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Books by G Douglas Barrett

An engaging argument about what experimental music can tell us about being human. In Experimenti... more An engaging argument about what experimental music can tell us about being human.

In Experimenting the Human, G Douglas Barrett argues that experimental music speaks to the contemporary posthuman, a condition in which science and technology decenter human agency amid the uneven temporality of postwar global capitalism. Time moves forward for some during this period, while it seems to stand still or even move backward for others. Some say we’re already posthuman, while others endure the extended consequences of never having been considered fully human in the first place. Experimental music reflects on this state, Barrett contends, through its interdisciplinary involvements in postwar science, technology, and art movements.

Rather than pursuing the human’s beyond, experimental music addresses the social and technological conditions that support such a pursuit. Barrett locates this tendency of experimentalism throughout its historical entanglements with cybernetics, and in his intimate analysis of Alvin Lucier’s neurofeedback music, Pamela Z’s BodySynth performances, Nam June Paik’s musical robotics, Pauline Oliveros’s experiments with radio astronomy, and work by Laetitia Sonami, Yasunao Tone, and Jerry Hunt. Through a unique meeting of music studies, media theory, and art history, Experimenting the Human provides fresh insights into what it means to be human.

After Sound considers contemporary art practices that reconceive music beyond the limitation of s... more After Sound considers contemporary art practices that reconceive music beyond the limitation of sound. This book is called After Sound because music and sound are, in Barrett's account, different entities. While musicology and sound art theory alike often equate music with instrumental sound, or absolute music, Barrett posits music as an expanded field of artistic practice encompassing a range of different media and symbolic relationships. The works discussed in After Sound thus use performance, text scores, musical automata, video, social practice, and installation while they articulate a novel aesthetic space for a radically engaged musical practice. Coining the term "critical music," this book examines a diverse collection of art projects which intervene into specific political and philosophical conflicts by exploring music's unique historical forms.

Through a series of intimate studies of artworks surveyed from the visual and performing arts of the past ten years—Pussy Riot, Ultra-red, Hong-Kai Wang, Peter Ablinger, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, and others—After Sound offers a significant revision to the way we think about music. The book as a whole offers a way out of one of the most vexing deadlocks of contemporary cultural criticism: the choice between a sound art effectively divorced from the formal-historical coordinates of musical practice and the hermetic music that dominates new music circles today.

Papers by G Douglas Barrett

New Music and Institutional Critique, 2023

This chapter analyses the work of contemporary artists who use alternative institutions to challe... more This chapter analyses the work of contemporary artists who use alternative institutions to challenge accepted notions of art music. Kevin Beasley’s 2019 curatorial collaboration with The Kitchen, Assembly, reframes heterogeneous musics as contemporary art through the transformational act of curation. In Rehearsing Philadelphia (2022), Ari Benjamin Meyers displays the process of musical rehearsal within temporary music organisations. The chapter contends that whereas Meyers devalues a range of music by refiguring it as rehearsal, Beasley and The Kitchen transvaluate musical practices historically understood as nonart into contemporary art—and, potentially, into art music—via the powers of the curator. Beyond calls to throw out labels and categories, such projects turn on the concrete determination of what art music is while implicating contemporary art in its potential critical reconstruction.

Cultural Critique, 2023

This article argues that the difference between human labor and its robotic simulation lies in th... more This article argues that the difference between human labor and its robotic simulation lies in the human capacity to refuse to labor. To make this argument, the article examines Nam June Paik’s Robot K-456 (1964)—an electronic sculpture that both performed and refused to perform experimental music—in light of cybernetic robots since the Second World War. In addition to these robots, Paik’s work also relates to their precedents in eighteenth-century musical automata, which, as incipient posthumans, had challenged the boundary between humans and machines. Drawing theories of the posthuman together with the critique of political economy, the article concludes that Paik’s robot ultimately affirms that the capacity for self-negation is uniquely human by failing at its own self-destruction.

