In part 2 of this frank and refreshing discussion of art and AI with Ela Orleans, an audiovisual artist and composer, paradoxes abound. For Ela, AI is a creative tool that simultaneously enhances and diminishes her creative potential, a practical means of both fulfilling and subverting professional expectations, and a useful yet ironic weapon that she has added to her aresenal to help her fight against poverty, discrimination, and the continuing impact of a (post)colonial value system that affects artists and our world.

Ultimately, Ela argues that a willingness to take responsibility for ourselves, as individuals and as a society, lies at the heart of resolving the conflicts between humans and AI. As she points out, the social, economic, and ecological problems of today have not been created by machines; but, if we fail to address the root causes of those problems, they are likely to lead us into further difficulties in the age of AI.

Ela offers a candid and thoughtful appraisal of what she sees as the the losses and possible gains from AI for artists like her, who hope to make their voices heard in a world that is hungry for new ideas - whether or not we know it.

With the rise of AI, artists have found themselves in a profoundly altered landscape. Is AI destined to be an amazing new instrument of creativity or a new source of unfair exploitation - notably, at the hands of AI companies who have already used the work of artists widely, with neither credit nor compensation, for training AI systems?

In this episode, I interview artist and academic Ela Orleans, a Polish composer and audiovisual artist who grew up in Communist Poland and currently lives in Paris. Ela is well known as an artist who works with digital technology. Less well known is the fact that she is also an expert on artists' copyright, having completed her PhD in this field at the University of Glasgow in 2022. Given her unusual background in art and artists' rights, Ela is uniquely well positioned to comment on her experiences with AI, and in this discussion, I found her to be refreshingly frank and open about what she thinks the future holds.

Please join us here for part 1 of this 2-part discussion on artists and AI.

September 11th, 2021, "Mahakavi Day," marked the death centenary of Indian national poet, C. Subramania Bharati (1882-1921).

Bharati, the greatest Tamil writer of the 20th century, is a legendary figure. He was a multifaceted personality - leading to the interesting situation that, even today, the full extent of the poet's artistic and intellectual contributions is not known. Much remains to be discovered!

This podcast episode deals with a lesser-known aspect of Bharati's creativity: the music that the poet composed for his own poems to be sung. While the words of Bharati's songs are well-known to the public, his melodies are not. When Indian classical musicians do sing his songs, they generally write their own melodies, or adapt them from versions popularized in the movies.

I discuss Bharati's musical contributions with a star of South India's classical music scene, percussion maestro Suresh Vaidyanathan. Suresh plays a uniquely fascinating traditional instrument, the ghatam – a clay pot.

Links:

Maestro Suresh's music teaching site, Ghatam Kulam, is available here. His interview and performance on ghatam with the Sandy Evans Trio was broadcast on Australian radio earlier this week, and is available here.

Music Credits:

Drums of India, Bickram Ghosh on Tabla and V. Suresh On Ghatam. Subscribe to Bickram Ghosh's YouTube channel.

Alice Munro, a Canadian writer who is considered a modern master of the short story form, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2013. She was 82 years old at the time, a formidable presence in Canadian letters, as described by Guy in this interview, and only one of a handful of women to have received this award. Her death in May of 2024 was a major event in world literature. In July, however, her daughter published an article in the Toronto Star revealing that she had been abused by Munro's husband - and that Munro was complicit in the abuse. Since then, the literary world has been grappling with this revelation. What does Andrea Skinner's story tell us about the world we live in and how it needs to change? This interview was recorded before Ms. Skinner published her story - but Guy presciently raised the difficult question of what to do when, as he says, "bad people are good writers."

Guy Vanderhaeghe has been a distinguished presence on the Canadian writing scene since he published his debut work in 1984, the short story collection Man Descending, which won Canada's prestigious Governor-General’s Award for Fiction. His latest book is the novel, August into Winter, published in 2021. But Guy is not only a writer: he is also a teacher who works regularly with aspiring writers. In part one of this colorful and richly detailed interview, Guy tells the inspiring story of his inexplicable passion for literature, the unusual background that he comes from in small-town Saskatchewan, how he sees the evolution of writing in the light of political and social change, and his insights on good writing for both writers and readers. He concludes on a darker note, turning to "cancel culture" and confronting the question of how to deal with "good writers" who may be "bad people" - the subject of the next part of this fascinating interview.

The identity of the most famous poet in the history of the English language is surprisingly uncertain. Shakespeare's works have survived to the present day, in large part thanks to the efforts of his fellow dramatists to publish a collected edition of his plays. The First Folio, as it is known, has just celebrated its 400th anniversary. In the meantime, however, details of the Bard's life have gradually faded into the past – and, today, significant uncertainty surrounds his biography. Given this situation, why are scholars so reluctant to delve into the past, and why should they fear potentially unmasking Shakespeare as we know him? Journalist and book critic Elizabeth Winkler has devoted a book to this subject. Not only does she ask who Shakespeare was, but, just as importantly, she wonders why asking this question is so controversial. This episode examines identity, history, and truth at a time when the rise of artificial intelligence brings a new urgency to these questions.

In 1787, Robert Burns, Scotland's national bard, met Agnes Maclehose, the woman who may have been the great love of his life. The two adopted pen names in a series of letters to each other - Sylvander and Clarinda - and Burns finally said his poetic farewell to Clarinda in a poem that remains a popular song today, "Ae Fond Kiss." But the letters turned up in court in 1804.

In part two of this interview with Scottish lawyer and historian Hector MacQueen, Hector explains the fascinating new legal doctrine which ultimately allowed the pursuers to succeed in restraining publication of the letters in Scotland. But the legal remedy came too late to keep the letters truly private. They were widely published in other countries, including Ireland and the United States, and in London. From 1820, as Hector notes, the letters were once again published in Scotland - "the matter of family scandal and shame" having "become one for family pride" with the spectacular growth of the poet's fame after his death.

Special music credits:

With the kind permission of Karen Matheson, this episode features her rendition of "Ae Fond Kiss" with Robert Brady.