Overview

An engaging consideration of what experimental music can tell us about being human. In Experimenting the Human, G Douglas Barrett argues that experimental music speaks to the contemporary posthuman, a condition in which science and technology have challenged the centrality of the human amid the uneven temporality of postwar capitalism. Experimental music addresses this condition, Barrett contends, not by adhering to the formal strictures of musical modernism but by producing extra-formal meaning through its immanent transdisciplinary involvements with postwar science, technology, and art movements. Hear Alvin Lucier use his brain waves to play percussion. Picture Pamela Z sculpting the sound of her voice using her wearable BodySynth system. Imagine Pauline Oliveros reflecting her voice off of the moon using radio signals. What these musical artworks have in common is an engagement with the notion that the human has been increasingly challenged through cultural, biological, medical, economic, and technoscientific means. This book brings together music studies, art history, and media studies to provide new perspectives on cybernetics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, robotics, and radio astronomy. Through a unique meeting of experimental music, posthumanism, and contemporary art, Experimenting the Human provides fresh insights into the perennial question of what it means to be human.  

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9780226823355

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Reviews

Setting out from cybernetics' collusion with neoliberal financialization, and probing the increasingly urgent question of the posthuman, Doug Barrett's compelling book asks 'how to recompose posthumanism'. Deepening our understanding of experimental music's journeying in postformalist artistic territories, and infused by critical race, queer, and feminist thinking, Barrett dialogues with the visionary work of six artists who cut through and reconfigure our troubled relations with technology through inventive practices that insistently bring the social and political back in. -- Georgina Born, professor of anthropology and music, UCL and global scholar, Princeton University

""Setting out from cybernetics’ collusion with neoliberal financialization, and probing the increasingly urgent question of the posthuman, Barrett’s compelling book asks ‘how to recompose posthumanism’. Deepening our understanding of experimental music’s journeying in postformalist artistic territories, and infused by critical race, queer, and feminist thinking, Barrett dialogues with the visionary work of six artists who cut through and reconfigure our troubled relations with technology through inventive practices that insistently bring the social and political back in.""   -- Georgina Born, professor of anthropology and music, UCL and global scholar, Princeton University ""Posing both uncomfortable questions and new possibilities for the understanding of music, Barrett trenchantly turns our attention to how experimental composers have long engaged with the critical issues of our time now being explored in many technological and humanistic fields. These essays ringingly assert the centrality of new musical expression in constituting both the human and the posthuman.""   -- George E. Lewis, Columbia University ""Experimenting the Human considers how experimental artists like Pamela Z, Nam June Paik, and Pauline Oliveros have critically engaged with the figure of the posthuman in their work. In the process, Barrett not only traces the possibilities of the posthuman disclosed through their artistic practice, but also the limits and blindspots they reveal, particularly given the posthuman's lingering, latent indebtedness to the raced, classed, and gendered exclusions that have long defined the human. Ambitious in scope and virtuosic in execution, Barrett’s book will be of interest not just to music scholars but to critical thinkers of all stripes.""   -- Eric A. Drott, University of Texas “Experimenting the Human examines an interdisciplinary, intergenerational roster of artists working across music, new media, and visual and performance art and contextualizes their experimental practices within histories and theories of technology and the posthuman from the Enlightenment to the present. Through these artists’ technological augmentation of the brain, hands, ear, and voice, Barrett shows how they have advanced unique modes of indeterminacy that register subjective precarity and difference. Their critical, resistant engagements with technology decenter human agency in ways that help us rethink the human for the past, present, and future, while also reaffirming our common humanity. Experimentalism, Barrett remarkably shows, has always been posthuman.” -- Natilee Harren, University of Houston ""This is a well-written and informed text with extensive historical research that significantly expands and contextualises the various case studies discussed with reference to the others, enhancing the consistency of both the arguments and the subject matter.”  * Neural * ""Barrett's inventive melding of the art historical imaginary and posthuman experimental music has been brought to us, thoughtfully as ever, to marshal and defend the powers of critique, and to listen to this experimental work with the limits of humanism in view."" * Music & Letters * "" ""Barrett makes a convincing case for how experimental music can thematize contemporary posthumanism, making audible the diversely complex ways in which we must theorize the latter term if we are to adequately understand its implications, potentials, and challenges. […] Barrett zooms between different levels of granularity while adopting different spatio-temporal, epistemological, and ethical perspectives, each of which reveals a particular adumbration of contemporary posthumanity’s expression in sonic art."" * Musicology Australia *

Author Information

G Douglas Barrett is assistant professor in the Media Arts Department at New Jersey City University.    

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