The Inspiration Machine - by Eitan Y Wilf

About the Book

"In The Inspiration Machine, Eitan Wilf explores the transformative potentials that digital technology opens up for creative practice through three ethnographic cases, two with jazz musicians and one with a group of poets. At times dissatisfied with the limitations of human creativity, these artists do not turn to computerized algorithms merely to execute their preconceived ideas. Rather, they approach them as creative partners, delegating to them different degrees of agentive control and artistic decision making in the hopes of finding inspiration in their output and thereby expanding their own creative horizons. The algorithms these artists develop and use, however, remain rooted in and haunted by the specific social predicaments and human shortfalls that they were intended to overcome. Experiments in the digital thus hold an important lesson: although Wilf's interlocutors returned from their adventures with computational creativity with modified, novel, and enriched capacities and predilections, they also gained a renewed appreciation for, and at times a desire to re-inhabit, non-digital creativity. In examining the potentials and pitfalls of seemingly autonomous digital technologies in the realm of art, Wilf shows that computational solutions to the real or imagined insufficiencies of human practice are best developed in relation to, rather than away from, the social and cultural contexts that gave rise to those insufficiencies, in the first place"--

Book Synopsis

Explores how creative digital technologies and artificial intelligence are embedded in culture and society.

In The Inspiration Machine, Eitan Y. Wilf explores the transformative potentials that digital technology opens up for creative practice through three ethnographic cases, two with jazz musicians and one with a group of poets. At times dissatisfied with the limitations of human creativity, these artists do not turn to computerized algorithms merely to execute their preconceived ideas. Rather, they approach them as creative partners, delegating to them different degrees of agentive control and artistic decision-making in the hopes of finding inspiration in their output and thereby expanding their own creative horizons.

The algorithms these artists develop and use, however, remain rooted in and haunted by the specific social predicaments and human shortfalls that they were intended to overcome. Experiments in the digital thus hold an important lesson: although Wilf's interlocutors returned from their adventures with computational creativity with modified, novel, and enriched capacities and predilections, they also gained a renewed appreciation for, and at times a desire to re-inhabit, non-digital creativity. In examining the potentials and pitfalls of seemingly autonomous digital technologies in the realm of art, Wilf shows that computational solutions to the real or imagined insufficiencies of human practice are best developed in relation to, rather than away from, the social and cultural contexts that gave rise to those insufficiencies, in the first place.

Review Quotes

"The Inspiration Machine will be of interest to anthropologists of science, technology, and computing, as well as those interested in matters of aesthetics, particularly in terms of how artists deal with this form of value amid their ordinary decision-making and practical activity. The work really builds on a large conversation in science and technology studies, both within and beyond anthropology, on the all too often overlooked relationship between creativity and scientific practice. Beyond anthropology, the work should be of interest to scholars of music or literature, in which the ethnographic treatment of new arts-technology practices is yet to fully develop as a more substantive research agenda."-- "American Ethnologist"

"The Inspiration Machine is itself a model and an inspiration, a highly original and ethnographically rich exploration of digital art-making. Drawing upon three revelatory case studies--and on a broad and subtle engagement with contemporary theory--Wilf illuminates the complex mutual entanglement of machinic creativity with human practices, aesthetics, and sociality. This is a singular study of emergent relationalities in unexpected places and practices and wonderful to think with."-- "Don Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz"

"The Inspiration Machine powerfully unsettles both commonplace imaginaries and banal critiques of how digital technology shapes and reshapes contemporary art-making. Along the way it clearly establishes Wilf as anthropology's leading theorist of modernity's vexed relationship to creative practice."-- "Steven Feld, VoxLox Media Arts"

"In this moment when generative AI is being declared the successor to human creativity, Wilf offers us a vital counternarrative. His nuanced ethnographic investigations challenge myths of autonomy in either creative practitioners or computational machines while insisting on the cultural/historical embeddedness and situated practices of meaning-making. This book should become an obligatory reference for anyone speaking about computational creativity."-- "Lucy Suchman, author of Human-Machine Reconfigurations"

About the Author

Eitan Y. Wilf is associate professor of anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of School for Cool and Creativity on Demand, both published by the University of Chicago Press.