The vinyl o_riso was designed during the Ybytu art residency (São Paulo-BR), from November 18th to December 20th, 2021. The sound and graphic material recorded on the vinyl correspond to the sonic experimentations made by the artist while training a neural network on how to laugh, based on hours of recordings of laughter by different people (women, men, and children). The o_riso project is also part of the collaboration between Gabriel and Ilê Sartuzi in the realization of the piece “a cadeira que ri [the chair that laughs] – an old cinema/theater chair equipped with resonator speakers. Creating a sound system that interacts with the chair, the piece is presented as if the synthesized laughter is coming from this hybrid animated object.
The text accompanying the vinyl is co-authored by Lemos and the GPT-J-6B model. The text exchanged between Lemos and the machine was based on excerpts from the essays Jokes and the Logic of the Cognitive Unconscious (1980) by Marvin Minsky and Le Rire (1900) by Henri Bergson.
During the process of training the neural network, upon hearing the first results of this process, Lemos also decided to present the work as a vinyl record. This way, as a physical object, the vinyl can also be seen as a disruption of the expectations on how digital art, and especially machine learning art, is commonly presented – either as online content or expensive audiovisual installation.
As part of the elaboration of the graphic project for the vinyl, Lemos and the artist Andrey Koens collaborated in the development of software in Python that manipulates sound spectrograms, transforming them into digital images that deconstruct the linearity implicit in the representations of traditional spectrograms.
https://soundcloud.com/gabrielfranciscolemos/o_riso-side-a