Workshop: Performing Sonic and Instrumental Agencies

Abstract

Just like land and bodies–sound and music is dispossessed. To put out of possession or occupancy, dispossession belongs to an active human reality of losing. (Fraley 2017, 518) With the arrangement of nation-states, the possession and ownership of property in settler colonies cues up onto-epistemological paths involving “economic, cultural, political, and psychic spheres of colonial and postcolonial life.” (Bhandar 2018, 4). Acts of dispossession are facilitated by imperial technologies that mediate and organize. Within the context of mechanical reproduction, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay writes, “the thrust-forward rhythm of the click of the camera’s shutter acts like a verdict–a very limited portion of information is captured, framed, and made appropriable by those who become its rights holders. (Azoulay 2019, xvi) Similarly, the imperial sound shutter’s ability to capture and dispossess vibrations from a source into mediums of wax, magnetic tape, and computer is a “field of power through which colonial relations are produced and maintained.” (Coulthard 2014, 17) For example, the Indigenous songs dispossessed by white settlers are still owned, and listened to by non-indigenous government institutions under the disguise of “inheritance”. (Robinson 2020, 156) These severed Indigenous songs are stored in vaults while sound in the U.S. National Parks (NPS) resounds and accumulates on dispossessed land. Within specific resource management aims guided by Heidegger’s violent hunger for purity, and primordiality (aka wilderness as a possessive investment in whiteness), the NPS uses remote acoustic monitoring systems to quantify the distinction between natural or unnatural (the latter often defined as human-produced). From this data collection the NPS enacts laws that facilitate dispossessed soundscapes, on dispossessed land, using an imperial technology, the sound shutter. Dispossessed sounds are abundant (violent appropriations in soundcloud rap, oppressive music copyright laws, and quotidian soundscapes in Palestine). What needs to happen for these sounds to be restituted? 

For the Instruments, Interfaces, Infrastructures: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Musical Media I propose to explore this topic through a guided listening session. While inheriting the mutations of colonialism and slavery, I personally have benefited from the restitution of dispossessed citizenship from the Holocaust. To de-knot these orientations, I have to recognize their mutations in my roots.

Biography

Erik DeLuca (born Tampa, FL 1985; German—through restitution law Article 116) is an artist and musician working with performance, sculpture, and text, in dialogue with social practice and critique. Recently, his projects have been included at Braunschweig University of Art, Kling og Bang (Iceland), Sweet Pass Sculpture Park, MASS MoCA, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and Fieldwork: Marfa. His writing is published in Public Art Dialogue, Mousse, Third Text and The Wire. He received a PhD in Music from the University of Virginia (2016), was a resident at Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture (2017), and was an Asian Cultural Council Fellow in Myanmar (2018). He lectured at the Iceland University of the Arts (2016-2018), was Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Brown University, and a critic at Rhode Island School of Design. Erik is Associate Professor of Art Education and Contemporary Art Practice at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Abstract

Magnusson in 2017 proposed a philosophy of organology based on heterarchical categorisation of musical instruments, hybridising older organologies with domain specific and ad-hoc micro-taxonomies, as needed. Instruments are now emerging whose design, behaviour and music is entangled with artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science. Correspondingly, a need is arising for new organological tools that decode, dissect and demystify these instruments. How can we begin to understand them and their musicological impact, and are these instruments in turn impacting sociotechnical discourse? Following Sharov and Tønnessen (2021), we propose agentology as an ad-hoc taxonomy for organological consideration of new agential and intelligent instruments, and also contemporary and historical instruments. Philosophers such as Latour and Barad, through to biologists like Maturana and Varela or Levin, to cognitive scientists like di Paolo or Froese, offer us a cornucopia of accounts of agency. Further, cyber-, bio, and ecosemiotics provide perspectives and tools that could be well suited for instruments which are starting to behave more like cells and animals than inert objects. 

To put these theoretical perspectives to the test, I will draw on my own experiences as a practice-based researcher-designer-player of new instruments, and that of my research colleagues, testers and musical collaborators. I will describe our nascent methodology based on encounters between musicians and agential instruments, and how as researchers we are delicately probing at the technological, phenomenological and sociological edges of music. I will also present highlights of and grounded reflections on one and a half years of local community building around the inclusive exploration of intelligent musical instruments in Iceland.

Biography

Jack Armitage is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Intelligent Instruments Lab, Iceland University of the Arts, working with Prof Thor Magnusson on artificially intelligent musical instruments. He has a doctorate in Media and Arts Technologies from Queen Mary University of London, where he studied in Prof. Andrew McPherson’s Augmented Instruments Lab. During his PhD he was a Visiting Scholar at Georgia Tech under Prof. Jason Freeman. Before then, he was a Research Engineer at ROLI after graduating with a BSc in Music, Multimedia & Electronics from the University of Leeds. His research interests are centred around musical instruments, investigating them from the perspectives of embodied interaction, craft practice and design cognition. He also produces, performs and live codes music as Lil Data, as part of the PC Music record label. 

Abstract

Per­form­ing live via real-time mo­tion cap­ture with/as my col­lab­o­ra­tor/avatar lu­lu10­tacles—a Vocaloid artist and syn­thet­ic be­ing. We’ll dis­cuss & demon­strate current practices of digi­tal trans em­bod­i­ment & vo­cal mod­u­la­tion in digi­tal com­mu­ni­ties. In exploring prac­tices in which the sep­a­ra­tion be­tween self & other are frac­tured, we’ll in­ves­ti­gate what meth­ods can be de­ployed in the al­ways-on­line world to re­al­ize trans fu­tur­ist pol­i­tics in the present. Plac­ing top­ics of race, gen­der, and cap­i­tal at the cen­ter of dis­course regard­ing digi­tal cu­ra­tion and space-mak­ing—we’ll trace threads of mu­si­cal an­ces­try that show digi­tal cu­ra­tion as a cru­cial tech­nol­o­gy of sur­vival across time & space. 

Vir­tu­al man­i­fes­ta­tions can act as pow­er­ful lens­es through which to re-con­cep­tu­al­ize re­la­tions to one’s own body—rene­go­ti­at­ing bound­aries of the self in both beau­ti­ful­ly pro­found and deeply dis­com­fort­ing ways. Hope­ful­ly, by the end of the key­note/per­formance, at­ten­dees will not only have gained a more in depth un­der­stand­ing of digi­tal com­mu­ni­ties and tech­nolo­gies of em­bod­i­ment—but will un­der­stand the ba­sic skills and pro­cess­es through which they can ex­plore these spa­ces them­selves, as well as cu­rate their own digi­tal forms in per­for­mance.

Biography

Max Schaf­fer (they/she) usu­al­ly just writes “trans­femme bxtch seeks mean­ing.” How­ev­er, for the sake of “pro­fes­sion­al ism”—Max is an artist & re­searcher at the in­ter­sec­tions of Mu­sic, Tech­nol­o­gy, & Gen­der Stud­ies. Their work fo­cus­es on digi­tal bod­ies & voic­es—specif­i­cal­ly re­gard­ing transness & re­la­tion­ships be­tween the in­di­vid­ual/col­lec­tive. You may en counter “them” in two oth­er forms—a per­for­mance en­ti­ty/ pro­duc­er named Saint Taint as well as a vir­tu­al be­ing/ avatar named lu­lu10­ta­cles. Max is cur­rent­ly a 3rd year PhD can­di­date at the UC San Diego dept. of Mu­sic, and pre­vi­ous­ly com­plet­ed their BA in His­to­ry & Gen­der Stud­ies from Har­vard Col­lege.