Encountered, Habituated, Estranged and Overridden by Machines.

Where does human agency remain in the era of automation and intelligent machineries? Technological affordances create instant ways of accomplishing challenging tasks, where a lot of individual agency is mitigated. In this installation, we present an autonomous musical instrument that invites volunteers to eventually take a subordinate role to machines. Over time, the instrument gradually raises its level of autonomy, eventually overriding through musical patterns impractical to play by users. Juxtaposing machine uprising and an artifact that manifests human creativity, we question the relationship between technology and human on the continuum of symbiosis and adversary, through orders of algorithmic complexity and intensity in the act of music.