Discourse, 2021

This article analyzes composer and artist Pauline Oliveros’s Echoes from the Moon, a work that us... more This article analyzes composer and artist Pauline Oliveros’s Echoes from the Moon, a work that uses extraplanetary radio transmissions to bounce participants’ voices and musical sounds off the moon. Oliveros approached moonbounce through her feminist (and anti-colonial) practice of Deep Listening, defined as the active reception of the “whole field of sound.” First realized in 1987, Echoes involves amateur radio operators who participated in early “moonbounce” technologies first developed for espionage prior to the development of communication satellites. In addition to military use, moonbounce was also formative for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). In fact, the first successful moonbounce of 1946 may have been the first Earth transmission to reach other stars.

The article further considers what an aural confrontation with extraterrestrial life could mean for the historical category of the human. Aliens have not only been a subject of sci-fi, but over two centuries ago were critical for humanism’s philosophical construction of the human. Extraterrestrials were integral, for instance, to Immanuel Kant’s late anthropological writings and, earlier, they formed the basis of his interplanetary racial hierarchy, which mirrored attitudes of other Enlightenment thinkers of the time. Two centuries later, scientists continue to express surprise at the lack of evidence for the extraterrestrial colonization of our galaxy. Yet why do scientists apply such a contingent world-historical process to the universe and imagine aliens as inevitable colonizers? Oliveros’s Echoes and Deep Listening encourage us in this context to hear space differently.

Twentieth-Century Music, 2021

This article analyses composer Pamela Z’s work in light of critiques of posthumanism from Black s... more This article analyses composer Pamela Z’s work in light of critiques of posthumanism from Black studies and sound/music studies. Z’s large-scale multimedia work Voci (2003), which the artist describes as a ‘polyphonic mono-opera’, consists of a series of eighteen scenes that combine vocal performance with digital video and audio processing. Z manipulates these sources using the BodySynth, an alternate controller interface that converts bodily gestures into expressive control signals. Z’s work has been considered through cyborgian, Afrofuturist, and posthumanist discourses. But rather than affirm her practice as fully consonant with technological visions of the posthuman, I argue that she challenges the very liberal humanism upon which the posthuman is built. For a key tenet of liberal humanism, as Alexander G. Weheliye observes, was the racial and gendered apportionment of humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and non-humans. We have never been completely human, he suggests, let alone posthuman.

Z uses technologies of the embodied voice to confront both the posthuman imaginary and the continued effects of its ideological preconditions in racio-colonial liberal humanism. In a Voci scene entitled ‘Voice Studies', for instance, Z engages the problem of ‘linguistic profiling’ as it applies to housing discrimination, citing the work of Stanford linguistics researcher John Baugh. Against a backdrop of percussive vocalizations, Z explains, ‘Studies reveal that people can often infer the race of an individual based on the sound of their voice’, subsequently playing back recordings of housing applicants containing vocal signifiers of racial difference. The article then contrasts this kind of ‘aural dimension of race’ found in Jennifer Lynn Stoever's notion of the ‘sonic color line’ with Pierre Schaeffer's attempt to separate sound from the social as well as from bodies and identities in his practice of acousmatic reduction. With this in mind, I show how Z construes the voice as an acous(ma)tic technology of embodiment while reframing opera’s humanist legacy through Voci’s allegorical narration of the ‘prehuman’, ‘human’, and ‘posthuman’. Moving with and against a posthuman imaginary, Z suggests that although we have never quite been human or posthuman, we may nevertheless narrate new versions of each.

Twentieth-Century Music, 2021

This article elaborates the art-theoretical concept of 'the contemporary' along with formal diffe... more This article elaborates the art-theoretical concept of 'the contemporary' along with formal differences between contemporary music and contemporary art. Contemporary art emerges from the radical transformations of the historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde that have led to post-conceptual art-a generic art beyond specific mediums that prioritizes discursive meaning and social process-while contemporary music struggles with its status as a non-conceptual art form that inherits its concept from aesthetic modernism and absolute music. The article also considers the category of sound art and discusses some of the ways it, too, is at odds with contemporary art's generic and post-conceptual condition. I argue that, despite their respective claims to contem-poraneity, neither sound art nor contemporary music is contemporary in the historical sense of the term articulated in art theory. As an alternative to these categories, I propose 'musical contemporary art' to describe practices that depart in consequential ways from new/contemporary music and sound art.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies, 2020

