Watson says
Visual language experiments for Watson Beats, IBM Italia, in collaboration with Planet Funk's Alex Uhlmann
The project, on which I collaborated with DensityDesign research lab (Politecnico di Milano), developer Paolo Corti and singer and songwriter Alex Uhlmann (member of Planet Funk), develops around IBM's AI experiment Watson Beats and explores the possibilities of artificial Intelligence in songwriting. As a result, Alex Uhlmann and Watson co-created the lyrics of the single Butterfly, released on 15 June 2018 (Universal), using content sourced from social media and news sites.
VISUALIZING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Our role was to give a visual voice to Watson; first of all this involved a number of experiments on two fronts: the data and the generative visuals. For the visual part of the project we experimented with the expressivity of abstract shapes to help convey the emotional component of the information accompanying the written texts.
We worked with large datasets of textual material enriched using sentiment analysis, categorized by topic and source. During the process we analyzed the volume of conversations around various topics, and in each topic we compared the sentiment of materials sourced from news sites against those coming from social media.
TEASER VIDEO
At first I was a little skeptical, I expected difficulty in finding inspiration experimenting with such modern technology. But in the end the opposite happened and I wrote about a theme as ancient and 'warm' as family values.
Alex Uhlmann, singer-songwriter