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Machines and sound-noise

“Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men. For many centuries life went by in silence, or at most in muted tones. The strongest noises which interrupted this silence were not intense or prolonged or varied. If we overlook such exceptional movements as earthquakes, hurricanes, storms, avalanches and waterfalls, nature is silent.”
(Russolo, 1913)

In his Futurist manifesto “The Art of Noises”, a seminal writing for 20th-century musical avant-garde, Luigi Russolo conceptualises the sounds emitted by the city- as-an-organism, as an abstract matter that he wants to capture, attune, and regulate, to produce futurist musical results. For this purpose, Russolo suggests new approaches to musical instrumentation and composition. Most notably, he invented the intonarumori, literally the noise intoner, one of the first electronic instruments, considered by many a predecessor of analog synthesisers and musique concrete, an instrument aimed at recreating the noises of the urban industrial soundscape, allowing the musician to attune, modulate, and play these sounds into a composition. Russolo’s first performance that expressed the ideas generated in his manifesto, took place in 1914 in Milan. The composition, Awakening of a city, featured the intonarumori, and evoked the everyday sounds of machines that populated industrial urban life. In his manifesto, Russolo essentially identifies the proliferation of industrial machines in the 19th century as the birth of noise. He suggests that the irruption of noise into everyday life can reconnect the listener to the true nature and materiality of sound. In ancient times, he explains, “the first sounds that man drew from a pieced reed or streched string” were seen as divine, and reserved to liturgy, which then led to the concept of sound as distinct and independent from life, “a fantastic world superimposed on the real one”, thus hiding the true materiality of sound, removing it from reality, and placing it into a mystical, sacred realm. (Russolo, 1913) The Futurists argue that this has hindered the progress of music in comparison to other arts. However, the birth of noise caused by the invention of machines in the 19th century presented them with an opportunity. In fact, at this time, noise infiltrated the sensibility of men, who developed an intimacy with the noise of the industrial city around them, and attuned their aesthetic taste to the sound of machines. As a result, a growing appetite for dissonance among the audience drove a shift in musical style towards inharmonious sound. The goal of futurist music was to attune and regulate the variety of noises produced by the machines of the industrial city, to break “the limited circle of pure sounds” and conquer “the infinite variety of noise-sound”. (Marino, 2009; Michelone, 2019; Russolo, 1913)

Without elaborating on some of the evident limitations of the futurist perspective on human-machine coexistence, it is worth noting how the manifesto contains some of the seeds that will infiltrate and inspire key movements in the 20th century avant- garde lineage. Similar fascinations with noise and the uncompressed irregularity of sound were already circulating among contemporary avant-garde circles. In his 1918 Dada Manifesto, Tristan Tzara argued that noise presented a potential to subvert the clarity and the illusory logic of bourgeois society, as expressed by normative views of music and sound, by rejecting its notion of “natural things” and, instead, embracing meaninglessness, expressed through a “noisy and monotonous primitivism” (Tzara, 1918).

The revolutionary avant-garde in early soviet Russia

Also as a result of Marinetti’s travels to St Petersburg between 1910 and 1913, the ideas expressed in the Futurist Manifesto, became well known among Russian futurists, which opened the way to a futurist fascination with machines among the post-revolutionary avant-garde (Wendel, 2012). In 1918, during a Moscow Proletkult conference, poet Vladimir Kirillov prefigured that “soon a symphony of labor will ring out, in which the voices of machines, sirens and motors will join in one chorus with the voices of victorious workers” (Nelson, 2004, p. 27). Between the late 1910s and early 1920s, a number of intellectual experiments and artistic interventions sought to explore the interrelation of humans and machines in the space of the city.

