Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Medienwissenschaft

This presentation aims to survey seminal moments in the history of bio-signal driven sound art in order to explore the multiple registers of a performative epistemology of sorts in bio-musical practice. Specifically, the potential of data-sonification in practices of virtual embodiment and its roots in biofeedback and biocontrol paradigms in cybernetic thinking will be explored by considering the writings of practitioners like David Rosenboom. Focusing on the works of artists ranging from Alvin Lucier to Marco Donnarumma, I will attempt to understand how the contingent and experimental assemblages that obtain between the physiological body and computational sonic interfaces entail modes of attunement, entrainment and affect that write a new ontological register approximating the conception of 'pure music' as proposed by Vilem Flusser. It is argued that sonic gestures in bio-musical performance paradigms recalibrate traditional notions of embodied musical cognition along radically different modalities. The techno-epistemic aspects of constitutive interfaces institute specific conceptions and practices of corporeality which in turn affect subsequent stages of the biofeedback loop. In this context, the unique affordance of sound as pre-cognitive vibrational energy in crystallizing contingent and protean configurations of the human body and technology is broached.