We Have Always Been More Than Human: A phenomenological reflection on prosthetics in music, and contemporary arts. (original) (raw)

In this presentation I address the phenomenon of prosthetics in music to outline aesthetic and phenomenological facets of a more-than-human music making. I begin by reconsidering the ostensible emergence of prosthetics and the creative machine in the contemporary historiography of art; rerouting and repositioning the existence of these apparatuses into the stream of technological dependencies that leads back to the earliest periods of human civilization. I point my magnifying glass at selected features of collaborative hybridizations between humans and machines in contemporary arts. My phenomenological inquiry involves a qualitative content analysis of works from artists selected for their contribution to the fields of more-than-human and cybernetically enhanced organisms. I begin my inspection of the humanmachine relationship with Shinya Tsukamoto’s 1989 film Tetsuo: the Iron Man. I then proceed to a series of experiments in body modification performance art: Stelarc’s body prosthetics, and the bio-art of Marion Laval-Jeantet. I conclude with Alvin Lucier’s composerly experiments in psychoacoustics, particularly his Music for Solo Performer from 1965. This investigation addresses a vast and uninterrupted discourse generated by the rhizomatic interconnectedness of techne, music, art, and the human body.