In Search of Good Ancestors / Ahnen in Arbeit is year-long experiment in computer generated radio, investigating the nature of datasets and machine learning algorithms as unstable, intergenerational vocal transmission and memory systems. Commissioned by RADIOLAB, a consortium of CTM Festival with German and Austrian Public Radio, the year-long audio stream features the voice(s) of an artificial BroadCaster, a bespoke generative voice instrument utilizing deep learning text and speech models, which generates an endless stream of vocal rhuminations on what the theme of becoming a good ancestor.

The BroadCaster begins pre-trained on widely used, and influential, public AI research datasets, and then mutates through collaborative public workshops held throughout the year. These workshops, developed in collaboration with the ethical tech collective varia, focus on the dynamics of creating and sharing voice and co-opting machine learning systems in playful and speculative ways, reflecting on themes of ownership, transmission and representation in the datafication of personal traces, such as one’s voice. The workshops each result in small datasets that are used to fine-tune the generative models of the BroadCaster, resulting in the treatment of new themes, warping and shifting voices and vocal identities.

The Broadcast serves as a vehicle for the workshops and vice-versa, together navigating themes of long-term and intergenerational thinking relating to voice. The Broadcast uses as its seminal text American virologist Jonas Salk’s 1977 lecture “Are we being good ancestors?”. Here, Salk, a renowned altruist, calls for the leaders of the West to make intergenerational responsibility the highest moral imperative. Through the year the BroadCaster endlessly attempts to expand upon on the material of lecture through algorithmic future-predictions of words and voice, which are altered through the year by the contributions of texts, stylistic annotations and voice recordings developed in the public workshops. Thus, new vocal identities and poetic styles emerge in excess of the single voice, while those of the initial trainings decay over time through a process of “catastrophic forgetting” when being trained on a dataset whose diversity unfolds over time.

The broadcast ran continuously from January 2022 – February 2023 at ahnen.in, while fragments played intermittently on German Public Radio. On the evening of the stream going silent, a small farewell ritual, a short radio album “Seeking Truth Seeking” was broadcast on the stream, an improvisational duet between vocal artists Faye Houston, Kassia Zermon and Johanna Bramli with the Broadcaster in its final stages of transformation. This radio album was broadcast on German Public Radio and hosted on their website.

Workshop activities exploring voice data ownership, voice sharing and cloning, and the transmission of memories were conceived in collaboration with Angeliki Diakrousi, Joana Chicau, amy pickles and Cristina Cochior of VARIA with additional inspirational writing contributed by artist-researcher Eleni Ikoniadou. This work was commissioned by CTM Festival, Deutschlandfunk Kultur and ORF Ö1 Kunstradio, with additional support from the Leverhulme Trust.

A short screen recording made of the Ahnen in Arbeit listening website on March 13 2023.

Read more on the CTM Festival website

Listen to the farewell songs performed on the eve of broadcast silence Seeking Truth Seeking on March 31 2023.

Listen to the pre-launch podcast KONTINUUM: Ahnen in Arbeit from 2022, produced by Anne Wellmer and German Public Radio.

Archived Workshops

Sat, 12th Mar 2022 – online – Re-reading / Re-writing ( archived workshop link )
Online

Fri, 27th May 2022 – An Inaudible Chorus ( archived workshop link )
Morphine Raum, Berlin

Sat, 10 December 2022 – Remnants of Future Voices ( archived workshop link )
Varia (Gouwstraat 3, Rotterdam)