Music Thesis Database

Simondon offers critical concepts for the consideration and creation of Bio Art, especially techno-aesthetics.

Simondon offers critical concepts for the consideration and creation of Bio Art, especially techno-aesthetics.

This thesis is based on a case study performed at the Symbiotic A Centre for Excellency in Biological Arts, supplemented by participant observation in numerous other contexts, including community laboratories, workshops, visits to exhibitions and conversations with practitioners of bioart, DIYbio and biology. The results of the research show that art can give nonspecialists an increased understanding of biotechnosciences and their impact on society, but also that artists are uncomfortable with focus on the of their art. The origins of this body of work lie outside of the established music institutions of academia and the mainstream popular music industry and practitioners are often associated with particular record labels including Mille Plateaux or Raster-Noton.

What ethical issues do bioartworks raise and address? There is a strong sense that art needs to convey something more than instrumentalist aims. While attempts have been made to coalesce these practices into a single unified genre, these assessments tend to critique work mainly in technological terms.

I discuss the development of two different projects, one in the final stage and one in the nascent stage. This work proposes to consider that the actual overcoming of modernism comes along with the advent of the posthuman—tracing its origin to Marcel Duchamp and his invention of the readymade—and not with postmodernism, the theoretical consistency of which, at least in the artistic field, this research questions.

They offer both physical instantiations of the theories and arguments of my research, as well as objects of analysis through which I explore and expand upon Simondon’s philosophy. Katherine Hayles analyzed the process through which the conception of the liberal humanist subject led the way to the posthuman subject, a subject who lives in complete entwinement with the digital.

The creative process allows the researcher to arrive at a deeper understanding of memetics and formalize the conceptual memetic framework and hypotheses described herein. and the Spectral Domain Microsound Amplification Software (SDMAS), along with a significant number of other works and projects not discussed in-text.

Thus theory and practice become interlocked in the search for evidence of memes in the creation of works of organized sound and the role that memes play in an audience’s ability to (re)construct the intention of a composer. Each of these works/projects contributed significant shifts in understanding the role that memes may play in intention/reception and are reflected upon in-text. Ph D thesis, The University of Melbourne, Australia, 2017.

In this thesis the author describes the evolution of a poly-temporal, multi-agential, and techno-ecological artistic praxis, involving the development of a data-audio display to sense, audify and collect real-time temperature data; parameter mapping; sound design; dataset-based digital music composition; and data musification strategies.

The real-time audification of temperature, using data from a custom interface routing sensor to a multi-point audio display, enables listeners to better apprehend the complex ecology of a heterogeneous mass simultaneously decomposing while supporting a myriad of life forms.

Understanding digitalization processes not as representations of some material reality but as ontological repetitions, and analyzing the archive not only as an issue of memory but also of conformation of both the future and subjectivities, this work advances the emergence of a digital subject and theorizes that its constitution happens by assuming a “point of view” in the technological unconscious. The author hypothesizes that memes catalyze the creation of artifacts, which, in turn, act as instigators for memetic replication in the brain, and that microsound—sound at the edge of perception—may play a key role in instigation.

These theorizations, which are part of the posthuman, are presented as the actual overcoming of modernism to show that the readymade as a medium is, at the same time, both one of the points of rupture and the key link to bring back new media and art theory as art at large. Thinking about these hypotheses yields creative deployment of microsound in primarily scored works.