Posthuman Music
| type | artistic research project proposal |
| date | dec 2025 |
Musicianship is experiencing an ecological crisis of its own making. Through misreading the rise of digital copying in the 1990s as a legal problem rather than an ontological shift, musicians responded to the historic moment by accepting a drastically contracted role for their works as tokens of exposure rather than sites of value, while continuing to work in familiar ways.
The operationalisation of increasingly capable generative systems has undermined another dimension of scarcity—creative distinctiveness. When the digital landscape becomes statistical substrate for algorithmic mining, the work’s boundedness dissolves once it is articulated. Generative AI makes it impossible to ignore the ontological collapse of the musical work precipitated by its digitisation.
The Posthuman Music project is an extension of the research that was first expressed in Tracing Ecotone, and developed further as Jazz in the Expanded Field.
It centers the ecological media theory that has originated my research into ways to mediate between the placeless logic of the cloud and the landscapes we inhabit.
Robert Smithson’s site-nonsite dialectic is used to draw a map of the distributed creation of meaning in a multi-layered reality, where the physical world is everywhere intersected by the digital.
Posthuman Music is an ERC-funded project at Orpheus Institute that aims to forge new conceptual frameworks and craft new creative tools to enhance emerging posthuman creative practices. I have submitted an Expression of Interest to join the program as a PhD student.
The system is designed to enable relational and statistical forms of creativity to co-exist and co-create without collapsing each other’s ontologies. Data is translated between the layers of reality in a way that avoids extracting ecologies as data, and anthropomorphising non-biological agents:
The project’s distributed agency and authorship is visualized by using a system of automated and semi-automated commits to a blockchain ledger. Changes and other events in any part of system’s ecology are appended, creating an immutable project history:
