Hey everyone. I’m excited to share my new paper, ‘Distributed Authorship in Technologically Mediated Creativity’, published in Imaginings: creative practice and inquiry (Vol. 2, SAE University College).
You can read it HERE
a recent image created by a tool I developed using AI (this time Claude Code)
The paper challenges traditional notions of the author as ‘sole originator’, arguing instead for an understanding of authorship as relational and distributed — particularly in contexts where generative technologies play an active role in the creative process.
It draws on two case studies from my own practice: a (non-AI) generative granular music system built in Bitwig Studio’s The Grid, and an album-art generator developed in collaboration with OpenAI’s Codex. Both involve forms of process uncertainty — where the artist relinquishes control to the system — and authorship uncertainty, where responsibility for the work is genuinely shared across human and technological agents.
The paper proposes three modes through which human authorship persists in these contexts:
1. System design
2. Curation of output
3. Collaboration
Since writing the paper late last year, I’ve developed the ideas further through working in Max to build more generative music systems. Max is a far deeper platform than The Grid, and allows for endless types of systems to be built. It’s been one hell of a learning curve, but I’m starting to get the hang of it finally, and have made a couple of systems for creating some nice music.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the ideas explored in the paper.
As always, thanks for reading.