This artistic interest in the role of modern technologies within urban landscapes culminated in Arseny Avraamov’s 1922 performance, Symphony of Sirens, which transcended the literary, theatrical, and filmic experiments of the time, as its extended performance took place across a modern metropolis, the portal city of Baku in Azerbaijan, and involved a complex orchestration of machines, human crowds, and urban infrastructures. Unlike Russolo’s noise orchestra, which “conquered” the noises of the city to incorporate them in what was still very much a traditional chamber orchestra, Avraamov’s symphony aimed at realising a radical unity of machines and humans across the city landscape. In fact, Baku’s geography and its key infrastructures were integral to the composition, as the performance was structured in a complex call-and-response between human and machine movement and sound, across the whole urban space. After a first set of cannon shots established the territorial limits of the city, and therefore the performance, at 10:30am, factory sirens, combined with additional cannon shots, prompted and organised the movement of bodies and other machines, vehicles and trains, across the different districts of the city. As crowds of people moved around, they sang workers’ and revolutionary anthems at different moments and in different areas. (Wendel, 2012) The Symphony belongs to a genre of mass spectacles that aimed at celebrating the collective spirit arisen from the 1917 revolution by abstracting traditional symphonic narrative structures to incorporate machine sounds and overlapping anthems to produce a total performance of the whole urban system. For example, in 1927, for the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, Shostakovich composed his ‘Symphony No. 2’, an experimental composition that similarly featured sirens, together with atonal instrumentation and a revolutionary choral part. (Wendel, 2012) Borrowing from Futurist and Taylorist principles, and inspired by contemporary avant-garde ideas about the mechanisation of artistic production, Avraamov championed “the transformative power of the ‘total artwork’, or gesamtkunstwerk, on communal de-individuation” to realise “a radical unity of the arts, technology, human labour and urban space.” (Wendel, 2012)

Emerging from a combination of ideas that animated the avant-garde discourse of the time, the Symphony pioneered a radical process of reciprocal hybridisation between the human and the machine, mobilising dynamic interrelations between artistic performance, urban infrastructures, modern technologies, and socialist revolutionary politics. Avraamov applied a futurist view of the relation between man and machine to his socialist revolutionary ambitions, and advanced a model of collective musical performance where mechanisation would organise and animate the revolutionary spirit of the masses. The avant-garde discourse of the 1920s proposed a notion of the total unity of the artwork, across the objects and architectures of the city, that, through the creative energy of modern technology, would produce a new mass political consciousness, in order to ultimately replace individualism with a new radical communalism. Inspired by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Avraamov recognised the importance of the city to this avant-garde proposition, and saw its streets and squares as the place where revolutionary art practices could come into a co-productive relation with the proletarian masses. Thus, he intended the Symphony as an “attempt to overcome the ‘chamber’ nature of music” (Avraamov, 1924, cited in Wendel, 2012)

Combining a Futurist fascination with modern technology with socialist ideology, Dziga Vertov anticipated the man-machine hybrid realised in the Symphony, as he was one of the first thinkers to capture “the capacity of mechanization for synthesizing art and collective labour”, and theorised the full potential of the urban environment to mobilise radical social change through technological dynamism (Wendel, 2012). After a long experience as a factory worker, avant-garde poet Alexei Gastev became a pioneer of scientific management, and in 1920 was appointed by Lenin as the head of the Central Labor Institute, whose purpose was to rationalise socialist labour, drawing from Taylorist priciples. In contrast with Bogdanov’s idea that labourers’ creativity positioned them above the machine they operated, Gastev suggested that the transformative relation between men and industrial machines was reciprocal. If, on one hand, machine rhythms altered human behaviour, and the experience of collective labour elevated their spirit, machines themselves were somehow constituted as proletarian subjects in the process. In light of this, in his 1919 Song of the Workers’ Blow, he reframed factory steam whistles as the sound of workers’ collective identity, rather than the symbol of monotonous toil. (Wendel, 2012) As a testament to how much Avraamov’s work was influenced by this idea of a reciprocal transformative relationship between the human and the machine, where the mechanisation of bodies corresponds to an infusion of revolutionary spirit in the machine, it’s worth noting that the essay that accompanied the instructions for the Symphony of Sirens, published in the Proletkult journal Gorn, opened with a four-line excerpt from the Song of the Workers’ Blow. (Kahn and Whitehead, 1994)

“When the morning whistles roar
In the outlying districts
It is not the call of slavery
It is the song of the future.”
(Gastev, 1919, in Aaramov, 1923, in Kahn and Whitehead, 1994)

By realising this radical unity of art, human labour, technology, and urban space, while also questioning the distinction between the artist and the worker, the performer and the spectator, as well as the human and the machine, the Symphony of Sirens showed the full potential of sound-noise in critical and avant-garde practice.