What kind of sonic methodology does not depend, however tacitly, upon the concept of medium? Whet... more What kind of sonic methodology does not depend, however tacitly, upon the concept of medium? Whether materialist, idealist, or based on affect, sound (art) theory seems axiomatically subject to a kind of centripetal pull towards a medium-specific ontology of art based on the formal division between mediums. The notion of sound as an independent artistic medium first emerged during the 1950s and 1960s, just as contemporary art began its radical critique of medium in works of canonical conceptual art, which further contributed to what Krauss (2000) labeled the ‘postmedium condition’. Against medium-specific formalism, contemporary art proposed, and in many ways achieved, a radically generic art whose governing concept was no longer based on the division of materials bound to discretized sense modalities. In addition to conceptual art, performance participated in this shift away from centripetal medium and, along with music, paved the way for intermedia, Happenings, Fluxus, and other heterogeneous forms such as social practice. This chapter proposes the category of ‘centrifugal sound’ as a way to understand art practices that include sound but reduce its centrality through extra-sonic materials deployed in performance. Through readings from art history, contemporary art theory, musicology, and sound art theory, alongside a consideration of Adrian Piper, John Baldessari, and Vito Acconci, the chapter listens from the periphery and finds not an absence but a movement towards conceptuality and the social.

Postmodern Culture, 2018

This essay examines cognitive labor and the posthuman brain in composer Alvin Lucier’s Music for ... more This essay examines cognitive labor and the posthuman brain in composer Alvin Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer (1965). Alongside a discussion of the historical relationships between cybernetics, posthumanism, and political economy, it contextualizes Lucier's neurofeedback experiments in light of the expansion of the military-industrial complex and the large-scale labor transformations of late capitalism. Read as staging the performer's "brain at work," Music for Solo Performer appears here as a response to post-Fordist economic models that prioritize cognitive over manual forms of labor.

Postmodern Culture, 2013

Ultra-red’s SILENT|LISTEN (2005-06) consists of a series of events in which statements addressing... more Ultra-red’s SILENT|LISTEN (2005-06) consists of a series of events in which statements addressing the AIDS epidemic are presented alongside Cage’s silent composition 4′33″ (1952). Ultra-red’s intervention refers to activist collective ACT UP’s militantly anti-homophobic slogan, “SILENCE = DEATH,” while implicating the cultural politics of Cagean silence, 4′33″’s contested status as part of an historically specific strategy of queer resistance deployed during McCarthyism. Turning on the music-formal problem of Werktreue, or “faithfulness” to an original score, SILENT|LISTEN is considered alongside the appropriation art strategies of AIDS activism and against recent theoretical attempts to bracket out “sound” from the historical and formal specificity of musical practice.

Contemporary Music Review, May 2012

This essay examines Wandelweiser as a unique social and artistic formation while considering the ... more This essay examines Wandelweiser as a unique social and artistic formation while considering the social import of the group's artistic works. Tracing Wandelweiser's history and analyzing a selection of its musical works, the group is considered in relation to historical avant-garde movements and contemporary network theory. Though lacking an official manifesto, Wandelweiser's aesthetic program can be located largely in its interpretations of John Cage's silent composition 4′33″. Expressed in the various interviews, writings, and musical works of Wandelweiser members, these readings of Cage's work—largely consonant with the consideration of ‘silence as an autonomous musical phenomenon'—are contrasted with existing and original interpretations of 4′33″ which underline its potential as a conceptual, discursive, and socially engaged musical work.

Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal, 2009

Throughout his career, Peter Ablinger has focused extensively on noise in nearly every capacity, ... more Throughout his career, Peter Ablinger has focused extensively on noise in nearly every capacity, especially as it appears in his ongoing Weiss/Weisslich (White/Whitish) series. This essay discusses some of these works along with a specific piece from Ablinger's phonorealism series, in which recorded speech is transformed directly into the music-mechanical production of tones played by a computer-controlled player piano.

