Digital Maximalism and ‘the new post-everything’
Ryder Ripps - Barbara Lee #8
This is my Masters dissertation which I wrote during the spring of 2019. I thought I’d share it here since it encompasses a lot of stuff that I tend to think about when writing music - attention span, fragmentation, information overload etc.
Digital Maximalism and ‘the new post-everything’: exploring themes of digital mediation and information overload through the music of Andrew Norman, Ryoji Ikeda, SOPHIE and others
‘There is no Sleepy Hollow on the Internet, no peaceful spot where contemplativeness can work its restorative magic. There is only the endless, mesmerizing buzz of the urban street. The stimulations of the Net, like those of the city, can be invigorating and inspiring. We wouldn’t want to give them up. But they are, as well, exhausting and distracting. They can easily, as Hawthorne understood, overwhelm all quieter modes of thought. One of the greatest dangers we face as we automate the work of our minds, as we cede control over the flow of our thoughts and memories to a powerful electronic system, is […] a slow erosion of our humanness and our humanity.’ (Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, 2011, p. 220)
In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr sets out to examine ‘what the Internet is doing to our brains’ using concepts from neuroscience and research into the effects of older technologies, such as maps, clocks, books and the printing press, on the plasticity of the brain, its capability to endlessly adapt and mould itself to new stimuli. Drawing on this history of neuroplasticity, Carr argues persuasively and urgently that the Internet is unlike any previous technology in its power to remap neural circuitry and reprogram the memory; that whenever we turn on our computers, we are plunged into an ‘ecosystem of interruption technologies’[1] that strip us of our ability to reflect deeply or focus our attention on one thing. Alongside William Powers’ Hamlet's BlackBerry (2010) and Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together (2011), The Shallows is just one of a growing genre of book-length critiques of modern lifestyles deemed overly organized around screens and hand-held telecommunication devices. The common note sounded by all these books is that ‘digital maximalism,’[2] a term coined by Powers to describe the contemporary creed that the maximization of connectivity is both essential and life-enhancing, is in fact overwhelming, distracting, alienating, isolating, dehumanising and superficial, and that in order to counter the ever-encroaching assault of technology on our lives, we ought to find ways to ‘disconnect’ through strategies of self-reflection, meditation, mindfulness, religion or rural retreat, to seek out ‘viable antidotes to the challenges of a tech-saturated life.’[3]
This essay aims to evaluate these criticisms through the lens of music, looking specifically at recent music written by composers and producers working within a variety of fields, ranging from contemporary classical music to experimental electronic music. Where appropriate, this essay also touches on examples from the visual arts and attempts to contextualise the artworks with reference to wider topics of interest, such as postmodernism, accelerationism and hyperreality. Owing to the nature of the subject matter, any essay on maximalism has the potential to be infinitely broad and discursive (definitions alone vary significantly from context to context, be it for maximalist architecture, fashion, literature or home décor). For sake of clarity, however, I’d like to make no pretence toward the exhaustive, and instead take a look at specific musical examples that each demonstrate a unique and thought-provoking engagement with issues of digital mediation and information overload. At the heart of this essay lies the following question: does the logic of technological progress in our current century entail, as Carr says, ‘a slow erosion of our humanness and our humanity’? It’s an idea that, I believe, has profound consequences for art, and considering the extent to which most of our lives (at least in economically developed parts of the world) are now inextricably intertwined with new media technologies that articulate, shape and define our experiences in ever-shifting, imperceptible ways, it seems to be an idea that can’t not be confronted on some implicit, subconscious level whenever we interact with the world and with others through art and other means of expression.
Digital Maximalism
‘The examined life is under siege from the ubiquitous temptations of technological diversion,’[1] laments Conor M. Kelly in an essay entitled ‘Depth in an Age of Digital Distraction,’ which seeks to promote and re-instil the traditional Catholic traits of ‘solitude, sacramentality, and communion’ into a modern, tech-saturated society bereft of such ‘transcendental values.’ [2] These three traits, according to Kelly’s diagnosis, can and should act as practical countermeasures to the three major flaws he identifies in the digital age: digital maximalism, superficiality, and isolation.[3] The extreme language and high romanticism of Kelly’s style is a common trope among writers who share similar views regarding the supposedly corrupting influence of new media. For Carr, Kelly, Turkle, Powers and others, what is lacked is frequently a suitable climate for ‘attention’, or else a ‘human’ element, both of whose preservation the writers appeal for. The excess is understood using variations on the ‘information overload’ concept first popularised by Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book Future Shock, in which levels of information exceeding our neural capacities ‘interfere with our ability to “think.”’[4] Powers argues that ‘we've effectively been living by a philosophy, albeit an unconscious one. It holds that (1) connecting via screens is good, and (2) the more you connect, the better. … the goal is maximum screen time.’[5] The discourse tends to characterise this philosophy, ‘digital maximalism,’ as a kind of Faustian bargain, in which society has regrettably traded ‘depth’ for ‘digital busyness.’ Words like ‘excess,’ ‘overload,’ ‘bombardment’ and ‘saturation’ are frequently deployed in these narratives to portray the hectic, fragmented and mind-numbing state of modern living induced by digital technologies. As a solution to these problems, Powers advocates periodic ‘disconnectedness’, the strategy of withdrawal from new technology as a means to ‘ground the busy mind’[6]: ‘old tools can be an effective way to bring the information overload of new ones under control. … Vinyl records not only do sound better, they’re fascinating to handle and ponder.’[7]
