Lucas Cantor Santiago presents 'Unfinished'

Third Place Books welcomes composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Lucas Cantor Santiago to our Ravenna store for a conversation about his new book Unfinished: The Role of the Artist in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Speaking from a musician's perspective, Cantor Santiago explores intersections between computer science and human creativity.

This event is free and open to the public. For important updates, RSVP is highly recommended in advance. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured books!

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This event is free to attend. Registration is recommended in advance.

Please note: While RSVP helps us anticipate attendance, your RSVP may not guarantee a seat. Seating is first-come, first-served, and all events at our Ravenna neighborhood store are free and open to the public. Only standing room may be available for events with high interest.

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About Unfinished. . .

For most of his career, the Emmy Award-winning composer and producer Lucas Cantor Santiago was a self-described luddite. Technology, he felt, was moving too fast, transforming the world and the arts with no regard for the cost in tradition, hard-won human wisdom, and tried-and-true methods of mastery.

That changed, however, when Cantor Santiago was commissioned by Huawei, one of the largest technology companies on the planet, to collaborate with artificial intelligence and finish Franz Schubert's Unfinished Symphony-a successful experiment that attracted attention throughout the world. Creating music in collaboration with a machine led him to question his long-standing assumptions about what music is, what technology does, and how the two have evolved together over the course of human history, from the first bone flute to today's landscape of constant innovation and change.

Drawing on Cantor Santiago's extensive experience in the arts and tech worlds and his ongoing experiments with AI-powered musicmaking, Unfinished is an engaging and refreshingly optimistic meditation on the role of technology in music and the arts. What is the current state of the art? How did we get here? Where do we go now? This book provides an informed perspective on what is lost but what we also gain when we bring our machines ever further into the creation of art in its many different forms.

Lucas Cantor Santiago is a composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist, and Emmy Award winner. He has collaborated on projects with Lorde, The Wu-Tang Clan, Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Warner Music, DreamWorks, Disney, NBCUniversal, Fox, Netflix and many others. His music can be heard on the radio, on television, in major feature films, NFL football coverage and on concert stages. His concert works include the final two movements of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony (finished with AI), the Softbank Sinfonia (a data-driven octet), New Composition #38 (a piece written by AI and produced by Cantor Santiago) and 24 Dedications. Cantor Santiago is a TEDx speaker on artificial intelligence and the arts, and a guest lecturer at UCLA, USC and Belmont University.

About Third Place Books

Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events.