Book Reviews by G Douglas Barrett

Twentieth-Century Music, 2024

Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision – edited by Carol Vernallis, Holly Rogers,... more Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision – edited by Carol Vernallis, Holly Rogers, Selmin Kara, and Jonathan Leal – assembles interviews and analyses from media theorists, analytic philosophers, musicologists, musicians, filmmakers, physicists, and neuroscientists to engage the public with contemporary scientific advances. While these advances range from artificial intelligence to quantum physics to the neuroscience of taste, the editors use the term ‘cybermedia’ to refer specifically to science's connections to information technologies and popular media (1). With this, the volume's nineteen essays and six interviews focus on common popular media objects of study including director Alex Garland's Ex Machina (2014) and Devs (2020), the Black Mirror episode ‘Nosedive’ (2016), the HBO series Westworld (2016–22), Boots Riley's 2018 film Sorry to Bother You, Jonathan Glazer's film Under the Skin (2013), Terence Nance's sketch comedy show Random Acts of Flyness (2018), and the USA Network series Mr. Robot (2015–19). Cybermedia's contributions focus on various aspects of these media objects – from event perception to quantum computing to mental health to race, gender, and political economy – through a range of disciplinary approaches: cognitive psychology appears alongside film music theory, analytic philosophy, colour perception theory, and media studies.

URXX (2014, Koenig Books) is a series of publications written, edited, and compiled by the contem... more URXX (2014, Koenig Books) is a series of publications written, edited, and compiled by the contemporary art and activist group Ultra-red. Presented as a “box set” of previously released written material, URXX spans the period between 2010 and 2014 and includes a DVD-ROM along with nine individually bound booklets. Each of these “workbooks” covers one of several activist themes, takes place in a primary geographical location, and includes one or several of a host of political groups, community organizations, activist collectives, and artistic groups in collaboration with Ultra-red. Analyzing Ultra-red’s unique approach to art and activism, this article discusses URXX in the contexts of sound art, social practice, and the author’s notion of critical music.

An engaging argument about what experimental music can tell us about being human. In Experimenti... more An engaging argument about what experimental music can tell us about being human.

In Experimenting the Human, G Douglas Barrett argues that experimental music speaks to the contemporary posthuman, a condition in which science and technology decenter human agency amid the uneven temporality of postwar global capitalism. Time moves forward for some during this period, while it seems to stand still or even move backward for others. Some say we’re already posthuman, while others endure the extended consequences of never having been considered fully human in the first place. Experimental music reflects on this state, Barrett contends, through its interdisciplinary involvements in postwar science, technology, and art movements.

Rather than pursuing the human’s beyond, experimental music addresses the social and technological conditions that support such a pursuit. Barrett locates this tendency of experimentalism throughout its historical entanglements with cybernetics, and in his intimate analysis of Alvin Lucier’s neurofeedback music, Pamela Z’s BodySynth performances, Nam June Paik’s musical robotics, Pauline Oliveros’s experiments with radio astronomy, and work by Laetitia Sonami, Yasunao Tone, and Jerry Hunt. Through a unique meeting of music studies, media theory, and art history, Experimenting the Human provides fresh insights into what it means to be human.

After Sound considers contemporary art practices that reconceive music beyond the limitation of s... more After Sound considers contemporary art practices that reconceive music beyond the limitation of sound. This book is called After Sound because music and sound are, in Barrett's account, different entities. While musicology and sound art theory alike often equate music with instrumental sound, or absolute music, Barrett posits music as an expanded field of artistic practice encompassing a range of different media and symbolic relationships. The works discussed in After Sound thus use performance, text scores, musical automata, video, social practice, and installation while they articulate a novel aesthetic space for a radically engaged musical practice. Coining the term "critical music," this book examines a diverse collection of art projects which intervene into specific political and philosophical conflicts by exploring music's unique historical forms.