Critiques of digital technology have also directly informed music criticism. In a 2011 article for Pitchfork, critic Simon Reynolds put forward the term ‘digital maximalism’ to describe what he observed as the dominant current trend in electronic music over the last year or two;’[8] music that features ‘a hell of a lot of inputs, in terms of influences and sources, and a hell of a lot of outputs, in terms of density, scale, structural convolution, and sheer majesty.’[9] Referencing Carr and Powers, Reynolds argued that albums such as Glass Swords by Rustie, Butter by Hudson Mohawke, and Cosmogrammaby Flying Lotus, among others, are symptomatic of a post-digital, ‘attention-deficit disorder’ era in which ‘our attention is dispersed, tantalised, teased’ by ‘the datascape.’[10] Borne out of a reaction against the minimalist aesthetics of the 1990s, these electronic producers replace the dark, stripped-down style of German minimal techno with flat, bright and busy soundscapes characterised by ‘texture-saturated overload.’[11] The results are often ‘preposterously euphoric,’ ‘not so much striking a balance between sublime and ridiculous as merging them until they’re indistinguishable.’[12] The aesthetics of digital maximalism are deeply rooted in perceptions of digital media’s excessiveness, not just in terms of the music’s vividness and hyperactivity but also its depth of referentiality, reflecting the ‘limitless source material and the everything-at-onceness of the internet.’[13] Reynolds sees the exuberant, garish quality of much of the music as a logical outcome of the digital age, since ‘having access to so many resources and being able to manipulate them so extensively lends itself to a certain grandiosity.’[14] Indeed, arguably what defines digital maximalism’s ethos above all is the awareness that anything is possible: ‘I feel we're in a time now where people can handle whatever you can throw at them as long as there's something they recognize that they can hold on to, so why not just really fucking go there?’ asks producer Flying Lotus (Steven Ellison). ‘Why not just have all these things from our past as well as all of the newest technology from today in one, and just really come up with the craziest shit we can?’[15]
To be clear, the desire for excess and sensory overload is by no means new. From Gustav Mahler to James Joyce, Francis Bacon to Antonin Artaud, artists of the twentieth century were veritably obsessed with the idea of ‘transformation through overload.’[16] Mahler famously professed as his aim the writing of a symphony ‘so great that the whole world is actually reflected therein,’[17] a philosophy echoed by Ives in his unfinished Universe Symphony and later magnified to apocalyptic dimensions by Scriabin and Stockhausen in Mysterium and Licht respectively. For avant-garde dramatist Artaud, the aim of theatre was to conjure the ‘living whirlwind that devours the darkness,’[18] a feat that required ‘extreme action, pushed beyond all limits.’[19] ‘Thundering with images and crammed with sounds,’[20] the purpose of his Theatre of Cruelty was to ‘crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator.’[21] For Nietzsche, as for Artaud, the embrace of ‘cruelty’ or violence was a necessary step in a spiritual-philosophical quest that sought to supplant conventional modes of thought with higher forms of consciousness: ‘We sail straight over morality and past it, we flatten, we crush perhaps what is left of our own morality by venturing to voyage thither.’[22] For the Viennese Actionists, it provided a liberating means for breaking down the boundaries between art and reality: ‘Because I knew no other way than art to get to reality, I intensified my actions to extremely aggressive undertakings,’[23] wrote Otto Muehl.
While all of the examples above could be described as maximalist (i.e. characterised by an aesthetic of excess), my focus here is on contemporary artists who induce similar feelings of sensory overload, not via divine or theological evocations (Ives, Scriabin, Stockhausen, Messiaen) or literal images or acts of bloodshed (Artaud, Bacon, Viennese Actionists), but through themes of digital mediation, artists whose search for the ‘craziest shit’ feels like an urgent response to our bewildering moment of 21st century excess. In addition, one important feature distinguishes the recent examples of maximalist art discussed in this essay from more general usage of the epithet. The term ‘cultural omnivorousness’ was introduced by the sociologist Richard Peterson in the early 1990s to refer to an emerging profile of consumers in the late-twentieth century that showed increased breadth of cultural taste and a willingness to cross established hierarchical cultural genre boundaries.[24] According to Peterson, the historical shift that took place in the 1980s among highbrow consumers from snobbism to omnivorousness was prompted by a growing understanding and appreciation of cultural knowledge as a form of capital, a signifier of intelligence, tolerance and a kind of cosmopolitan awareness and savviness that allowed oneself to feel comfortable in almost any social situation. ‘Rather than mobilizing what we might think of as “elite knowledge” to mark themselves as distinct – epic poetry, fine art and music, classical learning – the new elite learn these and everything else. Embracing the open society, they display a kind of radical egalitarianism in their tastes.’[25]
For Flying Lotus, then, as for countless other musicians, composers and producers born in the 1970s and 1980s, this radical egalitarianism, or ‘openness to appreciating everything,’[26] forms an integral part of their compositional aesthetic. Critic William Robin explains that, since a wide range of influences manifest themselves naturally and organically, ‘conceptions of compositional artifice, musical quotation, or collage-like combinations of idioms are absent. Instead, musics of multiple places, times, and generic traditions are “baked” into the compositional language,’[27]an attitude summarised by Judd Greenstein’s dictum: ‘ours is not an era of “influence upon” but, rather, is one of “incorporation into.”’[28] For Greenstein, that ‘incorporation into’ might include 1990s hip-hop, Fela Kuti, Bach, and Ravel; for Nico Muhly, English Renaissance motets, Stravinsky, and John Adams. This ‘post-ideology’ attitude (what Reynolds calls ‘the new post-everything’[29]) concurs with Fredric Jameson’s understanding of postmodernism as ‘a kind of aesthetic populism,’[30] erasing the older, modernist frontier between high culture and mass culture, and incorporating (not simply ‘quoting’ as Joyce and Mahler might have done) the ‘degraded landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader’s Digest culture, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature.’[31] As Jameson notes, the resulting art is often ‘empirical, chaotic, and heterogeneous,’[32] terms that, for Carr and Powers, could be equally applied to life in the ‘age of digital distraction.’
