Love wants possession. The tragedy — and the beauty — lies in wanting both.
About the project
Introduction
Love is one of culture’s most persistent ideas — and one of its most contradictory.
Love asks us to hold incompatible truths at once.
This project explores that contradiction of celebrating independence while longing to belong.
Across languages, musical styles, and cultural traditions, the same lyrical idea is allowed to take on different musical lives.
Each version becomes a small experiment: how does the emotional meaning of a song change when its language, rhythm, and cultural context change?
The words remain similar.
The emotional landscape shifts.
This is both an exploration of love’s paradoxes and an experiment in how art evolves when new creative tools enter the process.
Definition of Love
I want to make you my wife
with all intention to leave you.
I'll worship you all of my life
and lustfully deceive you.
Of course, I acknowledge that you're free
in demanding that your entirely mine,
Never being dependent on me
although my possession for all time.
Respecting your own identity
I want to mould you like clay.
Accepting what you'd like to be
you ought to change the way I say.
I want you being proud and strong
though obedient even if you're right,
challenging me when I'm wrong
you should give in without a fight.
Rolf Schwarz
"At a glance, what really jumps out is how consistently the poem runs on paradox and contradiction. Almost every couplet sets up a claim and then quietly undermines it:
- devotion vs. abandonment
- worship vs. deception
- freedom vs. possession
- respect vs. control
- strength vs. obedience
That tension feels very deliberate, not sloppy — like the speaker knows these things don’t reconcile, but keeps asserting them anyway. It gives the voice an unsettling mix of honesty and self-delusion."
The AI I have used for this project
AI and the Myth of the Pure Artist
Some elements of this project — including music generation, translation, and visual imagery — involved the use of AI.
To some this raises an immediate question:
Does the use of AI make a work less artistic?
Yet art has never existed independently of its tools and artists have always worked with the tools of their time:
- The printing press reshaped book making.
- Photography transformed painting.
- Synthesizers changed music.
- CGI revolutionised cinema.
Every new medium has at first been accused of threatening “real” creativity.
History usually proves otherwise.
New tools and advances in technology eventually became part of the creative language itself.
Creation as Direction
The romantic idea of the artist creating entirely alone is also something of a myth. Most artistic works emerge from collaboration — with other people, traditions, technologies, and instruments.
Consider the modern music studio: producers shape sound through mixers, software, and electronic instruments. Few would argue that this makes their work less creative.
Or consider cinema. A film director rarely writes the script, performs the roles, edits the footage, and composes the score — yet the finished film still reflects the director’s artistic vision.
Creation is often a process of direction and orchestration.
In this project, AI functions in a similar way: not as the artist, but as an instrument.
The concept, direction, and imagination remain human.
Does the use of AI take work away from “real” people?
There is no simple answer.
Artificial Intelligence will shape the future — including the labour market. Some professions may change dramatically. Others may disappear.
But this is not new. Every new tool has been accused of replacing “real” work.
Every new tool has done exactly that — and created something else in its place.
There was a time when entire professions revolved around horses. Saddlers, stable hands, carriage makers. They disappeared, not because they lacked value, but because the world changed.
We do not mourn them by returning to the past.
We move forward.
What This Project Would Otherwise Require
To understand the role of AI in this project, it is worth considering an alternative:
Each poem would require translation — not literal translation, but poetic interpretation. Multiple languages would mean multiple translators, each capable of working with nuance, rhythm, and meaning.
Each version would then need to be set to music. Different genres would require different composers.
And composition does not obey instruction. It resists. It fails. It requires revision.
In this project, some pieces emerged only after dozens of iterations — not because the others were wrong, but because they did not resonate.
Now imagine asking a human collaborator to repeat that process:
again
and again
and again
until something clicks.
Then comes production:
- studios
- musicians
- singers
- engineers
Across multiple languages, styles, and interpretations.
The cost would be substantial.
The time, prohibitive.
As a result, the project would never exist.
On Displacement
So who, exactly, has lost work here?
No translator has been replaced — because none would have been hired.
No composer has been displaced — because no commission would have been made.
No musician has been excluded — because no recording session would have taken place.
The alternative is not “human work instead of AI”.
The alternative is absence.
Artificial Intelligence has lowered the threshold of entry into a domain that is traditionally difficult to access. It has made it possible to explore musical and linguistic ideas that would otherwise remain unrealised.
In that sense, it does not only automate — it enables.
If AI-assisted work is shared publicly, does it displace other artists?
Fair enough, while no real person disadvantaged in the creation of the tracks had you kept the music you created to yourself, but are you not harming other musicians by publishing your AI generated slush on commercial streaming services like Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Play and others?
The concern is understandable.
But the world was already full of repetition, imitation, and derivative work long before AI appeared.
If something is empty, it disappears.
If something resonates, it remains.
The medium does not decide that.
The audience does.
No one is compelled to listen.
No one is compelled to care.
In a cultural landscape shaped by choice, attention is not a right.
It is given.
On Originality
There is also a quieter assumption beneath the criticism:
that art created with this new tool of AI is somehow less original.
But originality has always been an unstable concept.
Every artist borrows.
Every work echoes something that came before.
Every tradition is built on repetition and variation.
Artificial Intelligence does not invent this condition.
It exposes it.
A Changing Landscape
Artificial Intelligence does not mark the end of artistic creation.
It marks a shift.
Like every tool before it, it will be used badly, used well, dismissed, absorbed, resisted, embraced, misunderstood, and eventually integrated into the broader language of art.
What remains unchanged is the question at the centre of all creative work:
Does it resonate?
Everything else — including the tools — is secondary.
Unione MusiKI
The name reflects the nature of the experiment:
- Unione — a union of musical styles, languages, and influences.
- MusiKI — combining music with KI, the German abbreviation for Artificial Intelligence (Künstliche Intelligenz).
Post Scriprum
I am willing to bet that the fact that I used AI for the website coding is less controversial and will upset fewer people than the production of the music tracks.
Why would that be? After all, it could be argued that I have taken away work and creativity from website developers?
Also, I feel that using Midjourney for the image creation is less upsetting. Again, have I not taken work away from painters and designers?
Or is it that those two areas are "technical" anyway, so our humanity is not challeged regarding the coding, and in case of images a bit of a niche (no gallery is threatened so far by AI paintings?). As it has less exposure on the internet, less money is made with imagery as opposed to music, so it is less contraversial?