The Uncanny Muse
Music, Art, and Machines from Automata to AI
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025
An acclaimed critic, journalist, and songwriter-musician tells the story of art’s relation to machines, from the Baroque period to the age of AI.
What does it mean to be human in a world where machines, too, can be artists? The Uncanny Muse explores the history of automation in the arts and delves into one of the most momentous and controversial aspects of AI: artificial creativity. The adoption of technology and machinery has long transformed the world, but as the potential for artificial intelligence expands, David Hajdu examines the new, increasingly urgent questions about technology’s role in culture.
From the life-size mechanical doll that made headlines in Victorian London to the doll’s modern AI–pop star counterpart, Hajdu traces the fascinating, varied ways in which inventors and artists have sought to emulate mental processes and mechanize creative production. For decades, machines and artists have engaged in expressing the human condition—along with the condition of living with machines—through player pianos, broadcasting technology, electric organs, digital movie effects, synthesizers, and motion capture. By communicating and informing human knowledge, the machines have exerted considerable influence on the history of art—and often more influence than humans have been willing to recognize. As Hajdu proclaims: “before machine learning, there was machine teaching.”
With thoughtful, wide-ranging, and surprising turns from Berry Gordy and George Harrison to Andy Warhol and Stevie Wonder, David Hajdu takes a novel and contrarian approach: he sees how machines through the ages have enabled creativity, not stifled it—and The Uncanny Muse sees no reason why this shouldn’t be the case with AI today.
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Machines have been inspiring human creativity ever since the technological advancements of the Enlightenment "transformed... the Western world," according to this hit-or-miss history. Exploring how machines have shaped "our communication through art," journalist Hajdu (Positively Fourth Street) discusses a Victorian-era automaton named Zoe that purported to draw people's portraits (it was actually operated by a man hidden under the stage on which it sat); a 1927 exhibition in Manhattan that showcased motorboat propellers, radio sets, and other devices at "the intersection of art and machines"; Andy Warhol's machine reproduction tools, including silk screens; and AI programs that churn out proficient if generic music and visual art. Running beneath this history, Hajdu finds a perpetual clash between reactionaries who view every innovation as a terrifying dehumanization of art and those who celebrate its creative potential. He's at his most convincing when exploring how technology helps humans channel their creativity in new ways, as when he explains that the radio brought performers "singing softly, naturally, with the tonalities and inflections of ordinary speech... to listeners alone in the privacy of their homes." Too often, however, the narrative gets mired in circular ruminations on the metaphysics of information technology ("How can a computer sound like itself?" wonders techno-theorist George Lewis. "How do human beings sound like themselves?"). It's an intermittently insightful treatment of a timely topic.