Escaping the ‘crazy labyrinth’: Andrew Norman and radical distraction
In 1964, Leo Marx published a work entitled The Machine in the Garden. The title refers to a trope in American literature representing the interruption of pastoral scenery by technology due to the industrialization of America during the 19th and 20th centuries. According to Carr, the tension between these ‘two conditions of consciousness’[33] – the industrial ideal and the pastoral ideal – is analogous to the present-day conflict between the disruptive forces of information technology and ‘the contemplative mind.’[34] ‘The problem,’ Carr explains, ‘is that we’re losing our ability to strike a balance between those two very different states of mind. Mentally, we’re in perpetual locomotion.’[35] Drawing on these issues, the composer Andrew Norman (b.1979) incorporates the rhetoric of juxtaposition, jump cuts and fragmentation into a hyperkinetic, hyper-theatrical symphonic idiom that often dramatizes the ‘the psychic dissonance’[36] associated with the information overload of the digital era. Narrative is an integral part of Norman’s music; pieces like Play (2013), Unstuck (2008), Try (2011), Switch (2015) and Sustain (2018) involve ‘non-linear, narrative-scrambling techniques’[37]associated with movies and video games. As part of the ‘game’ (in Norman’s terms), the role of the ‘protagonist’ (the orchestra, the soloist or the listener) is to ‘make sense of this crazy universe,’[38] to navigate one’s way through the ‘non-sequiturs, wrong turns, and crazy tangents’[39] and begin to form some coherent sense of the piece’s structure and how the disparate parts fit together, to construct order from chaos.
For Norman, underneath the frenetic surface level of activity lie deep questions about the impact of technology on the ways we think. In the programme note to his piano concerto Sustain, he asks whether, 100 years from now, ‘the act of sitting quietly and listening to a symphonic argument unfold over 45 minutes will mean even more than it does today.’[40] He adds, ‘perhaps, in a time when humans will be bombarded with increasingly atomized bits of information, when overstimulation, fragmentation, and isolation will be the given norms of experience and discourse, perhaps then communal listening to a single, long unbroken musical thought will carry a kind of significance, sacrifice, and otherness we can’t yet really imagine.’[41] In many of his works then, Norman provides a musical representation of the ‘machine in the garden’; he dramatizes the very anxieties that Marx, Carr and others describe in their books, namely the effects of constant distraction on our ability to focus or complete a single thought – ‘the dissolution of the linear mind.’[42] In the three-movement symphony Play, this idea manifests in the form of a conflict between a melodic wedge-shaped motif that grows in hints and fragments, and a battery of percussion instruments that act as switches for the rest of the orchestra, starting/stopping, freezing/unfreezing and rewinding or fast-forwarding action in evermore ‘manipulative, even sadistic’[43] ways. Only until much later in the piece is the wedge-shaped motif able to rid itself of these ‘oppressive systems of control’[44] and reach its full form. In marked contrast to the first two movements, in which the players are rendered powerless and automaton-like with little sense of individual agency, the third movement allows for long, sweeping melodic lines and soloistic opportunities, empowering and humanising performers through expressive playing and creative choices.
Norman’s music frequently relies on the sharp juxtaposition between delicate, almost inaudible textures and violent, riotous barrages of noise. In addition to Marx’s ‘machine vs garden’ metaphor, one could attempt to understand these violent ruptures in terms of what anarchist writer Hakim Bey describes as ‘temporary autonomous zones’ (T.A.Z.),[45] the socio-political tactic of creating temporary spaces that elude formal structures of control. These zones, which Maggie Nelson describes as ‘ephemeral but crucial gaps in an otherwise suffocating global capitalist order,’[46] could be applied to fleeting moments of ‘engaged withdrawal’[47] in Norman’s music, rare acts of exodus from the relentless bombardment of sonic information and the dehumanising grip of machinic automation. In the chamber ensemble piece Try, a single, serene piano gesture is repeatedly intercepted by a manic and frenzied ensemble, each time as if announcing (almost mockingly) the pianist’s inability to express anything without constant interruption. The piece’s rapid trial-and-error procedure evokes the disorienting back-and-forth of web-browsing, momentary glimpses of concentration and flow inevitably sabotaged by incoming messages, emails, hyperlinks, and the like – the internet’s ‘ecosystem of interruption technologies.’ Later, in a moment of calm introspection, the pianist plays a sequence of delicate arpeggiations in silence as if meditating. In moments like this, Norman creates a ‘temporary autonomous zone,’ a transitory oasis of freedom from controlling mechanisms that stifle individual creativity or depth of reflection. In The Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot refers to these precious junctures as ‘the still point of the turning world.’[48]
‘A single, larger system’: Ryoji Ikeda and the technological sublime
In The Shallows, Carr argues that our brains are socially adapted to want to ‘merge’ with computers, since electronic media ‘are so effective at altering the nervous system because they both work in similar ways and are basically compatible and easily linked.’[49] Thanks to its plasticity, the nervous system ‘can take advantage of this compatibility and merge with the electronic media, making a single, larger system.’[50] There’s growing evidence, moreover, that our brains naturally mimic the states of the other minds we interact with, whether those minds are real or imagined. As Carr notes, ‘such neural “mirroring” helps to explain why we’re so quick to attribute human characteristics to our computers and computer characteristics to ourselves.’[51] Terms like ‘circuits,’ ‘networks,’ ‘wiring,’ and ‘programming’ are so routinely used to describe our brains that we no longer even realise we’re speaking metaphorically. Our natural disposition to ‘mirror’ technology, be it the clock, the factory machine or the computer, explains why the maximalist determination to ‘stretch [the listener’s] powers of perception,’[52] as Andrew Norman describes it, so frequently goes hand in hand with an equal determination to test the limits of technological equipment. It assumes that, like a computer, the brain has a limited processing capacity that can be exceeded (or ‘overloaded’) by a certain amount of input; Google co-founder Larry Page, for example, has theorised that the human DNA is ‘about 600 megabytes compressed,’[53] making it smaller than any modern operating system.
