Georgina Born
University of Oxford, Music and Anthropology, Faculty Member
It was suggested in Chapter 13 of this book that the normative principles of public service media (PSM) have become more rather than less relevant, have expanded and have gained a new urgency in the digital era. In what follows, a series... more
It was suggested in Chapter 13 of this book that the normative principles of public service media (PSM) have become more rather than less relevant, have expanded and have gained a new urgency in the digital era. In what follows, a series of propositions are advanced, focused on the ways that such principles fi nd new expression in digital conditions. If the proponents of neoliberal economic thinking argue that the digital economy is best served, and best understood, in terms of the dynamics of competition operating within free markets, then the oligopolistic tendencies that have
become pronounced in the last decade, manifest in the dominance of a few key digital intermediaries and in the rapid capacity to establish primacy in new digital markets, disprove such assumptions. This chapter therefore advances the need for public intervention in digital media markets on several levels, each of them important, each founded on and drawing legitimacy from the expanded normative principles set out in Chapter 13.
become pronounced in the last decade, manifest in the dominance of a few key digital intermediaries and in the rapid capacity to establish primacy in new digital markets, disprove such assumptions. This chapter therefore advances the need for public intervention in digital media markets on several levels, each of them important, each founded on and drawing legitimacy from the expanded normative principles set out in Chapter 13.
At the core of previous normative frameworks for public service broadcasting are four interrelated concepts: independence, universality, citizenship and quality. As yet, these norms have not evolved to meet the challenges posed by digital... more
At the core of previous normative frameworks for public service broadcasting are four interrelated concepts: independence, universality, citizenship and quality. As yet, these norms have not evolved to meet the challenges posed by digital platforms as well as the increasing cultural diversity and stubborn inequalities of modern Britain. The proposition in what follows is that the principles of public service media (PSM), as opposed to public service broadcasting (PSB), have not diminished but expanded in the digital era. This chapter explores these principles in relation to PSM as a whole, but is particularly focused on the crucial role in delivering public service played by the BBC and Channel 4 both now and in the future.
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... Basic tier channels have higher audiences but the rights to films are more expensive and they earn little (510 pence per subscriber) from the platform ... Sky had sewn up the UK market in first-run film rights for pay television by... more
... Basic tier channels have higher audiences but the rights to films are more expensive and they earn little (510 pence per subscriber) from the platform ... Sky had sewn up the UK market in first-run film rights for pay television by securing long-term output deals with all the major ...
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AFTERWORD: MUSIC POLICY, AESTHETIC AND SOCIAL DIFFERENCE1 Georgina Born CULTURE, POLICY, AND THE POLITICAL While her son Sacha, a pallid 10-year-old, gapes at Tom and Jerry on cable, [Galina] Kuznetsova, carefully made up for an evening... more
AFTERWORD: MUSIC POLICY, AESTHETIC AND SOCIAL DIFFERENCE1 Georgina Born CULTURE, POLICY, AND THE POLITICAL While her son Sacha, a pallid 10-year-old, gapes at Tom and Jerry on cable, [Galina] Kuznetsova, carefully made up for an evening in front ...
Research Interests: Sociology and Aesthetics
Research Interests: Aesthetics and Art
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Digital ethnography has a double meaning, referring both to the ethnographic study of digital cultures and to the development of digital methodologies to enhance anthropological, ethnographic and related interdisciplinary research. In... more
Digital ethnography has a double meaning, referring both to the ethnographic study of digital cultures and to the development of digital methodologies to enhance anthropological, ethnographic and related interdisciplinary research. In this paper we combine the two. We offer a critical and reflexive introduction to novel internet-based methodologies that complement offline ethnographic research. Our aim is to show the powers of such methodologies and how they can be used to supplement other sources of ethnographic insight. The chapter’s ethnographic focus is on two digital music cultures, both of which make significant use of the internet: Vaporwave, a contemporary genre, and Microsound, an established and long-standing one. By comparing the two genres, and analysing their online practices, we show how they represent distinctive moments in the evolution of the internet as a digital-cultural medium. We therefore contend that digital methodologies oriented to our actors’ uses of the internet must be attuned to its cultural and historical variation: to the internet itself as a cultural form, and its changing contributions to such digital-music assemblages. Methodologically, we adapt tools developed previously for Actor Network Theory: the issue crawler software (http://www.govcom.org/Issuecrawler_instructions.htm). Brought to digital music genres, these tools analyse the exchange of hyperlinks amongst actors online, mapping, visualising and making available for further analysis relations among some of the many entities––labels, platforms, venues, festivals, funding bodies, distributors, critics, bloggers, fans, co-artists, allies––that mediate, and are mobilised by, such genres. Coupled with analysis of the two genres’ offline social and cultural formations, and supported by qualitative insights from genre theory and media aesthetics, such network visualisations offer ways of