The Cargo Cult

In this paper, we present the piece and the underlying software system of "The Cargo Cult" by Damian T. Dziwis. The piece is an audio-visual live coding performance using an autonomous programming machine learning (ML) agent in the context of contemporary music. The ML-agent is a genetic programmer system from the field of evolutionary algorithms. It is designed to live code in a proprietary and specially developed esoteric-like programming language, resulting in real-time audiovisual events presented to the audience. In this case, the usually used fitness function of the executing algorithm is replaced by a text-based, chat-like input interface. This creates a genuine human-computer interaction between the autonomous agent and the artist on stage, reflecting the theme of "cargo cults" emerging in society in the context of interaction with artificial intelligence systems. The piece was developed for the "die digitale" festival (D¨usseldorf/Germany) in 2018.