Nowhere is the relationship between human limitation and technological limitation more thoroughly explored that in the works of Japanese visual and sound artist Ryoji Ikeda[54] (b.1966), who states that his use of ‘raw’ sounds – noise and sine tones whose frequencies sit at the edge of human perceptibility – are ‘as much a test for the electronic devices’[55] as for the audience’s senses. (His 2005 album Dataplex even comes with a warning sticker cautioning the listener that the final track contains ‘specific waveform data’ that will cause ‘some CD players to experience playback errors.’[56]) Combining concepts from particle physics and quantum mechanics with his experience of the ‘extreme’[57] scale of the 90s Tokyo club scene, Ikeda’s installations project abrasive, strobe-like visualisations of data and number systems accompanied by radically disorientating sound compositions designed to overwhelm the listener into a state of ‘wonder or contemplation.’[58] His ability to to transform and transcend the music’s extreme economy of materials – shards of static, monochrome graphics and lines of digital code – into realms of vastness and sublimity has earned him a reputation as an ‘ultra-minimalist,’[59] delivering maximal impact through minimal means. Much of Ikeda’s work is devoted to exploring the concept of infinite, using the world of mathematics (‘the purest beauty,’[60] in Ikeda’s words) to express both the aesthetics of the beautiful (crystalline, rational, precise, elegant) and the sublime (infinite, infinitesimal, immense, ineffable).
Ikeda’s work is representative of a new kind of sublime unique to the technologies of the 21st century. Distinct from the 18th century conception of the sublime that was rooted in the ‘natural,’ and the subsequent ‘metropolitan-industrial’ sublime of the 19th and 20th centuries, the technological sublime of the current era stems from an age of secularization in which the power of divine nature has been transferred to the power of human technology. We experience sublime technologies as expressing the grandeur of human intellect, but also as forces that can potentially control or threaten us (consider, for instance, how critics of genetic modification often argue that we ‘shouldn’t play God’). In his Critique of Judgment (1790), Immanuel Kant distinguishes between two notions of the sublime: the mathematical and the dynamic. While the former is evoked by that which is immeasurable, colossal and infinite, such as the immensity of a mountain landscape or the vast night sky, the dynamic pertains to the superior forces of nature, where our experience of insignificance and finitude upon seeing, say, a volcanic eruption or an earthquake, is ‘supplemented by the realization that we could be destroyed by the devastating power of these forces of nature.’[61] The dynamic sublime therefore evokes both awe and fear – a ‘negative lust,’[62]in Kant’s terms – in which attraction and repulsion melt into one ambiguous experience. The dazzling, hypnotic audiovisual installations of Ryoji Ikeda seem to encapsulate the awe and apprehension that we as a society feel as we consider the future of humanity. Streams of data collide on-screen to create a sensory overload that can literally cause an epileptic seizure, sine waves bounce back and forth between left and right channels to disorient your sense of space, and impossibly heavy bass drones vibrate the pit of your chest, all forcing us to confront not just the very physical nature of sound, but also the very violent, uncontrollable and destructive potential of digital technology – a glimpse into what Alvin Toffler called the ‘harsh metallic note’[63] of the future.
Instead of identifying his music with any particular concept, Ikeda often emphasises its abstractness: ‘There’s no message to what I do. It’s very pure. It’s like a Lego.’[64] His preoccupation with number systems stems from a worldview that constructs itself around the binaries of one and zero – ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ – which constitute ‘the most fundamental part of human logical thinking,’[65] the means by which ‘we all engage in intellectual activities and social life by successively applying it to various events,’[66] explains Ikeda. The notion that all sorts of things are discretely composed of vast amounts of such ‘Yes and No’ elements finds parallel in the geometric art of Piet Mondrian, who believed that, by processing everything into horizontal and vertical lines, one could reveal the structure of the world through binary oppositions, translating complex spatial illusions into what he termed, ‘truth.’[67] This philosophy also forms the foundation for search engines like Google, which draws on terabytes of behavioural data every day as part of its much-publicised ‘mission’ to ‘organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’[68] As Carr notes, Google views information as ‘a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can, and should, be mined and processed with industrial efficiency.’[69] According to this logic, ‘the more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can distil their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.’[70] The eerie side effect of the conviction that ‘we live in a world of numbers, ’[71] as Google executive Marissa Mayer declared, is a kind of universal ‘levelling out’ of content: because the different sorts of information distributed by traditional media – words, numbers, sounds, images, moving pictures – can all be translated into digital code, they can all be ‘computed.’ As Carr notes, ‘everything from Beethoven’s Ninth to a porn flick can be reduced to a string of ones and zeroes and processed, transmitted, and displayed or played by a computer.’[72]
New York-based artist Ryder Ripps (b.1986) demonstrates this point succinctly in his project ‘Barbara Lee,’ a large installation in which 50,000 photographic images are presented on 120 square feet of shallow platforms on which visitors can walk or sit, physically enveloping themselves in the infinite ‘clickbait simulacra of today’s society.’[73] Evoking the disorienting, rapid image flow of Web surfing, each photo is reduced to a tiny thumbnail, distilling long, complex stories and situations to 1-inch high sensationalist snippets. When viewed from afar, the garish patchwork of Internet bricolage (memes, viral videos, celebrities/politicians) is visually overwhelming and abstract; not a single image is able to stand out, yet each one aggressively competes for the viewer’s attention. Describing ‘Barbara Lee’ as ‘obvious,’ ‘grotesque’ and capturing the ‘abstract absurdity of modern humour,’ Ripps acknowledges the irony that his artwork contributes to the vicious cycle of clickbait as much as the material it criticises. In a world of numbers, even art is stripped of its value to transcend meaning beyond the ones and zeroes.