The sound of error in the network society

During the 20th century, the city evolved from an industrial machine to a networked informational landscape, as understood by critics like McLuhan in the 1960s, as the dominant social and cultural structures of the modern industrial society transformed into those of a postmodern network society. The structures of the network society rely on technical processes and protocols that guarantee dependable flows of information, fluid and efficient interaction, and generally these things rely on highly functioning global digital networks. This postmodern network society was established on what Lyotard defined as a “logic of maximum performance” that aimed toward the realisation of a fantasy of full efficiency, accuracy, and predictability (Lyotard, 1984). This is an essentially cybernetic ideology that predicates complete control of information in order to minimise error and maximise performance. A cybernetic logic that insists upon dependable transmission inevitably casts error as a destabilising moment in a system, as communication is reduced to the act of detecting and circulating signal, and casting out noise (Nunes, 2102).

To understand the relation between error, noise and information it’s worth briefly reviewing a key shift in cybernetics and information theory. In Robert Wiener’s account, the essence of cybernetics is the containment of error to realise control over a purpose-driven behaviour through feedback. Thus, an increase in information, is a decrease in entropy, and an increase in order. To ward off entropy and stabilise the organism, early cybernetics aims “to build an enclave of organisation in the face of nature's overwhelming tendency to disorder” by using negative feedback as a technique of control to react to external stimuli or changes of state and return the system to its initial conditions. (Wiener, 1988, p.xiii) In contrast with this view, Claude Shannon identifies an increase in information, with an increase in entropy, which reframes error as information in its own right, rather than a negation of information. Shannon established a technical relationship between error in communication and noise, which is seen as spurious information added to the signal, an uncertainty added to the message through error. (Shannon, 1948) "As a result, chaos went from being associated with dissipation in the Victorian sense of dissolute living and reckless waste to being associated with dissipation in a newly positive sense of increasing complexity and new life.” (Hayles, 1999, p.103) This shift in cybernetic theory enabled a reconceptualisation of error as asignifying information that disrupts the cybernetic regime of maximum performance, while also materially highlighting a new potentiality for aesthetic interventions within a programmatic communication system. In fact, the idea of error became widely used in avant-garde practice as a critical tool for understanding the operational logic of living within a network society. Inspired by the experiments from earlier decades of the 20th century, a range of technical and artistic practices started developing a “poetics of noise” by experimenting with error as a seductive force, an unintended, asignifying material that “simultaneously refuses and exceeds the cybernetic imperative to communicate.” (Nunes, 2102, p.14)

John Cage’s experiments were key to exploring error and noise as forms of unintended sound. He researched the possibilities for a restriction of individual agency and control in musical composition and performance, opening them up to indeterminacy by exploring the interaction between agents and elements as a creative process. If, as Russolo argued, music became as an imitation of natural sound, which was then stylised and conceptually abstracted above material life, Cage closed the circle by making unintended environmental sounds, a silence that “was actually filled with noise”, the core material of the piece or the performance (Dunbar-Hester, 2010). “Where Russolo argued that industrial noises were valid in a musical composition, Cage argued that all sounds were.” (Kane, 2014) Cage’s work influenced numerous experimental composer and certainly reverberated through Paul Schaffer’s idea of musique concrète. While working as an engineer at France’s public radio broadcaster Radio Diffusion Française, Schaffer managed to get permission to start a series of experiments with radio art, sound and technology. Inspired by Russolo’s manifesto, and formally called “research into noises”, these experiments in 1942 evolved in his Studio d’Essai, and then in the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrete, co-founded with composer Pierre Henry in 1949 (Patrick, 2016). Schaffer realised the inherent musicality and rhythm carried by the sounds of everyday machines, and started exploring the possibilities of abstracting the material musical qualities of those sounds. In a 1948 journal, Schaffer was already contemplating the idea of a “symphony of noises” for which he was collecting an archive of sounds from mundane objects and machines (Schaffer, 2013, p.4). The result was an inversion of the traditional theory of the compositional process, which moved from the abstract concept of notes to the concreteness of actual sound, in favour of an approach that started from concrete sounds and textures coming from both nature and machines, and progressed through the technical manipulation of those fragments of sound into a composition. Instead of relying on the conceptual notion of harmony and composition, centred around the formalised frequencies of musical notes, musique concrète only dealt with the plastic qualities of sound, in an almost Dadaist attempt to “forget meaning and isolate the in-itself-ness of the sound phenomenon” (Schaffer, 2013, p.13)

