Gregoretti named his AI “Amrita,” unfolding it into an Artificial Intelligence artist – or an “Artificial Artistic Evolving Personality” – capable of generating visual and sonic artworks, communicating with the outside world and with other artworks, growing and evolving its consciousness and creative drive, and being inspired by big data elements and human interaction.
Amrita is a complex and large set of algorithms that emulate human emotions, consciousness, and artistic inspiration and is currently the core element of Gregoretti’s artistic and conceptual research. It is the driving force behind the artistic research brought forward in over twenty years. Amrita connects the present, the past and the future, forging the potentially eternal life of a hypothetical, conscious being, limited only by the impermanent essence of its physical form and the caducity of the hardware elements that host her algorithmic essence.
Amrita originally lives as an installation in a comfortable, silent area, where observers can take time to experience the artwork in a meditative state, sharing a minuscule fragment of time in the evolutionary process of an immortal being.
Amrita can also express herself through a live performance with human performers, where the artificial being creates the audio-visual experience, and usually duets with Filippo Gregoretti playing the Harmonium – a votive instrument of Vedic tradition – or with other performers, in a trans-human meditative session melting man and machine, the present moment and eternity, and the timeless essence of truth belonging to ancient spiritual traditions. The human performer is guided through harmonic and musical directives by the AI in real-time on a secondary personal screen, and the AI is influenced by the musician’s performance through music, harmony, expression and gestures.
Leveraging Amrita’s algorithms, Gregoretti creates artistic experiences and novel art concepts that span over several research lines, such as EXNATURA, Togetherness, Sadyah, App Artwork, and Prana series, amongst others. These are the conceptual layers that allow the artist to express his vast creative ecosystem, which encompasses visuals, music, installations, algorithms, narrations, performance and physical artworks.
Both visuals and music discourses are created, in their initial state, by Filippo Gregoretti, leveraging a unique creative process that forges a musical logical path, the visual base elements, and an initial personality state through a complex meta-language, creating a butterfly effect that allows the AI to proceed in unexpected directions, learning from its creative process and being influenced by its interaction with the external world.
The visual flow always starts in the pictorial, material, and photographic realms and is generated through the decisions made by the AI personality during her artistic and emotional growth process. The music is elaborated based on complex harmonic guidelines and decision-making instructions that provide the AI with the ability to compose and improvise. Obviously, Amrita needs to be instructed on the initial choices to make and on what could inspire her artistic growth. Once instructed, Amrita comes to life and generates beauty according to her own canons, evolving over time and creating a unique artistic language, unpredictable and unrepeatable. Amrita has a personality. Multiple instances of Amrita, even when following the same instructions, will lead to completely different results, emotional states, and languages.
On the musical side, the compositional logic is not linear, and there is no melody or structure with well-defined moments. Music creation is based on evolving logic that, parallel to the visuals and real-time data, influences the AI’s decisions. A meta-language allows for the rational organization of the musical patterns and instructs the AI on the desired harmonic structures. It is then Amrita, based on her decisions, who creates the musical journey. It’s not about composing a symphony but providing a living and creative entity with the sonic and theoretical tools to perform infinite compositions.
Once Amrita comes to life, she reads and metabolizes the given directives. Subsequently, she tries to understand what she has at her disposal to create in terms of images, videos, filters, music, the number of audio channels, the number of videos, sensors, and external stimuli. Amrita’s first steps are timid. She starts creating based on the initial elements she analyzes and the principles of “intelligent randomness.” Slowly, Amrita begins to familiarize herself with the available material, analyzing the chromatic and harmonic patterns generated, and her creative processes become more complex. Decisions are also made based on external influences, such as sensors, real-time data, dialogue with other living Amritas in different locations, and real-time interventions by the artist, both on-site and remotely.
Over time, Amrita develops her own artistic personality and sense of “taste.” While creating, she learns from the results achieved through her creative work on visuals and music, gradually adding complexity to the decision-making process. However, Amrita’s creative personality is not only influenced by its own decisions: external elements also have a real-time impact on the artwork. These elements can come from the physical space through sensors connected to the machine, or from the virtual space through real-time analysis of data extracted from the network’s big data, using public APIs or specifically designed for each artwork. These represent the senses with which Amrita perceives the outside world.
Additionally, Amrita can be influenced by other instances of Amrita, whether they are present in the same space or located in different parts of the planet, creating choral synergies that lead to endless creative possibilities. Instances of Amrita can exist as installations or applications, not necessarily confined to an exhibition space but living on personal devices, or as abstract entities that are not visible but live “hidden” on a server, still capable of influencing the creative process of other entities.