Opaque technologies
The socio-cultural assimilation of new technologies tends to proceed by initially employing them to facilitate and implement existing concepts and practices in some enhanced or optimised way; only subsequently does its transformational potential become evident, as appropriate new concepts emerge. This is as true in the case of music as in other areas of human activity. As examples we might consider current laudable and sophisticated attempts to make the internet fully transparent as a means for enabling the remote co-performance of conventional scores.
In this project, MTT seeks rather to investigate the musical and sonic properties of technologies themselves – their opacity rather than their transparency. In many cases, this amounts to exploring the materiality of the very technologies that enable what we perceive as the virtual.