For the computer to be understood as an instrument in its own right, computing itself must first be brought forth in its own right as a medium, not simply as a representation or simulation of an existing medium.
It’s not just resistance to change, but the very idea of simulation itself where efforts seem to be lacking.
Computing in and for itself – I’ve already written a post on what this means:
In other words, we need something like the 1920’s anti-pictorialism movement in photography and this really hasn’t happened yet. Or worse , it was happening more in the 60’s through 90’s, but since, with the extreme hegemony of surveillance capitalism and all of our actual computers set up as portals to this, or basically as devices for consumption not creation, there’s been a severe falling-off, and the revolution really never got completed.
Suffice to say ‘computing in and for itself’ absolutely means code as the key functional element of instrumental practice. It should mean new and more accessible ways of code, such as physical computing and live coding etc. The keyboard/IDE or even vi/emacs are absolutely insufficient.
Above all the revival of hacking, the liberation of code from professionalized practices [self-documentation, reusability, version control], refusal of semantic software abstractions or skeuomorphism of any sort, and a renewed closeness to the hardware layer would all be important steps.
What’s good? I mentioned someone like Vera Molnar in visual art. While I didn’t mention much in music or sound, I think Gottfried Michael Koenig in the ‘Funktion’ works comes very close. But again, there’s some falling off from the main concept if computing as a medium simply refers back to music, visual art, video, or ‘interactive experience’.
Indeed, it’s depressing that the paradigmatic works are often so far in the past, being from 50 to 70 years old. It indicates that we’re in danger from being totally cut off from a very important legacy.
The computer in and for itself, as its own medium, may express itself in various derivative media, but should not take too many cues from how these media have existed thus far – just as photography is not painting, film is not theatre, and so on.
So absolutely, VST’s are out, ableton is out, many uses of max/supercollider are out though at least as programming languages they have much more potential than for what they’re being used currently. Analog/physical modeling is ‘out’, AI especially ‘out’. Something like ppooll is more ‘in’, Orca and SonicPi are ‘in’, circuit bending is in – but all this is just baby steps – the physical can and should be more a part of this.
Finally since the conversation references institutions – I hope we can acknowledge this awful trend, with well-funded institutions devoted to ‘computer music’ or ‘media engineering’ or ‘sound informatics’, in which the engineering effort is devoted 100% to training the best and brightest to work for the major tech companies and/or surveillance organizations, while the arts aspect is simply forgotten. Or that the notion of what makes an acceptable publication is that one has merely simulated something to make it cheaper or more accessible, rather than having helped bring forth a new sense of the real. Art is then simply devalued as aesthetics or decoration rather than something with a fundamentally important role in opening up new ways in which it is possible to be. Or worse, the artist is requisitioned into this system, creating things like ‘earcons’ for self-driving cars – apparently this is the way art validates itself institutionally. All this would have been absurd 50 or even 30 years ago.
‘Broader impact’ – is only interpreted in the narrowest sense of this commodification or simulation, because that’s all that is thought to be legitimate. Is it any wonder that Mark Fisher is right and we’re endlessly stuck recycling the past and our greatest worry is that we haven’t brought back the past accurately enough? Or that Kevin Kelly is right and we’re just ending up with an exact facsimile of the so-called ‘physical world’, in which a virtual world does not even function as fantasy or escape?
So while I agree that there’s too much conservatism in music, it still stands: traditional instrumental practice (say: violin practice) always was ‘in and for itself’, but computer practice always points to and seems to be ‘for’ something else. The computer will only be fully respected as an instrument when it can stand fully and completely on its own.
