Architectures of Emptiness Musical Sources the Digital Derive and the Senses (original) (raw)

With this paper I investigate the relationship between musical sources, modern and postmodern archiving technologies for archiving and repercussions on the sensuous experience of such musical artefacts: how the utilization of physical sources such as books, scores, manuscripts, vinyls and tapes has changed with the advent of digitalisation and online databases; how visual and tactile exposure to physical sources has been drastically modified by what philosopher Vilem Flusser calls ‘technical images’; how distinct and diverse personal relationships with physical sources of input have been progressively neutralised, standardised and perhaps even equalised by the introduction of digital devices, impersonal objects with multifarious performative purposes. Moreover, I examine epistemological and ontological implications of the emergence of contemporary sources of input that arise from programs which are exclusively digital, fully absorbed in the domain of the virtual, existing only in the realm of binary numbers, ephemeral virtualities (engraving and editing software suites for audio and video production, digital photography, design, tridimensional rendering, etc). I will investigate how proliferation of such sources impinges on the domain of the sensuous and on the social fabric, altering our very notion of history, chronology, tradition. Finally I will suggest futurabilities, pathways and methods of study for evaluating musical sources, and in doing so, I bring into play Jorge Luis Borges’s short story The Library of Babel, Elias Canetti’s masterpiece Auto da Fé, and the ancient Chinese divination text I Ching.