Articles with tag: materiality

12/11/2018 _Perspective

On Self-Tracking as Surveillance Practice

Running, walking, climbing stairs.

[the surface of the earth rotates while I’m moving in the world]

Someone is watching my every move.

Even when I do not move – when I sit, when I wait at the bus station, when I eat, when I sleep – there is a constant recording of my activity of being alive.

Breathing in, breathing out. Someone, something is counting. […]

Does “Critical Composition” (Still) Exist?

Reflections on the Material of New Music

Critical and reflective compositional approaches to musical material are not a phenomenon of the 20th century. In fact, the theoretical examination and compositional expansion of possible material forms within concrete historical conditions of possibility are a necessity of art music production and have always had the potential to cause controversies between composers, music theorists, music critics, and listeners. […]

The Order of Things and People

Vertical Non-State Surveillance

The rise of the security paradigm marks one of the most crucial shifts in Western cultures, if not globally, of the past decades. [1], [2] In the course of this development, whose origins can be traced back to the economic crisis of the 1970s, [3] security has emerged as a key frame of intelligibility and organization of contemporary life, and has progressively become “a powerful diacritic of social relations, a key point of encounter between citizens, non-citizens, and states, […]