The 2025 NINA (Neither Intelligent Nor Artificial) Festival (held in Milan in May) saw the debut performance of Error01HUMAN: System Overdrive, a creation of Bassetti Foundation contributors Jonathan Hankins and Luca Severino alongside performance artist Lisa Mos.

Following the NINA logic, Error01HUMAN aims to be calculable and incalculable, an explorative performance and simultaneous debate on the impact of AI in the creative process. The argument is confronted practically, as music prepared using AI is accompanied by acoustic percussion and a robot that awakens to its AI fueled potential.

AI meets art. But the truth is that AI has already become integral to many of us working in the arts, particularly within the music industry. It is used to speed up technical processes, and within the great marketing machine, but also as a font for ideas. But how far can we (as artists) see AI as just a tool? For Error01HUMAN, AI is a beast. It guards, protects, facilitates, but it also bites and has agency of its own.

Should we see the incorporation of AI within music production as the latest step in a democratization process that we have been witness to during our artistic careers? Sampler and Cubase technology brought studio production into the bedroom thirty years ago, accessible to many in certain quarters of the world. And with it, the opportunity to make music and share the files, broadcast and distribute.

Sampling! That is stealing other people’s work! That’s not real artistic production! Eminem or Dido? (I hear you counter), or possibly not. Have times moved on?

Error01HUMAN is both an experiment and a challenge. A month to prepare for the first show. A poiesis intensive process, driven by technique and experience in the studio and on the dance floor. A constant stream of new knowledge, skills and techniques, courtesy of our collaborative and good natured (if a little inflexible) beast.

But (as President Bassetti would ask) where (and to whom) will the power will go? A possible answer, power will go to those who can take control of the tools, of the technology, of the beast.

Suno.ai, Moises, stem separators, technology that is open to almost anybody who owns a laptop. And of-course, a studio that has been custom built over years and a lifetime of experience with music production. And a seemingly never-ending loop. What we might call poiesis intensive environmental preparation.

AI becomes time. Time to create a space for the humans within a process, be that musical or legal. And once again control is the key to the question: but the question remains, who will the power go to?

Under the name steward.exe, we try to ask this question through a performance that is not only a display of artistic and technical form, but also a personal and shared journey and interrogation about ethics, responsibility and role.

The video below tells the Milan story.