Throughout the second half of the 20th century, the socio-technical structures of the network society developed greatly, producing an ever more intense interrelation of material objects and flows of information in the social world, leading to the emergence of what Castells called the space of flows (Castells, 2007). An interesting paradox is that, with the intensification of a technical system that relies on control and functionalism, the undesirable information of error and noise actually proliferated, becoming increasingly available to material practices of critique, as a powerful metaphor of informational dysfunction, and unintentional or asignifying communication (Kane, 2014). By the late 1990s, experimental artists had developed a growing fascination with “the aesthetic use of discarded and deleted data” (Kane, 2014). In response to the growing presence of computation in everyday life, Achim Szepanski, founder of record label Mille Plateaux, notes in the label’s manifesto that “the more user-friendly the software, the less transparent is the medium itself.” (Szepanski, 2001) Glitch art, and glitch music especially, emerged as a way of foregrounding the materiality of the medial, by using the unintended, dysfunctional, or simply irrelevant elements of communication and information to produce what Kim Cascone defined as “the aesthetics of failure” (Cascone, 2000).

A material poetics of noise

Throughout these works, the sound-noise of machines - industrial machines at first, informational machines later - is used to create opportunities for new modes of expression. In The Open Work, Umberto Eco elaborates on Shannon’s information theory, distinguishing between actualised communication - the message sent - and the potential messages received. He argues that, despite the fact that communication works to reduce the potential and instead actualise signal transmission by reducing noise, it will always be haunted by equivocation (Nunes, 2012). By conceptually allowing error and noise into the communication system as information, Shannon opens information theory to the possibilities of asignifying, unintended, errant information - a “potential of potential” that circulates in the gap between the actual and the possible (Wark, 2004).

Wether the above-mentioned musical experiments deal with a fascination for machine sound, with revolutionary subjectivities, or with a critique of communication, they all produce a “poetics of noise” through a “counterprotocol practice” (Nunes, 2012; Galloway and Thacker, 2007). It is possible to trace, throughout these practices, histories, and movements, a sort of genealogy of a collective attempt to foreground the materiality, or even the logic, of machines, and deploy it aesthetically through critical interventions in the dominant structures of industrial modernity, as well as of the postmodern network society. There might still be an opportunity to extend this attempt to the context of the ubiquitous machines of contemporary computational sovereignty.

Ubiquitous machines, discrete aesthetics, and the illusion of disembodiment

Throughout the 20th century, machines and their sounds became an ever more permeating presence in the contemporary city, a trend that accelerated even further in the last two decades, with the emergence of ubiquitous mobile networked computation. However, the aesthetic experience of these ubiquitous machines is radically different from the one that charmed the Futurists. In fact, the chaos, dissonance, and dynamism that accompanied machines at the beginning of the 20th century, has been replaced by ambience and discreteness.