Through a series of intimate studies of artworks surveyed from the visual and performing arts of the past ten years—Pussy Riot, Ultra-red, Hong-Kai Wang, Peter Ablinger, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, and others—After Sound offers a significant revision to the way we think about music. The book as a whole offers a way out of one of the most vexing deadlocks of contemporary cultural criticism: the choice between a sound art effectively divorced from the formal-historical coordinates of musical practice and the hermetic music that dominates new music circles today.

New Music and Institutional Critique, 2023

This chapter analyses the work of contemporary artists who use alternative institutions to challe... more This chapter analyses the work of contemporary artists who use alternative institutions to challenge accepted notions of art music. Kevin Beasley’s 2019 curatorial collaboration with The Kitchen, Assembly, reframes heterogeneous musics as contemporary art through the transformational act of curation. In Rehearsing Philadelphia (2022), Ari Benjamin Meyers displays the process of musical rehearsal within temporary music organisations. The chapter contends that whereas Meyers devalues a range of music by refiguring it as rehearsal, Beasley and The Kitchen transvaluate musical practices historically understood as nonart into contemporary art—and, potentially, into art music—via the powers of the curator. Beyond calls to throw out labels and categories, such projects turn on the concrete determination of what art music is while implicating contemporary art in its potential critical reconstruction.

Cultural Critique, 2023

This article argues that the difference between human labor and its robotic simulation lies in th... more This article argues that the difference between human labor and its robotic simulation lies in the human capacity to refuse to labor. To make this argument, the article examines Nam June Paik’s Robot K-456 (1964)—an electronic sculpture that both performed and refused to perform experimental music—in light of cybernetic robots since the Second World War. In addition to these robots, Paik’s work also relates to their precedents in eighteenth-century musical automata, which, as incipient posthumans, had challenged the boundary between humans and machines. Drawing theories of the posthuman together with the critique of political economy, the article concludes that Paik’s robot ultimately affirms that the capacity for self-negation is uniquely human by failing at its own self-destruction.

Discourse, 2021

This article analyzes composer and artist Pauline Oliveros’s Echoes from the Moon, a work that us... more This article analyzes composer and artist Pauline Oliveros’s Echoes from the Moon, a work that uses extraplanetary radio transmissions to bounce participants’ voices and musical sounds off the moon. Oliveros approached moonbounce through her feminist (and anti-colonial) practice of Deep Listening, defined as the active reception of the “whole field of sound.” First realized in 1987, Echoes involves amateur radio operators who participated in early “moonbounce” technologies first developed for espionage prior to the development of communication satellites. In addition to military use, moonbounce was also formative for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). In fact, the first successful moonbounce of 1946 may have been the first Earth transmission to reach other stars.

The article further considers what an aural confrontation with extraterrestrial life could mean for the historical category of the human. Aliens have not only been a subject of sci-fi, but over two centuries ago were critical for humanism’s philosophical construction of the human. Extraterrestrials were integral, for instance, to Immanuel Kant’s late anthropological writings and, earlier, they formed the basis of his interplanetary racial hierarchy, which mirrored attitudes of other Enlightenment thinkers of the time. Two centuries later, scientists continue to express surprise at the lack of evidence for the extraterrestrial colonization of our galaxy. Yet why do scientists apply such a contingent world-historical process to the universe and imagine aliens as inevitable colonizers? Oliveros’s Echoes and Deep Listening encourage us in this context to hear space differently.

Twentieth-Century Music, 2021

This article analyses composer Pamela Z’s work in light of critiques of posthumanism from Black s... more This article analyses composer Pamela Z’s work in light of critiques of posthumanism from Black studies and sound/music studies. Z’s large-scale multimedia work Voci (2003), which the artist describes as a ‘polyphonic mono-opera’, consists of a series of eighteen scenes that combine vocal performance with digital video and audio processing. Z manipulates these sources using the BodySynth, an alternate controller interface that converts bodily gestures into expressive control signals. Z’s work has been considered through cyborgian, Afrofuturist, and posthumanist discourses. But rather than affirm her practice as fully consonant with technological visions of the posthuman, I argue that she challenges the very liberal humanism upon which the posthuman is built. For a key tenet of liberal humanism, as Alexander G. Weheliye observes, was the racial and gendered apportionment of humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and non-humans. We have never been completely human, he suggests, let alone posthuman.