Hyperreality / Accelerationism
In Future Shock, Toffler observes that, rather than ‘resist or seek flight’ from accelerated technological change, some people ‘thrive on change, [they] crest its waves joyfully.’[74] Immersed in a hyperreal world of pervasive technology, post-truth politics, and the illusory spectacle of social media, one wonders whether the only logical response to the rapid and relentless digitalisation of social life is to adopt a philosophy of accelerationism, to accept that the dissolution of civilisation and the erosion of humanity wrought by capitalism and technological progress cannot and should not be resisted, but rather must be pushed faster and farther towards the insanity and anarchic violence that is its ultimate conclusion. As Reynolds explains, ‘the alternative to such realms of seclusion and info-sensory deprivation is to plunge deeper into digitalism, learn to surf ... the data-tsunami.’[75] First introduced by twentieth-century philosophers François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the concept of accelerationism was most notoriously explored in the 1990s by the British philosopher Nick Land, who wove together ideas from the occult, cybernetics, science fiction and poststructuralist philosophy into a heady, nightmarish vision of techno-capitalist acceleration. ‘Life is being phased-out into something new. And if we think this can be stopped we are even more stupid than we seem,’[76] warned Land in his 1992 essay Circuitries.
In some ways, the current political climate has given the impatient, intemperate, possibly revolutionary ideas of accelerationism a renewed relevance; Andy Beckett has cited the ‘ultra-capitalist, anti-government’ policies of Donald Trump as ‘the first mainstream manifestation of an accelerationist politics.’[77] In an era of fake news and post-truth politics, it seems that the binary concepts of the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual,’ if always problematic, have now lost total currency as a means for measuring value and authenticity in the digital era. ‘Hyperreality,’ a term coined by Jean Baudrillard in his 1981 philosophical treatise Simulacra and Simulation, theorizes that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, that human experience is a simulation of reality. The most recent manifestation of this phenomenon was arguably the 2019 Ukrainian presidential election, in which Volodymyr Zelenskiy, an actor and comedian with no political experience other than playing the role of president in a TV series, won a landslide victory. The eerie lack of discernable difference between the real-life Zelenskiy and his fictional persona[78] epitomises the public’s compliance with the new counterfeit reality, a ‘faith in fakes.[79] As Obama stated in 2016, the new political ecosystem ‘means everything is true and nothing is true.’[80]
Critics such as Harper and Reynolds have noted how certain recent electronic musics (sometimes labelled under the umbrella term ‘Internet music’) have responded to ideas surrounding digital mediation, namely the perceived degenerative effects of digital technology on culture or ‘humanity,’ with an aesthetic of ambivalence. Artists such as HDMIRROR, James Ferraro (also known as BEBETUNE$), Fatima Al Qadiri, Guy Akimoto, and members of the London-based PC Music label produce music that simultaneously embodies the fears critics have of a digitally mediated world (that it replaces human intimacy with hyperactivity, hyperkitsch and hyperreality), and responds to these anxieties in a partially positive way through satire and acceleration, embracing the impending techno-apocalypse through the pounding, relentlessly upbeat sounds of our own dehumanisation, a seductive ‘soundtrack to Land’s visions.’[81] These artists frequently play up to perceptions of pop’s kitsch gaudiness, campness and themes of romantic love, and do so within a digital frame, ‘infusing Internet use and digital connectivity with an intense libidinal charge.’[82] The eerie, deadpan, synthesized female voice from the opening track of Guy Akimoto’s BaeBae EP flirts with the listener from within a digitally mediated world: ‘Log me on, sign me out /Give me something to type about … Me and bae, bae and me / HDMI, USB.’ Instead of recoiling at the technologisation of the most intimate of human relationships, ‘BaeBae’ appears to embrace digital love. Surging forward at 165 bpm and twitching with stimulation and syncopation, incorporating everything from London rave to J-pop, Akimoto exploits the glittery, cutesy aesthetic of pop and accelerates its parameters into mercilessly maximalist territory, evoking a Ryder-Ripps-esque collage of glaring, high-contrast imagery and superficial pop culture ephemera glistening majestically (and somewhat unnervingly) in digital HD.
In Alone Together, Sherry Turkle raises concerns about the way in which genuine, organic social interactions become degraded through constant exposure to illusory meaningful exchanges on social media, since virtual communication (as opposed to real-time, face-to-face conversation) allows people to enhance, edit, retouch and delete any aspects of their online persona to their liking. Turkle summarises this phenomenon as the ‘Goldilocks Effect’ – Not too close. Not too far. Just right. – the compulsion to control where we put our attention and customise our lives and relationships.[83] In the song ‘Faceshopping,’ PC-Music affiliate SOPHIE contemplates the true meaning of identity with the motoric refrain: ‘My face is the front of shop / My face is the real shop front / My shop is the face I front / I’m real when I shop my face.’ ‘It’s about asking what’s an authentic way of presenting yourself,’ explains the Scottish producer. ‘Is it through the caricature you make of yourself online, through Instagram? Is that really a more honest way of expressing yourself?’[84] Turkle would argue that a digitally mediated expression of the self can only ever be a hollow, superficial rendering of one’s true identity. In the context of Internet music, however, the answer seems less clear-cut. Since much electronic music produced online is released either anomalously or under a pseudonym, conceptions of identity on the internet tend to be more fluid and negotiable than in everyday life. In the digital realm, people might find themselves more in tune with their projected ‘false’ identities, since online personas often function not as ‘fake’ stand-ins for the ‘real’ self but as the authentic versions themselves. To quote Baudrillard: ‘The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.’[85]
In ‘Faceshopping,’ the beats that accompany the seductive vocal mantra are pounding and relentless, evoking a dehumanised, industrial soundscape of factory machinery. Incorporating aspects of contemporary subcultural pop – techno, trance, rap, R&B – and driving them further into ‘futuristic, lurid and brutal sensual territory,’[86] ‘Faceshopping’ could pass as an extreme multimedia advertising campaign for cosmetics and stimulants aimed at young women, ‘the gruesome logical endpoint of a culture that pushes body supplementation and modification products and their ideologies well beyond the point of inhumanity.’[87] Indeed, a few years ago when Billboard asked SOPHIE what genre her music falls under, she responded ‘Advertising.’[88] Commenting on the parallels between art and advertising, media scholar Marshall McLuhan once argued that ‘the concern of the advertiser is to make an effect. Any painter or artist or musician sets out to create an effect. He sets a trap to catch somebody’s attention.’[89] Echoing this sentiment, SOPHIE has stated how she ‘think[s] all pop music should be about who can make the loudest, brightest thing.’[90] Owing to its immediacy and concise nature, mainstream pop is, in a sense, the maximalist medium par excellence: virtually every aspect of pop songs are tailored for maximal emotional impact, and producers such as SOPHIE are constantly ‘imagining how they could be further distilled, concentrated, intensified.’[91] It is not surprising that the terms that SOPHIE and PC Music founder A. G. Cook use to describe the strobing spectacles of their live shows could equally be applied to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty: ‘It’s completely overriding your cognitive process and becoming a directly cantered physical thing.’ (Compare this with Artaud’s desire to ‘arrive at the unknown through the disjunction of all the senses.’[92]).
