Machine-assembled dislocation: technology and imagined agency

Ferguson, John (2010) Machine-assembled dislocation: technology and imagined agency. In: Music and Machines 10: Resistant Materials; 23 - 25 Sep 2010, Newcastle, U.K.. (Unpublished)


My artistic practice explores the dialectical relations between precision and indeterminacy, key concepts include touching at a distance, negotiating inertias, setting processes in motion and intervening within evolving trajectories. All of which to some extent sideline what might be perceived as the autonomy of a performer, foregrounding environmentally situated aspects of performance, rather than just the actions of the performer themselves. This presentation will suggest that Gadamer’s ‘fusion of horizons’ might be considered analogous to the notion of ‘performance ecology’ as put forward by John Bowers, an analogy premised on the relationship between a perceiver and their environment, as explored and constructed, through active perception. If, as Koestler suggests, the position at which perception lies between the real and the imagined is a ‘matter of degree’, then this can be configured as a creative threshold from which to imaginatively listen and negotiate. Performance ecology can therefore neither be exclusively determined by physical artefacts (instruments, for example) or timbral entities (sounds), but as a cultural field, soliciting a perceiver’s own memories and associations. The means by which this ‘imagined agency’ communicates itself is in the auditory, haptic and kinaesthetic dimensions; phenomena which are also in a sense the means by which environments and cultures are experienced and sustained, shot through with agencies as well as ambiguities to be negotiated.

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