Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanism

6. Skewed Remote Musical Performance: Sounding Deconstruction

6 SkEwEd rEMOTE MUSiCal PErfOrMaNCE: SOUNdiNg dECONSTrUCTiON 145 The point is that what transcends that reduction and schematization is not a substance, content, presence, or place . . . but rather a “beyond” . . . that is at the same time radically intimate, a beyond that is not, in Derrida’s terms, a place. In short, the transcendent must be rethought as the virtual. CARY WOLFE, WHAT IS POSTHUMANISM? If the organismic technological posthumanism discussed in chapter 5 performs an intensification of the paradoxical (deconstructive) causality that it disavows, this chapter discusses an art practice—Skewed Remote Musical Performance (SRMP)—that makes this performance explicit. Moreover, this practice connects the ambivalence of deconstruction to a digital network without using visual representation. In so doing, SRMP performs a deconstruction of the organismically configured body that exists, for Hansen, abstractly and prior to sensation as such: in place of primary embodiment, then, this chapter (via SRMP) offers sonic relation. To this end, the chapter reaches beyond its grasp to articulate the sound of SRMP as a “field-mosaic” in McLuhan’s sense, indicating a paradoxical relationality as the “origin” of the terms related. In particular, the chapter ’s analysis of SRMP articulates a notion of sound that reaches toward the “fieldness” of this relationality precisely by refusing to give sonic instantiations (“sounds”) primacy. In this refusal, the “fieldness” of SRMP’s sound also prevents us from registering a human organism prior to its relational status: in the digital echo chambers of SRMP, embodied organisms do not dominate their representations but rather coexist with them via complex intermediating networks. Ultimately, then, SRMP models a way in which sound disjunctively intervenes in constructions of presence and absence, opening the body to a relational play that not only moves 146 skewed remote musicaL performance between those two poles but also constructs them as poles even as it is constructed by them. Accomplished through the open source software SuperCollider, SRMP consists of two remotely situated musical performers who collaborate in real time via a computer network.1 The defining characteristic of SRMP is a skewing mechanism that results in a situation in which the sounds heard in each of the two locations are markedly different from one another and specifically differ such that the details of their differences are not anticipatable or captured. For example, in the initial performance—which took place simultaneously in San Diego, California, and Victoria, British Columbia, Canada—each SRMP performer could articulate any of an array of sound files using a musical keyboard interface that allowed him to select the sample, select an effect chosen from a bank of signal processors , select the parameters of the effect, and indicate the articulation’s duration and rhythm.2 To introduce a significant difference between what was heard at the two locations, the computer randomly turned on and off a skewing mechanism that, in this case, altered which sound file was played at the remote location but did not alter the effect applied to the sample locally (see the diagram of SRMP’s signal processing). Theoretically, the skewing that is used in SRMP could be applied to any sonic parameter (or visual parameter , for that matter) that the software can recognize (which is to say, any parameter that can be digitally manipulated). In practice, the skewing used in SRMP has tended to combine a series of binary choices (i.e., whether to apply a sound effect at all; whether to substitute a randomly chosen effect for that which was remotely specified; whether to apply the effect uniformly or only to certain sound samples; whether to articulate the effected in addition to the original sample or as a substitute for it; etc.) with a continuum of dynamic specifications (i.e., how small will the “grains” in the granular processing be; to what extent is pitch shifting applied; what are the relative volumes of the processed samples to the originals; etc). This is to say that the skewing does not introduce new parameters to the performance but rather alters the sound of the parameters already included in the performance interface. Similarly, skewing has not been applied to formal compositional structures of relation in these performances but functions instead at the level of the performance itself. With $
 
  
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 figure 7. Diagram of signal processing for Skewed Remote Musical Performance. 148 skewed remote musicaL performance all this said, the most important things to note are that skewing happens between both locations, the...