navigating an intertwingularity: computational ambivalence in experimental music practice

This project offers a provisional, practitioner-oriented notion of ‘computational ambivalence’ in experimental music, addressing how many musicians sensitive to the non-neutrality of music technologies resist adopting a single overarching stance towards software, and therefore cannot extricate their technological questioning from music making itself.

Computational ambivalence is established in relation to three idiosyncratically-defined ‘threads’ — experimental music, music computing, and critical cultural computing — and is exhibited in and through a ‘field guide’, speculative historical case studies on Iannis Xenakis’s Theraps and James Tenney’s Quintext, reflections on my own musical practice, and an accompanying portfolio of music and software.