The Dream of the Siren

The Dream of the Siren is a concert program for three acapella voices by Ensemble Echolab, exploring the creativity of the future through the archetype of the siren.

The siren is the ultimate figure of seduction. From the power of man’s gaze, her shape warps from ugly limbs into a smooth, perfect mirror of his desires. For the heroes of old, the siren became a beautiful woman. For us, our siren song is Artificial Intelligence. Now in a renaissance, AI sings of a frictionless utopia, flooding our our world from the mundane to the fantastical.

The Dream of the Siren is inspired by the siren’s ugly parody of human desire. The concert experiments with AI hallucinations and uncanny behaviour to discover a new path of creative agency. This concert program brings together existing new music immersed in the world of the sirens of  antiquity with newly-commissioned AI-assisted works by composers such as Livia Malossi and Niko Schroeder.

Ensemble Echolab

Ensemble Echolab is a vocal ensemble based in the Hague. Led by Vanessa Guinadi, the ensemble seeks to experiment with contemporary vocal work that is fiercely modern, theatrical and collaborative. The ensemble is currently comprised of singers Vanessa Guinadi, Kristia Michael and Jasperina Verheij.