significantly deepening the analysis of genres with online emanations. Yet, importantly, adequate interpretation of the network visualisations demand that they are combined them with other sources of ethnographic knowledge. Use of these tools, combined with the methodological principles we set out, can be transposed, we contend, into many spheres of ethnographic enquiry where cultural scenes and practices combine offline and online manifestations. At the outset, we analyse the distinctive ways in which uses of the internet enter into the aesthetic and communicative practices of Vaporwave and Microsound. We proceed to analyse the temporality of these practices––including the temporality of the web; through the case of Microsound, we trace the beginnings of the migration of electronic music cultures online in the mid-late 1990s, and through Vaporwave, we examine very current, transmedial aesthetic uses of the internet. Together, the two demonstrate how the web is employed, with various levels of emphasis, in several ways: 1) to circulate music in the form of text, recordings, and objects; 2) to cultivate, publicise and distribute knowledge and facilitate discussion, via blogs, mailing lists and fora; 3) to accumulate, and accelerate the accumulation of, cultural capital through the creation and exchange of symbolic, semiotic and material links; and 4) as an expressive and aesthetic medium, part of a genre’s larger transmedial aesthetic assemblage. Indeed, in the case of Vaporwave, the internet acts as a rudimentary content creator, providing––in the guise of recycled web content––the substantive material through which the music is realised. Our comparative analysis of Microsound and Vaporwave affords insights into the historicity of the web, showing how online communities and digitally-native practices have developed from ‘wide’, open, and often anonymous social networks to more ‘local’ and intimate communities that, in their small scale, seek to mimic or replicate ‘offline’, co-present musical socialities. In the case of Vaporwave, this historicity enters into the very aesthetics of the genre, as artists and other actors engage in knowing, postmodern play with the signifiers of the early days of web 2.0.
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a broad range of expectations of the courtroom work group, with some of these expectations seemingly beyond the purview of the court. If the young person successfully completes probation after being awarded youthful offender status, his... more
a broad range of expectations of the courtroom work group, with some of these expectations seemingly beyond the purview of the court. If the young person successfully completes probation after being awarded youthful offender status, his record is sealed and he need not report his transgression on job applications. Ironically, it is in acting responsibly (as defined by the court), that young people are able to earn back their youthful designation. In spite of young people’s involvement with the MYP lasting much longer than other Parts in New York (17.2 months versus 9.4 months on average, citywide) and their higher levels of involvement with alternative programs, JOs in the MYP are less likely to earn youth offender status than JOs in other jurisdictions. Barrett’s discussion of the strategic use of bail is also revealing. The judge’s decision to detain a young person is either preventive (i.e., to minimize the possibility that a young person would be rearrested and jeopardize his potential to earn youthful offender status), punitive (i.e., to punish him for not following through on the court’s wishes, such as abiding by a curfew), or conciliatory (i.e., to appease a district attorney who is pushing for jail time.) Like delays, bail decisions reflect judicial discretion—this discretion includes considerations beyond those typically accepted as appropriate by the legal community. In addition to illustrating the use of discretion, Barrett’s discussion of bail illustrates the importance of the courtroom workgroup—at least some courtroom decisions have as much to do with conforming to workgroup expectations as they do with serving the needs of the defendants. During many of their interactions with the judge, young people are treated with parental or paternalistic concern. A considerable amount of the judge’s time is spent lecturing, encouraging, or admonishing the young people on his dockets. In addition, the court often tries to involve parents, though it is not legally required to do so. Courtroom personnel recognize that parental support is instrumental to the legal success of defendants; defendants rely on adults for transportation and housing, as well as for financial and emotional support. Not all defendants receive such support; they face homelessness, abuse, victimization, and more. Some young people’s lives are further complicated by their involvement with multiple state agencies beyond the MYP, including family court and child welfare services. Though defendants in the MYP are adults according to the law, the reality is that they occupy a blurred place between juvenile and adult. Describing how the judge negotiates within, and sometimes takes advantage of, this fuzzy place is Barrett’s fundamental contribution. As she rightly notes, whether or not the MYP is successful is a matter of debate; drawing such conclusions depends on what considerations are prioritized (e.g., costs, recidivism rates, defendant satisfaction, etc.) and the availability of quality data. Perhaps the most powerful conclusion about the MYP is that made by the judge who created it: the mandatory model of trying young people as adults should be abandoned for a discretionary transfer model. Such a model better reflects both empirical patterns in youthful offending—most young people ‘‘age out’’ of offending—and broad-based support from the public and the legal community for rehabilitative programs for juveniles. Until a discretionary model is implemented, works like Barrett’s help to reveal how legal actors attempt to ‘‘cultivate an active, rehabilitative justice in the age of retribution’’ (p. 20).
