GHOST at De Singel, Antwerp
A haunting concert about grief, memory and artificial intelligence.
Following the death of his father, composer Asa Horvitz collected 151 books about death, mourning, archives, and memory. Together with the computational linguist Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant and the theorist Alejandro Calcaño, he trained a small, deliberately ‘flawed’ AI on these texts. This generates fragmented, repetitive, and poetic language reminiscent of how memories and grief present themselves.
These texts underpin a series of songs that Horvitz performs with the singer and bassist Carmen Quill, the performer Ariadne Randall, and the pianist Wayne Horvitz.
The result is a concert for voice, piano, electronics, and viola da gamba, where voices shift between speaking and singing, and music and language echo in fragments of memory. Originally a multimedia work, GHOST is presented during Dear Antwerp as a concert without scenography.