audiovisual performance with two channel projection

Since the 17th century, Humans have been presupposed to be more than nature, other than technology. The Human, above all, possesses reason, and along with it intelligence, consciousness, and language. Through the formulations of Kant and Baudelaire, we also see the construction of the Human as creative: creativity thus defined as the human-unique capability to produce original meaningful things; what’s more, the conceptual structure of creativity prohibits mechanical things from ever being able to do the same, as they lack the secret ingredient of what it means to be Human: Reason.

This anthropocentric conceptual structure of creativity finds itself instantiated in how we understand and produce sound and music. The classical paradigm of sound creation carries a number of characteristics that limit how we can build new composition practices, such as the emphasis on blank canvases, short temporality and time as the unit of change, and the fixity of sound (that is, music travels in the form of fixed objects pre-determined by the human creator).

The goal of this project/performance is to direct us towards the possible newness that awaits us from beyond our conceptual inertia. We aim to produce a line of flight from old concepts toward new spaces of possibility. To do so, we have created an actively listening room where a stack of sensors, software, machine learning plugins, and cameras take in the subtle movements of bodies and the environmental conditions to form a kind of distributed instrument. We offer listening as a musical co-creative relationship wherein neither human nor machine is fully reducible to itself anymore. By emphasizing relational processes over output, listening becomes a mode of relation between agents that forces each to attend to the other and adjust their output accordingly.

This performance tries to move beyond a mode of creation that enlists other intelligences as mere tools – it is not instantiating the end or ideal mode of relating humans to machines. Rather, we are using the tools at our disposal with all their limitations in order to expose precisely where these tools foreclose meaningful co- creative relationships, and to gesture toward how such products might be improved, rethought, and revolutionized to produce humans and machines, and indeed sound itself, differently.