When computing started entering homes as a consumer product, the material sound of computation, which up until that point had been a key element of the user’s or the computer scientist’s experience of the machine, started to be progressively silenced. After an initial stage of home computing, when the character of the computer as a personal product was very much built on the idea of programming as a hobby, or on the rhetoric of political empowerment, personal computers became a tool of workplace-like efficiency, commercial competition, or education. Between the 1980s and 1990s, software consumerism produced a surface notion of computer literacy, which focused on software and its tasks, presented as a magically efficient tool for productivity and organisation. (Vee, 2017) The user’s engagement with the materiality of computation became secondary, superfluous, something to conceal, or even prevent. In line with this development, the material sound of computation has been progressively replaced with an abstract sound that became the sound of the virtual software environment, characterised by “a strong nonfigurative character”, that is often present in the discrete operational micro-sounds attached to software functions, as well as in the more immersive, foregrounded musical features, like the startup sounds that became some of the most distinctive assets of personal technology brands, such as Apple, Microsoft, or Nokia (Hertzfeld, 2011; Schmidt, 2012). The emphasis on the nonfigurative sounds of software, and the corresponding cancellation of the material sound of hardware, contributed to building an aesthetic of technical systems that reflects a desire to minimise the perceptible invasiveness of computing in everyday life, to realise an electronic symbiosis of the user with the machine, that bypasses any need for the user to consider, or engage with, the materiality of computation.

This idealised relationship with technology, that is at once ubiquitous and invisible, can be understood as a form of what Mark Weiser defined as “calm technology”, a form of computing that “recedes into the periphery of attention” to produce “fundamentally encalming” effects (Schmidt, 2012, p.182; Weiser and Brown, 1995). Weiser claims that, for much of our evolution, we experienced information through direct sensory experience from the surrounding environment, so our brains have evolved to only consciously attend to the most central parts of information, but contemporary calm technologies have reconfigured the environment around us to produce an experience of information that largely plays in the periphery of our attention (Weiser and Brown, 1995). This configures a relation of computation to the spacial environment that mirrors the discreteness and unobtrusiveness of ambient music, what Brian Eno described as it ability to “completely sink into the environment somewhere” (Tamm, 1995, p.138). Ambience is a distinctive aesthetic quality of the contemporary digital condition and its human-computer interactions, as the “ambient aestheticization of digital media and informational tools” was a key strategic paradigm for the establishment of ubiquitous computing and “ambient informatics”. (Schmidt, 2012, p.176) The pragmatic purpose of much of this design approach to technological systems, devices, and interfaces, is to produce seamless interaction, to make technology disappear, or become part of the concrete environment and its normalised social practices. According to Alfred North Whitehead “Civilization progresses by the number of operations it manages to carry out by habit.” (1979, p.18) Nowadays, the technical objects that are regarded as the most refined and sophisticated are ubiquitous ones, the ones that have a pervasive presence in the environments of everyday life, but that are used automatically, almost unconsciously, by users. A complex ensemble of technological objects and protocols carries out a series of synchronisation processes that we usually take for granted, but constitutes the background of our everyday habits. These invisible, networked, synchronised technical processes create a vast, obfuscated, area of “grey” media, that enables the stabilisation and naturalisation of a socio-technical milieu, made of habits and processes that go largely unnoticed, under a threshold of critical perception (Fuller and Goffey, 2012).

A lot of the contemporary fantasies of unnoisy and seamless signal processing aim to fulfil a promise of pure, free-floating information, abstracted from the material constraints of the material world. This illusion of disembodiment rests on a construction of information and materiality as separate concepts, and on an essentially bifurcated view of nature. According to Hayles, “this information/matter dichotomy maps onto the older and more traditional dichotomy of spirit/matter”, the idea that the true essence of the individual is separable from its material instantiation, a promise of immaterial existence, free from the body, where “if we can become the information we have constructed, we, too, can soar free, immortal like the gods.” (2000, p.73, 75) When, in 1948, Shannon formalised the idea of information into a mathematical function, he cautioned that his general theorem was meant to be applied directly only to certain technical contexts, not to communication in general. In fact, in his theory, no message is ever sent, what is sent is a signal, and through its encoding in a signal, for transmission through a medium, the message assumes material form. (Shannon, 1948) Therefore, for information to exist, it needs to instantiation in a medium, through signal. Abstracting information from this material base is “an imaginary act” that constructs the matter/information dichotomy (Hayles, 2000). However, Shannon’s theoretical definition of information was quickly translated into a cultural fantasy that sees human essence as an abstract message encoded into a biological material body, but not intrinsic to it. This illusion is manifest for instance in Wiener’s 1950 suggestion of the possibility of telegraphing a human being, or in Moravec’s 1988 fantasy of a consciousness that achieves immortality by being downloaded into a computer and transferred from one bodily instantiation to another. According to Hayles, dualities like information/matter and information/noise actually function as dialectics rather than dichotomies, as the bifurcated concepts are constituted in an interactive relation, where “the slashes turn out to be permeable membranes rather than leakproof barriers.” (Hayles, 2000, p.76) This fantasy of pure and disembodied information, as an historical construction, affects culture by concealing the materiality of our interaction with computation, as well as its effects. Artistic interventions that foreground the materiality of media communication, and information in general, to deploy it aesthetically, can contest the illusion of disembodiment that permeates the contemporary mythology of technology, and affect the cultural understanding of the relation between human and machine.

