The S.E.A.L.S.
The S.E.A.L.s are a political, feminist, noise, and AI-inspired electronic sorta-surf rock band composed of the talents of Sofy Yuditskaya, Sophia Sun, Ria Rajan, Margaret Schedel, and Susie Green, augmented by the S.E.A.L. (Synthetic Erudition Assist Lattice), as we call the collection of AIs that assist us in creating usable content with which to mold and shape our music and visuals. Established during the Lockdown of 2020, this global collective of sound & visual artists created a series of online performances whilst transcending and subverting technology to embrace latency creating audio/visual asynchro-noize – a reflection of their cumulative practice.
From our Earth Day 2022 performance. Music by The S.E.A.L.S. Video by me, sourced from Arctic footage shot during my 2016 TheArcticCircle.org residency (in Svalbard), a news real about radar arrays in Svalbard, and some footage from the Monterey Bay live cams sourced by Ria Rajan. The rest of the videos are generated in wzrd.ai with landscape prompts evoking Earth and Mars, the land to which we may someday flee. The Seals we see emerging from the generated landscapes of Earth are generated with VQGan and Clip, and then re-integrated int the landscapes using RIFE and other post production techniques.
The S.E.A.L.s are an AI-inspired electronic noise/surf band consisting of the collective efforts of Sofy Yuditskaya, Susie Green, Ria Rajan, Margaret Schedel and Sophia Sun augmented by the S.E.A.L. (Synthetic Erudition Assist Lattice), our AI counterparts that assist us in creating usable content with which to mold and shape our music and visuals; our music came about during the height of the Covid-19 lockdowns across the globe; our live performances online using various tech stacks are dependent upon the concert organizers preferences; during these performances we improvise on our respective music, audio and visual instruments; we regard telematic music technologies, not only as means by which our live online networked performances can be accessed but also, as a chance-agent providing a completely individualized temporal experience as the medium of the internet provides a multidimensional sensorium.
Mixed by Susie Green
Visuals by Sofy Yuditskaya with additional footage from Ria Rajan
AI Visual Processing by Vaporstack using Modnet and Basnet
Original Arctic Footage by Sofy Yuditskaya shot while on residency at TheArcticCircle.org
Satellite Drone Footage by D News
Underwater Footage from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Curated and Edited by Ria Rajan
Meg is reading from “IT Governance” - By Peter Weill & Jeanne W Ross
Video made by me with wzrd.ai Song composed by Susie Green with elements made by Margaret Schedel, Sophia Sun, Ria Rajan and Sofy Yuditskaya
By our band The SEALs--this Song is written and performed by Susie Green, using samples from Meg Schedel, Ria Rajan and Sophia Sun. Video made by me with wzrd.ai and Vqgan
Video from my 2016 Arctic.org residency, mermaids generated through VQGan and music by Susie Luna Green
Our program begins before it begins with the amalgamation & transmutation of assets offered up by the S.E.A.L. We five, through shared words, golden dice & a prism of frequency, invoke one another to activate a portal of boxes within boxes. We are observed & connected across lay/latency lines, stitching together a tapestry of sight & sound...and for 35 minutes life is less lonely for these ghosts in the machine. We create an experience that transcends the academic contexts in which we are trained with a more punk aesthetic with a real beat. The performance swerves between the avant-garde and a Bond-theme song for a movie set in the ocean of the future. To increase our telepresence we each have an identical golden rotten luck die that we roll to determine playing our identical custom made theremins and performance techniques including barks, tonal honks, grunts, growls, roars, moans, and pup contact calls. Our improvisation is asynchronous; we’re in different timezones with zoom lags, no single stream of the performance was the same for any viewer or performer, beautifully isolated experiences in this interconnected world. We’ll never know exactly what anyone experiences each in their own Covid bubbles.