[Dancecult-l] Black Music and Technology Discourse

[Nibelungentreue at aol.com]

Some of you may be interested in the following piece which has just appeared 
in July 2007 issue of Science Fiction Studies. My google search on "Nick 
Collins" also uncovered some published work on laptop performances and issue of 
"liveness". 

There is much more that can be said about this of course, for eg I'd be 
interested sometime on developing and applying to EDMC the "three circuits" model 
Cybermarx has used in his scholarship on ludology, with respect to avoiding 
technological determinism implied in discussion of liveness. There is too much to 
cover here when thinking through the ramifications for EDMC, so I'll instead 
quote from Bill Nichols's updating of Walter Benjamin's famous thesis on 
mechanical reproduction, "The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems". 
The utopian hope that sustains my interest in EDMC is that of a "live" gathering 
where, following Nichols, "what falls open to apperception" in such play is 
"the relativism of social order...the set of systemic principles governing 
order itself, its dependence on messages-in-circuit, regulated at higher levels to 
conform to predefined constraints". What I like is how Nichols implies such 
simulations "refute a heritage that celebrates individual will and 
subjectivity" (i.e. what is potentially jeopardised according to some commentators in 
technologically mediated performances):

"If there is a liberating potential in this, it is clearly not in seeing 
ourselves as cogs in a machine or elements in a vast simulation, but rather in 
seeing ourselves as part of a larger whole that is self regulating and capable of 
long term survival. At present this larger whole remains  dominated by parts 
that achieve hegemony. But the very apperception of the cybernetic connection, 
where system governs parts, where the social collectivity of mind governs the 
autonomous ego of individualism, may also provide the adaptive concepts 
needed to de-centre control and overturn hierarchy."

I apologise if this post alienates some readers less interested in broader 
social/philosophical aspects of liveness, but one of the reasons I raise them is 
because they not only locate "liveness" in terms to do with who is "playing" 
and who or what is being "played", but also because those interested in 
Afrofuturism may find it useful to compare this utopian vision with Zuberi's 
appraisal [pasted below].

Best,

Neil Huthnance

Nabeel Zuberi 

Is This The Future? Black Music and Technology Discourse

Abstract. -- As a dispersed assemblage of ideas and aesthetics, sonic 
Afrofuturism operates across the porous borders between and among music, sf, the 
academy, journalism, and the blogosphere. In this article I am interested in the 
value of these rhetorics for media studies. In particular, how can writing that 
focuses on the materiality of music inform our understanding of the 
technological changes associated with digitization? I will argue that music forms, 
commodities, and practices provide ample evidence of the continuities as well as 
discontinuities in the mediascape. Today’s popular music culture is marked by 
the mediations of the past, even as recorded sounds take on more informational 
characteristics. I also seek to ground the technological sublime of 
Afrofuturist poetics in the widespread social practices associated with records, 
sound-system dances, and music networks. Underpinning the sonic imagination in 
techno-centric writing and music-making are the quotidian practices of music 
cultures, the more “worldly” fictions behind “sonic fictions,” to borrow Kodwo Eshun
’s suggestive adaptation of literary and visual sf for music recordings. This 
paper examines the material possibilities of techno-discourse for 
transnational media studies through a discussion of digital sampling, and points to the 
limitations of technological utopianism in relation to writing about music and 
black bodies.

    

   
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