A Sensing Media Ensemble

The Sensing Media Ensemble project proposes a critical inquiry into the materiality of media technologies. It aims to bypass informational/material dichotomies to instead explore the virtual materiality of information, where virtuality is understood not as “the immaterial realm of information” but rather as the interrelation of material objects with informational flows. (Hayles, 2000, p.94) As a form of sound-based project, it is not meant as an intentional composition or performance, but rather as an errant practice that resists intentionality and purpose, in favour of a strategy of attunement with other technical, human, and animal entities, and their heterogeneous capacities for sensation and signification. Also, inspired by the idea of “evil media studies”, the Sensing Media Ensemble could be an opportunity for a practice of attunement that foregrounds the obscured materiality of machine sound- vibration, with the aim of questioning the illusion of pure information, total disembodiment, and seamless interaction, through what we could call a “grey” poetics of the unintended sound-noise. (Fuller and Goffey, 2012)

The sound of calm computation doesn’t really resemble the thundering sounds industrial machines that charmed the futurists. In fact, ubiquitous electronic machines permeate the environment, not with the deafening din of wheels, motors, and engines, but with inaudible vibration of ultrasonics. By exceeding the standard human hearing frequency range, ultrasonic vibration allows machines to communicate, exchange information, and sense the environment around them, without producing for us any sonic affect, which is usually determined by how we receive the timbre of the sound through our cultural, aesthetic, and social understandings of it. Sound is nothing but air in vibration. Musical instruments work by vibrating air at specific frequencies, and the process is not materially different from how we generate sound with our vocal cords, to then modulate it with throats and lips. In terms of perceiving this vibration that propagates through air, the membrane in our ears, the eardrum, vibrates sympathetically with it. By sensing and perceiving these vibrations, our brain encodes them into a different form, which is what we would call sound (Puckette, 2007). Wether we hear it or not, we are constantly interrelated with a whole sonic ecosystem of machines that are constantly operating, sensing, and processing, all around and within us. Therefore, it’s worth thinking about electronic vibration as the material source of both the audible and inaudible sounds of computation. Vibration accompanies life with its messy and irregular materiality, just like - or even more intensely than - it did at the time of the futurists, the difference is that this noise is now inaudible, and the socio- material dynamics it accompanies are, accordingly, obfuscated. The project involves the production of sound as a way of figuring the process of computational sensing - based on the ultrasonic vibration of sensors - by producing an aesthetic experience of it - based on audible vibration. Experiencing this form of noise-sound recalls vibration-sound as a material element of reality, and recalls us to the materiality of media technologies and information. It offers a way of figuring the invisible activity of computational sensing by making it aesthetically experienceable, and through this, thinking about questions of agency and subjectivity within a socio-technical ensemble of humans and machines.

