Echo #4 online

Musicians and sound artists search for ways to create or generate new forms, new structure, new processes, modes of development or modes of analysis or understanding. They may seek to encourage or map phenomena of growth, evolution, complexity and emergence. In a computational environment, artists often adopt models, simulations or data from other domains, perhaps theoretical, social, from the ‘hard’ or natural sciences or data from the ‘real’ world. These effectively constitute a new mode of mimesis; they are a way of describing a world – real or imagined, past, present or possible, material or virtual. This brings with it new questions and challenges, a new epistemic and ethical context.

ECHO 4 - New Mimesis, brings together models and data sources of many kinds. Rather than offering any reductive answer to the many questions, each brings a different perspective on the complexity of our relationship with data, simulation and their possible referends, and with sound and the very idea of music. In each of these contributions the relationship between observing subject, mimetic object and any notional ‘original’ is held in a dynamic instability. They also remind us that in any sound-work we are listening to a listening.

With contributions by Jorge Boehringer, Chris Chafe & Greg Niemeyer, Bjarni Gunnarsson, Jasmine Guffond, Adam Linson, Danica Maier & Martin Scheuregger, Frédéric Mathevet, Jean Penny, David Rothenberg, and Lottie Sebes.

→ Explore, read, browse and listen to issue #4 - New Mimesis