Many of the SOPHIE’s songs (‘Faceshopping,’ ‘Ponyboy,’ ‘Lemonade’) feature glossy, high-pitched female voices that reflect the cute aesthetics of PC Music and its child-like and accelerated sentiments, appearing almost cyborg-like in their eerie deviance from the human norm. This ‘uncanny valley’ effect, seeming both inhuman and post-human, is often interpreted by critics of PC Music as a satirical acceleration of the purportedly dehumanising effects of the digital technologies manifest in pop music. Yet, rather than seeing this diagnosis of uncanniness as ‘primitive, degenerate and a regression from humanity,’[93] as Carr, Turkle and other writers would perhaps claim, Harper argues they might be better thought of as ‘manifestations of human difference … engaging constructively with changing forms of human expression, in the process expanding conceptions of human identity rather than undermining what are essentially reactionary notions of it.’[94] It should also be noted that perceptions of digital technology’s supposedly degenerative effects, its propensity for information overload, superficiality and artificiality, largely depend on the extent to which the user is accustomed to handling information digitally. In other words, while Turkle views digitally mediated representations of the self as synthetic and false, others, perhaps of a younger generation more accustomed to digital technology, might view these mediums unproblematically as authentic and sincere. As PC Music exponent Hannah Diamond herself says of her music, ‘even if it is a slightly amplified version of me and the things I’m interested in, it’s not falsified.’[95]
Conclusion: embracing the ‘turbulent sea of multiplicity’
In this essay, I have attempted to outline some of the key traits of ‘digital maximalism’ as a musical aesthetic, drawing from an eclectic range of recent works by contemporary composers and producers, and contextualising these musics in relation to a broader discourse on digital technology and its perceived degenerative effects. My aim was to demonstrate how various artists have approached concepts of digital mediation in their own unique ways, exploiting sonic excess and sensory overload for different philosophical purposes. For Andrew Norman, rapid disorientation and distraction represent oppressive structures of control, ‘crazy labyrinths’[96] from which the player and listener must seek flight. His symphonic narratives chart a process from a state of hyperactivity, chaos and confusion to one of calmness, clarity and introspection, empowering the performers through creative choices and soloistic opportunities, and restoring us, as Artaud put it, ‘to a state of deepened and keener perception.’[97] Ryoji Ikeda, in contrast, utilises extreme sonic registers and rapid, disorienting visual spectacles to simultaneously explore the limits of technology and the threshold of human perception. Beneath the austere, mathematical precision of his sound compositions lies a profound, almost mystical fascination with the sublime, a desire to simulate the infinite vastness nature of the universe through a maximalist exploration of minimalist sonic materials. The accelerationist music of SOPHIE and Guy Akimoto, on the other hand, reflects a more ambivalent relationship to the effects of technology on human consciousness, and the psychological and physiological stupefaction that their music elicits are perhaps characterised more by ‘a decidedly who-cares-where-we’re-headed-let’s-party-vibe,’[98] rather than any edifying, moralising mission to steer humanity away from the impending technological apocalypse. As Harper notes, ‘it’s the profound ambivalence of this potentially “accelerationist” art-pop that is its most constructive and provocative contribution.’ The music ‘asks us whether we accept or reject the image of the future, and indeed the present, that it conjures. It might make us feel powerless, bewildered and over-stimulated or it might leave us thrilled, blissful and entertained, and it’s at its cleverest when it can do both at the same time.’[99]
Earlier, I mentioned how the phenomenon of digital maximalism is both unique to contemporary life (due in part to the culturally omnivorous nature of its proponents) and also the latest in a long line of ‘maximalisms’ that stretch back to the turn of the twentieth century (and beyond). It also bears mentioning that the concept of ‘information overload’, like the term ‘maximalism,’ seems to be as old as time itself: in the 1st century AD, Seneca the Elder commented, that ‘the abundance of books is distraction.’[100] In 1255, the Dominican Vincent of Beauvais, also commented on the flood of information: ‘the multitude of books, the shortness of time and the slipperiness of memory.’[101] In his seventeenth-century text The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton complained of the ‘vast Chaos and confusion of books’[102] and the ‘trifles, rubbish and trash’[103] published each year. Commenting on the speed of transmission in the 1890s, the English physician Clifford Allbutt linked the ‘nervous maladies’ of ‘hysteria’ and ‘melancholy’ to ‘the whirl of the railway, the pelting of the telegrams.’[104] It’s clear, then, that digital technologies are hardly the first to induce anxieties about information overload and most likely won’t be the last. The question I posed at the beginning – whether the logic of technological progress in our current century entails, as Carr says, ‘a slow erosion of our humanness and our humanity’ – was always a rhetorical one. Rather than seek an answer to Carr’s question (assuming there even is one), I’m more interested in exploring why and how such attitudes emerge in the first place, and the rich and multifaceted ways these ideas become mirrored and manifest in products of culture and art.