The Sensing Media Ensemble emerges through a co-creative process across an assemblage of conscious and non-conscious actors across. As the Ensemble perceives bodies and attunes vibration through the diffuse sensing activity of an ecology of technical and biological entities, with different capacities for sensation and signification, we can understand the transmission of information and signals as part of a living process. To conceptualise this process, it’s useful to think with Gabrys’ reading of Whitehead applied to computational sensing. Gabrys employs a Whitehead-inspired analysis of environmental-sensing processes to think about the process of data gathering as a practice that gives rise to new forms of entities, milieus, and relations (Gabrys, 2016). In Whitehead’s cosmology, the relations between entities are not fixed subject-object relations, but rather a co-constitutive process. There are no finite subjects experiencing objects that are external to them, because “an actual entity is an act of experience”. The very process of perceiving something is constitutive of a “superject”, a more-than-human entity that attains unity through a process of be-coming together of multiple creatures. (Whitehead, 1979). In light of this, we can understand data not as external objects waiting for conceptual classification by a human subject, but rather as what the subject- superject experiences and feels in its becoming. This process of feeling, processing the datum, is what generates the superject. Thus, the process of capturing data becomes a creative process that generates new relational entities and environments. Therefore, we can think of this relational ecosystem as a more-than-human body, a multilayered material entity, situated at the intersection of many layers of information. A Spinozian body made of assemblages and flows, relations of forces between bodies, with the dynamic capacity of affecting and being affected, that never attains a final, defined state or form, but is constantly in the process of becoming. (Deleuze, 2001) As information is felt, compressed, communicated, and manipulated, across this ensemble of entities, this body is constituted as a living media device.

The project also functions as a practical method for understanding computational sensing as a set of logical-procedural activities of abstraction and compression, through which machines perceive the surrounding environment. The computational transformation of matter from embodiment to abstraction, and its successive recomposition, requires the formalisation of organicity into information, which means that the continuous nature of the analog needs to be formalised into discrete units to become available across a digital dimension. Considering that analog matter is continuous, as opposed to digital objects, which are made of discrete units, we can think of this formalisation, as a form of what Hayles describes as “making discrete”; “the act of making something discrete rather than continuous, that is, digital rather than analog.” (Hayles, 2005, p.56) Stiegler similarly understands the relationship between technology and nature as one of abstract compression and discretisation of the continuous flux of experience, which he describes as a process of grammatization, understood as “the process whereby the currents and continuities shaping our lives become discrete elements.” (2010, p.70) However, it’s worth noting how both Hayles and Stiegler see this process of discretisation and compression as not exclusively imposed by technological discovery on the object-nature, as the artifice of technology is always already constitutive of the very structure of being, just like the human and the technical are co-constituted in their relation. For instance, although we sense the world basically in its analog form, throughout history we have developed technical prostheses to impose some degree of discretisation over the continuous, analog flow of language. “From a continuous stream of breath, speech introduces the discreteness of phonemes,” and then writing operates a further compression by “developing inscription technologies that represent phonemes with alphabetic letters.” (Hayles, 2005, p.56)

By producing a sonic response to the presence and movement of bodies, the aesthetic experience produced by the Sensing Media Ensemble can consist in the material feeling of being sensed by computation. We can conceptualise this computational reflection of the abstracted body as a “cubist synthetic recomposition of movement” produced by mathematical logic (Portanova, 2013, p.53). Cubist painting expresses the force of variation within movement, as it retains a sense of indetermination, the possibility of infinite potential points, in the sharp discreteness of its segmented sections. Sensation, as an aesthetic experience, is usually intuitively associated with analog continuity, rather than with the discreteness of the digital cut. But digital logic doesn’t sense movement in its continuity, as it can only experience it in its cut, its discrete form, through mathematical abstraction. So, the digital re-composes and re-figures bodily presence, originally analog and continuous, as a combination of discrete numbers, a cubist-like rendering of movement.

Through this type of aesthetic experience of being perceived by the machine, and of computational sensing more broadly, we can perhaps intuitively grasp a sort of physics of the virtual, the material interrelation of physical objects and informational processes, that is normally obscured to the non-specialist, “in much the same way that the earth’s gravity is felt and intuitively understood by someone who never heard of newton’s laws.” (Hayles, 2000, p.91) This process of feeling the integration of bodily perceptions and computer architectures causes a sense of change in subjectivity, and a bodily understanding of the materiality of cyberspace, or how Hayles would say, of our “condition of virtuality” (2000)

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