Time, History and Materials

Co-organisers:

• WinterSound Festival and the Centre for Practice-Based Research in the Arts, Canterbury Christ Church University
• Music, Thought and Technology, Orpheus Institute, Ghent (Belgium)

As Kittler observed, a defining characteristic of modern media is their affordance of ‘time-axis manipulation’. Since Kittler’s own time, however, the technologies of media production have become effectively identical with those of storage and retrieval. This includes all the ways we inscribe, organise or manipulate sound or abstract music – and for the digital machine there is no difference in kind between sound and abstraction.

Artists thus work in an environment in which cultural-historical views of history (whether the end of history or the eternal dynamism of Benjamin’s angel of history) are contiguous with personal, even real-time views (Husserl’s articulation of retention and protention, for example). Retrieval and manipulation across history and geography are no different in kind to ‘real-time’ processing of material acquired nanoseconds ago. Technological developments have opened up vast space of possibilities that challenge assumptions about time, history, the autonomy of material, and personal or cultural ownership. The practices of composition, improvisation and reception evolve. In many respects, the nature and selection of material have become more fluid, more situated or contingent. ‘Becoming-material’ is transformed as a process.

Convenors:

• Matt Wright, Centre for Practice-Based Research in the Arts, Canterbury Christ Church University
• Jonathan Impett, Orpheus Institute, Ghent

Call for proposals

Now closed.

Schedule

Registration

Free but required. Please register before 24 January 2019.

Now closed.