Jennifer is a poet and librettist and her background is in writing, art, collaboration, creative learning and project management. Williams is particularly interested in expanding dialogues across languages, perspectives and cultures and in poetry, cross-form work, music, visual art, dance, opera and theatre. She is concerned with the body, and how slowing down can help busy people to experience their connection to themselves, one another and the world more fully. She holds a BA degree from Wellesley College in English Literature with a Studio Art minor, and an MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow. Recent posts have included Projects and Engagement Coordinator at the Institute for Academic Development, Programme Manager at the Scottish Poetry Library and Literature Officer at the Traverse Theatre. 

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