Z uses technologies of the embodied voice to confront both the posthuman imaginary and the continued effects of its ideological preconditions in racio-colonial liberal humanism. In a Voci scene entitled ‘Voice Studies', for instance, Z engages the problem of ‘linguistic profiling’ as it applies to housing discrimination, citing the work of Stanford linguistics researcher John Baugh. Against a backdrop of percussive vocalizations, Z explains, ‘Studies reveal that people can often infer the race of an individual based on the sound of their voice’, subsequently playing back recordings of housing applicants containing vocal signifiers of racial difference. The article then contrasts this kind of ‘aural dimension of race’ found in Jennifer Lynn Stoever's notion of the ‘sonic color line’ with Pierre Schaeffer's attempt to separate sound from the social as well as from bodies and identities in his practice of acousmatic reduction. With this in mind, I show how Z construes the voice as an acous(ma)tic technology of embodiment while reframing opera’s humanist legacy through Voci’s allegorical narration of the ‘prehuman’, ‘human’, and ‘posthuman’. Moving with and against a posthuman imaginary, Z suggests that although we have never quite been human or posthuman, we may nevertheless narrate new versions of each.

Twentieth-Century Music, 2021

This article elaborates the art-theoretical concept of 'the contemporary' along with formal diffe... more This article elaborates the art-theoretical concept of 'the contemporary' along with formal differences between contemporary music and contemporary art. Contemporary art emerges from the radical transformations of the historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde that have led to post-conceptual art-a generic art beyond specific mediums that prioritizes discursive meaning and social process-while contemporary music struggles with its status as a non-conceptual art form that inherits its concept from aesthetic modernism and absolute music. The article also considers the category of sound art and discusses some of the ways it, too, is at odds with contemporary art's generic and post-conceptual condition. I argue that, despite their respective claims to contem-poraneity, neither sound art nor contemporary music is contemporary in the historical sense of the term articulated in art theory. As an alternative to these categories, I propose 'musical contemporary art' to describe practices that depart in consequential ways from new/contemporary music and sound art.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies, 2020

What kind of sonic methodology does not depend, however tacitly, upon the concept of medium? Whet... more What kind of sonic methodology does not depend, however tacitly, upon the concept of medium? Whether materialist, idealist, or based on affect, sound (art) theory seems axiomatically subject to a kind of centripetal pull towards a medium-specific ontology of art based on the formal division between mediums. The notion of sound as an independent artistic medium first emerged during the 1950s and 1960s, just as contemporary art began its radical critique of medium in works of canonical conceptual art, which further contributed to what Krauss (2000) labeled the ‘postmedium condition’. Against medium-specific formalism, contemporary art proposed, and in many ways achieved, a radically generic art whose governing concept was no longer based on the division of materials bound to discretized sense modalities. In addition to conceptual art, performance participated in this shift away from centripetal medium and, along with music, paved the way for intermedia, Happenings, Fluxus, and other heterogeneous forms such as social practice. This chapter proposes the category of ‘centrifugal sound’ as a way to understand art practices that include sound but reduce its centrality through extra-sonic materials deployed in performance. Through readings from art history, contemporary art theory, musicology, and sound art theory, alongside a consideration of Adrian Piper, John Baldessari, and Vito Acconci, the chapter listens from the periphery and finds not an absence but a movement towards conceptuality and the social.

Postmodern Culture, 2018

This essay examines cognitive labor and the posthuman brain in composer Alvin Lucier’s Music for ... more This essay examines cognitive labor and the posthuman brain in composer Alvin Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer (1965). Alongside a discussion of the historical relationships between cybernetics, posthumanism, and political economy, it contextualizes Lucier's neurofeedback experiments in light of the expansion of the military-industrial complex and the large-scale labor transformations of late capitalism. Read as staging the performer's "brain at work," Music for Solo Performer appears here as a response to post-Fordist economic models that prioritize cognitive over manual forms of labor.