If we accept for a moment, despite the abundance of historical data that suggests otherwise, that our age is indeed uniquely distracting, overwhelming, superficial and so on, that the cultural impact of digital media far outweighs the seismic shifts that previous technologies such as the printing press had on earlier societies, perhaps then we can understand the proliferation of recent maximalist art as resulting from a uniquely overwhelming and fragmented period in human history known as postmodernism. In this context, the maximalist desire for excess arguably stems from an anxiety that sits at the heart of a postmodern worldview that questions (or outright denies) the existence of a universal, stable reality. Since all claims to knowledge and all judgements of value are contingent or socially-conditioned in ‘the age of epistemological uncertainty,’ the only viable option for art that strives to remain relevant to the age is ‘to be the age itself.’[105] As Takayoshi Ishiwari states, ‘knowing that they can never know what is authentic and inauthentic, maximalist authors such as Thomas Pynchon and Roland Barthes attempt to include in their fiction everything belonging to that age. … because of this their novels are often encyclopaedic’[106] Seen in this light, perhaps the hyperkinetic chaos of maximalist music and the state of radical distraction and disorientation it induces in the listener aren’t simply designed to imitate the mind-scrambling, fragmented nature of contemporary life in the Internet age, but to equip us with the tools necessary to understand and make peace with the technologies that are ostensibly out to erode our humanity; to show us, as American playwright Richard Foreman puts it, ‘how at every moment, the world presents us with a composition within which a multitude of meanings and realities are available, and you are able to swim, lucid and self-contained, in that turbulent sea of multiplicity.’[107]
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[1] Doctorow, Cory, cited in Carr, 91.
[2] Powers, William, Hamlet’s Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age (New York: Harper Collins, 2010).
[3] Kelly, Conor M., ‘Depth in an Age of Digital Distraction: The Value of a Catholic College in Today’s World’ (Journal of Catholic Higher Education, 2015), 114.
[1] Ibid., 114.
[2] Ibid., 119.
[3] Ibid., 116.
[4] Toffler, Alvin, Future Shock (Random House, 1970), 311-15.
[5] Powers, 4.
[6] Powers, 216.
[7] Powers, 217.
[8] Reynolds, Simon, ‘Maximal Nation,’ Pitchfork (2011), https://pitchfork.com/features/article/8721-maximal-nation/. Accessed 1/6/19.
[9] Reynolds.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Garvey, Meaghan, ‘PC Music, Hipster Runoff and the Year of the Internet Hangover,’ Pitchfork (2015), https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/773-pc-music-hipster-runoff-and-the-year-of-the-internet-hangover/. Accessed 24/6/19.
[14] Reynolds.
[15] Cited in Reynolds.
[16] HDMIRROR, Bandcamp description, https://hdmirror.bandcamp.com. Accessed 27/5/19.
[17] Cited in Taruskin, Richard, Oxford History of Western Music: Music in the Early Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2006).
[18] Docherty, Brian, Twentieth-Century European Drama (Springer, 1993), 83.
[19] Levenson, Michael, The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 143.
[20] Jannarone, Kimberly, Artaud and His Doubles (University of Michigan Press, 2010), 89.
[21] Ibid., 92.
[22] Cited in Nelson, Maggie, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint Edition, 2012), 17.
[23] Ibid., 20.
[24] Peterson, Richard A. and Kern, Roger M., ‘Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore,’ American Sociological Review 61, no. 5 (1996)
[25] Cited in Robin, William, “A Scene Without a Name: Indie Classical and American New Music in the Twenty-First Century,” PhD diss., University of North Carolina (2016), 76.
[26] Peterson and Kern, cited in Robin, 75.
[27] Robin, 75.
[28] Ibid., 73.
[29] Reynolds.
[30] Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1991), 2.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Ibid., 1.
[33] Marx, Leo, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 28.
[34] Carr, 167.
[35] Ibid., 168.
[36] Marx, 29.
[37] ‘Biography’ from Norman’s website: http://andrewnormanmusic.com/biography. Accessed 31/5/19.
[38] Cited in Lanzilotti, Anne, ‘“Cut to a different world”: Andrew Norman,’ (Music and Literature, 2016), http://www.musicandliterature.org/features/2016/10/25/cut-to-a-different-world-andrew-norman. Accessed 31/5/19.
[39] ‘Proms 2018: pre-première questions with Andrew Norman’ (5:4, 2018), http://5against4.com/2018/07/23/proms-2018-pre-premiere-questions-with-andrew-norman/. Accessed 28/5/19.
[40] ‘Sustain (2018)’ from Norman’s website: http://andrewnormanmusic.com/biography. Accessed 31/5/19.
[41] Ibid.
[42] Carr, 1.
[43] ‘Play (2013, Rev. 2016)’ from Norman’s website: http://andrewnormanmusic.com/archives/220. Accessed 31/5/19.
[44] Ibid.
[45] Bey, Hakim, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Autonomedia, 1991).
[46] Nelson, 45.
[47] Paolo Virno, cited in Nelson, 45.
[48] Eliot, T.S., The Four Quartets, I. ‘Burnt Norton’ (1935)
[49] Carr, 213.
[50] Ibid.
[51] Ibid.
[52] Cited in Lanzilotti (2016)
[53] Olsen, Stefanie, ‘Google's Page urges scientists to market themselves,’ CNet (2007), https://www.cnet.com/news/googles-page-urges-scientists-to-market-themselves/. Accessed 5/6/19.
[54] For an example of Ikeda’s work, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omDK2Cm2mwo&t=57s&frags=pl%2Cwn.
[55] Ikeda, Ryoji, cited in Miller, Michael H., ‘Infinite Quest: Ryoji Ikeda Wants to Disappear,’ Observer (2011), https://observer.com/2011/05/infinite-quest-ryoji-ikeda-wants-to-disappear/. Accessed 3/6/19.
[56] Marsh, Peter, ‘Ryoji Ikeda Dataplex Review,’ BBC Music (2006), https://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/2dvr/. Accessed 3/6/19.
[57] Ibid.
[58] Ikeda, Ryoji, cited in Coomer, Martin, ‘Ryoji Ikeda interview: “Spectra is poised between past and present,”’ TimeOut London (2014), https://www.timeout.com/london/art/ryoji-ikeda-interview-spectra-is-poised-between-past-and-present. Accessed 28/5/19.
