Flusserstudies.net

Quand les machines créent : musique générative et obsolescence du sujet créatif à l’exemple d’Andrew Frelon

Guillaume Beringer

This article examines the emergence of fully artificial musical groups, exemplified by the project of Andrew Frelon (The Velvet Sundown), through the philosophical lens of Vilém Flusser’s media theory. While Flusser’s work is often interpreted as visually oriented, this study highlights his conception of music as a non-representational structure of thought and a model for understanding technical apparatuses. The analysis traces the historical shift from computer-assisted music, where technology extended human gesture (as seen in Kraftwerk), to generative music created by artificial intelligence, where the human subject is increasingly displaced. Frelon’s work is presented not merely as a technological hoax but as a form of sociological art that exposes the mechanisms of the information society. By utilizing AI to generate identities, discographies, and synthetic audiences, Frelon demonstrates how cultural narratives can be industrialized. Drawing on Flusser’s concepts of the "alphabetical society", "programmed imagination", and the "functionary of apparatuses", the paper argues that generative music accelerates the transition from a material culture to a world of "non-things". In this new paradigm, music ceases to be an embodied, intersubjective event and becomes a circulating flow of data optimized for private consumption. Consequently, the traditional concert space and the possibility of genuine dialogue are threatened by a closed loop of algorithmic production and bot-driven reception. Ultimately, this study posits that AI-generated music reveals a critical anthropological crisis: the risk of the creative subject becoming redundant in a system where machines converse only with other machines, reducing human agency to the mere management of pre-existing models.