Postmodern Culture, 2013

Ultra-red’s SILENT|LISTEN (2005-06) consists of a series of events in which statements addressing... more Ultra-red’s SILENT|LISTEN (2005-06) consists of a series of events in which statements addressing the AIDS epidemic are presented alongside Cage’s silent composition 4′33″ (1952). Ultra-red’s intervention refers to activist collective ACT UP’s militantly anti-homophobic slogan, “SILENCE = DEATH,” while implicating the cultural politics of Cagean silence, 4′33″’s contested status as part of an historically specific strategy of queer resistance deployed during McCarthyism. Turning on the music-formal problem of Werktreue, or “faithfulness” to an original score, SILENT|LISTEN is considered alongside the appropriation art strategies of AIDS activism and against recent theoretical attempts to bracket out “sound” from the historical and formal specificity of musical practice.

Contemporary Music Review, May 2012

This essay examines Wandelweiser as a unique social and artistic formation while considering the ... more This essay examines Wandelweiser as a unique social and artistic formation while considering the social import of the group's artistic works. Tracing Wandelweiser's history and analyzing a selection of its musical works, the group is considered in relation to historical avant-garde movements and contemporary network theory. Though lacking an official manifesto, Wandelweiser's aesthetic program can be located largely in its interpretations of John Cage's silent composition 4′33″. Expressed in the various interviews, writings, and musical works of Wandelweiser members, these readings of Cage's work—largely consonant with the consideration of ‘silence as an autonomous musical phenomenon'—are contrasted with existing and original interpretations of 4′33″ which underline its potential as a conceptual, discursive, and socially engaged musical work.

Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal, 2009

Throughout his career, Peter Ablinger has focused extensively on noise in nearly every capacity, ... more Throughout his career, Peter Ablinger has focused extensively on noise in nearly every capacity, especially as it appears in his ongoing Weiss/Weisslich (White/Whitish) series. This essay discusses some of these works along with a specific piece from Ablinger's phonorealism series, in which recorded speech is transformed directly into the music-mechanical production of tones played by a computer-controlled player piano.

Twentieth-Century Music, 2024

Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision – edited by Carol Vernallis, Holly Rogers,... more Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision – edited by Carol Vernallis, Holly Rogers, Selmin Kara, and Jonathan Leal – assembles interviews and analyses from media theorists, analytic philosophers, musicologists, musicians, filmmakers, physicists, and neuroscientists to engage the public with contemporary scientific advances. While these advances range from artificial intelligence to quantum physics to the neuroscience of taste, the editors use the term ‘cybermedia’ to refer specifically to science's connections to information technologies and popular media (1). With this, the volume's nineteen essays and six interviews focus on common popular media objects of study including director Alex Garland's Ex Machina (2014) and Devs (2020), the Black Mirror episode ‘Nosedive’ (2016), the HBO series Westworld (2016–22), Boots Riley's 2018 film Sorry to Bother You, Jonathan Glazer's film Under the Skin (2013), Terence Nance's sketch comedy show Random Acts of Flyness (2018), and the USA Network series Mr. Robot (2015–19). Cybermedia's contributions focus on various aspects of these media objects – from event perception to quantum computing to mental health to race, gender, and political economy – through a range of disciplinary approaches: cognitive psychology appears alongside film music theory, analytic philosophy, colour perception theory, and media studies.

URXX (2014, Koenig Books) is a series of publications written, edited, and compiled by the contem... more URXX (2014, Koenig Books) is a series of publications written, edited, and compiled by the contemporary art and activist group Ultra-red. Presented as a “box set” of previously released written material, URXX spans the period between 2010 and 2014 and includes a DVD-ROM along with nine individually bound booklets. Each of these “workbooks” covers one of several activist themes, takes place in a primary geographical location, and includes one or several of a host of political groups, community organizations, activist collectives, and artistic groups in collaboration with Ultra-red. Analyzing Ultra-red’s unique approach to art and activism, this article discusses URXX in the contexts of sound art, social practice, and the author’s notion of critical music.