[59] Hodges, Max, ‘Ryoji Ikeda’s ‘+/- [the infinite between 0 and 1]’: An Interpretation,’ Medium (2016), https://medium.com/@maxhodges/ryoji-ikedas-the-infinite-between-0-and-1-an-interpretation-ae1c2f804840. Accessed 7/6/19.
[60] Cited in Hodges.
[61] de Mul, Jos, ‘The Technological Sublime,’ NextNature (2011), https://www.nextnature.net/2011/07/the-technological-sublime/. Accessed 7/6/19.
[62] Cited in de Mul.
[63] Toffler, Future Shock (Random House, 1970)
[64] Cited in Miller (2011).
[65] Ikeda, Ryoji, ‘Ryoji Ikeda | Supersymmetry’ interview with Kazunao Abe, https://special.ycam.jp/supersymmetry/en/interview/. Accessed 28/5/19.
[66] Ibid.
[67] ‘The Case for Abstraction | The Art Assignment | PBS Digital Studios,’ YouTube, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96hl5J47c3k. Accessed 5/6/19.
[68] Google ‘Overview’ (undated), https://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/search/howsearchworks/mission/. Accessed 5/6/19.
[69] Carr, 152.
[70] Ibid.
[71] Mayer, Marissa, ‘Google I/O '08 Keynote by Marissa Mayer,’ YouTube (2008), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x0cAzQ7PVs&frags=pl%2Cwn. Accessed 5/6/19.
[72] Carr, 82.
[73] Ripps, Ryder, cited in Gleeson, Bridget, ‘Ryder Ripps Takes on Our Clickbait Culture with 50,000 Tiny Images,’ Artsy (2016), https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-ryder-ripps-takes-on-our-clickbait-culture-with-50-000-tiny-images. Accessed 9/6/19.
[74] Ibid.
[75] Reynolds (2011).
[76] Land, Nick, cited in Harper (2012).
[77] Beckett, Andy, ‘Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in,’ The Guardian (2017). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/accelerationism-how-a-fringe-philosophy-predicted-the-future-we-live-in. Accessed 18/6/19.
[78] ‘Could this comedian be Ukraine's next president?’, Guardian News, YouTube (2019), https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=21&v=SGjKcManV9I. Accessed 29/5/19.
[79] Eco, Umberto, Il costume di casa (Bompiani, 1973).
[80] Remnick, David, ‘Obama Reckons with a Trump Presidency’ (The New Yorker, 2016), https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/28/obama-reckons-with-a-trump-presidency. Accessed 29/5/19.
[81] Ibid.
[82] Harper (2016).
[83] Turkle, Sherry, ‘Connected, but alone? | Sherry Turkle,’ YouTube (2012), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7Xr3AsBEK4&t=897s&frags=pl%2Cwn. Accessed 24/6/19.
[84] Cited in White, Ryan, ‘how sophie radically changed the music industry,’ i-D (2018), https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/xw7pj3/sophie-interview-2018. Accessed 24/6/19.
[85] Cited in Poster, Mark, Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings (Polity; 2nd edition, 2001).
[86] Harper, Adam, ‘”Distroid” – the muscular music of hi-DEF doom,’ Dummy Magazine (2012), https://www.dummymag.com/features/dist roid-gatekeeper-fatima-al-qadiri-adam-harper/, accessed on 24/5/19.
[87] Ibid.
[88] Cited in Lin, Yu-Cheng, ‘SOPHIE: A Beginner's Guide to a Hyperpop Mystery,’ Red Bull (2016), https://www.redbull.com/us-en/sophie-a-beginners-guide. Accessed 24/6/19.
[89] Cited in Hiebert, Paul, ‘Acute & Abstruse Things Marshall McLuhan said in Australia in 1977,’ McLuhan Galaxy (2013), https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/2013/06/18/acute-abstruse-things-marshall-mcluhan-said-in-australia-in-1977/. Accessed 24/6/19.
[90] Vozick-Levinson, Simon, ‘PC Music Are for Real: A. G. Cook and Sophie Talk Twisted Pop,’ Rolling Stone (2015), https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pc-music-are-for-real-a-g-cook-and-sophie-talk-twisted-pop-58119/. Accessed 24/6/19.
[91] Ibid.
[92] Beistegui, 77.
[93] Harper (2017), 95.
[94] Ibid., 96.
[95] Cragg., Michael, ‘Hannah Diamond is real’, The FADER (2016), http://www.thefader.com/2016/02/29/hannah-
diamond-interview. Accessed 24/6/19.
[96] Norman, ‘Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4: Concert Conversation with Andrew Norman and Carlos Kalmar’ (YouTube, 2018), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2R3RpN9NSys&frags=pl%2Cwn. Accessed 1/6/19.
[97] Bigsby, C. W. E., A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama: Volume 3, Beyond Broadway (Cambridge University Press, 1985), 83.
[98] Nelson, 51.
[99] Harper (2012).
[100] Cited in Doctorow, Cory, ‘Complaining about information overload in the time of Ecclesiastes,’ Boingboing (2010), https://boingboing.net/2010/11/28/complaining-about-in.html. Accessed 24/6/19.
[101] Cited in Blair, Ann, ‘Information Overload’s 2,300-Year-Old History,’ Harvard Business Review (2011), https://hbr.org/2011/03/information-overloads-2300-yea.html. Accessed 24/6/19.
[102] Cited in The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Prose, ed. Alan Rudrum, Joseph Black, Holly Faith Nelson (Broadview Press, 2001), 116.
[103] Ibid,. 115.
[104] Stokes, John, In the Nineties (University of Chicago, 1989), 13.
[105] Ishiwari, Takayoshi. ‘The Body That Speaks: Donald Barthelmeʹs The Dead Father as Installation’, unpublished Masterʹs thesis, p.1. Osaka University, 1996. Cited in ‘Maximalism’ (Wikipedia, accessed 1/6/19) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximalism#cite_note-3.
[106] Ibid.
[107] Foreman, cited in Nelson, 52.