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Buku ini mengintegrasikan penelitian tentang musikologi dan kajian tentang bunyi/suara dalam musik, dan bunyi/suara sebagai mediasi kehidupan sehari-hari. Bab diskusi musik dan suara dalam hubungannya dengan genre yang berbeda, teknologi... more
Buku ini mengintegrasikan penelitian tentang musikologi dan kajian tentang bunyi/suara dalam musik, dan bunyi/suara sebagai mediasi kehidupan sehari-hari. Bab diskusi musik dan suara dalam hubungannya dengan genre yang berbeda, teknologi dan pengaturan, termasuk seni instalasi, rekaman musik populer, kantor dan rumah sakit, dan terapi musik. Buku ini menawarkan sebuah perpektif global yang baru tentang bagaimana musik dan bunyi/suara dan transformasinya dapat mengubah pengalaman yang bersifat pribadi maupun kelompok
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The authors examine the future of public service broadcasting in the context of current debates about, and commercial pressures on, the BBC. They describe the European Community constraints on public service broadcasting and the needfor a... more
The authors examine the future of public service broadcasting in the context of current debates about, and commercial pressures on, the BBC. They describe the European Community constraints on public service broadcasting and the needfor a clearer definition of such broadcasting, ...
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Abstract The BBC is an exemplary institution in the government of culture. In the context of the neo-liberalism of the 1990s it became also a key experimental site for the development of a new culture of government, one in which notions... more
Abstract The BBC is an exemplary institution in the government of culture. In the context of the neo-liberalism of the 1990s it became also a key experimental site for the development of a new culture of government, one in which notions of markets, efficiency, accountability and ...
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IN RECENT YEARS several writers have pursued the methodological similarities between the practices of ethnography and of psychoanalysis. They stress the use of concepts of transference and countertransference for understanding the... more
IN RECENT YEARS several writers have pursued the methodological similarities between the practices of ethnography and of psychoanalysis. They stress the use of concepts of transference and countertransference for understanding the experience of fieldwork and for analyzing ...
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What would contemporary music scholarship look like if it was no longer imprinted with the disciplinary assumptions, boundaries and divisions inherited from the last century? This article proposes that a generative model for future music... more
What would contemporary music scholarship look like if it was no longer imprinted with the disciplinary assumptions, boundaries and divisions inherited from the last century? This article proposes that a generative model for future music studies would take the form of a relational musicology. The model is drawn from the author's work; but signs of an incipient relational musicology are found scattered across recent research in musicology, ethnomusicology, and jazz and popular music studies. In support of such a development, the article calls for a reconfiguration of the boundaries between the subdisciplines of music study – notably musicology, ethnomusicology, music sociology and popular music studies – so as to render problematic the music/social opposition and achieve a new interdisciplinary settlement, one that launches the study of music onto new epistemological and ontological terrain. In proposing this direction, the article points to the limits of the vision of interdisci...
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This article sets out new methodological principles for the sociology of art, a sub-discipline that it seeks to broaden conceptually by shifting the ground from art to cultural production. This shift suggests the utility of overcoming the... more
This article sets out new methodological principles for the sociology of art, a sub-discipline that it seeks to broaden conceptually by shifting the ground from art to cultural production. This shift suggests the utility of overcoming the boundaries that demarcate the sociology of art from adjacent fields, augmenting the sociological repertoire with reference to anthropology, cultural and media studies, art and cultural history, and the music disciplines. At the same time the article proposes that an explanatory theory of cultural production requires reinvention in relation to five key themes: aesthetics and the cultural object; agency and subjectivity; the place of institutions; history, temporality and change; and problems of value and judgement. The first half of the article approaches these issues through a sustained critique of Bourdieu. It proceeds through an exposition of generative research from contemporary anthropology, including the work of Alfred Gell, Christopher Pinney...
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One of the most sustained criticisms of Bourdieu’s work is its poverty with respect to theorizing time, change, and history. In this light, this article traces out a series of novel paths in the analysis of temporality and history in... more
One of the most sustained criticisms of Bourdieu’s work is its poverty with respect to theorizing time, change, and history. In this light, this article traces out a series of novel paths in the analysis of temporality and history in relation to cultural production, informed by recent work in anthropology, social theory, and (less so) art history. The challenge of developing new perspectives on such matters does not arise solely from critiques of Bourdieu, but from wider recognition across the humanities of the problematic nature of prevailing forms of historicism, contextualization, and periodization. Several linked departures are proposed: the need to analyze the multiplicity of time in cultural production; the contributions of the art or cultural object––as a nonhuman actor––to the production of time in not one but several dimensions of temporality; and the importance of integrating such thinking into the theorization of history. Advancing beyond philosophical process theory, yet...
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In this paper I look critically at two recent rereadmgs of Adorno which are interesting because they represent two possible permutations in the current reconsideration of his thought. They are papers by Thomas Y. Levin and John Caughie. 1... more
In this paper I look critically at two recent rereadmgs of Adorno which are interesting because they represent two possible permutations in the current reconsideration of his thought. They are papers by Thomas Y. Levin and John Caughie. 1 Both involve attempts to derive from ...
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This special issue examines the politics of gender in relation to higher education, creative practices and historical processes in electronic music, computer music and sound art. The starting point is a summary of research findings on the... more
This special issue examines the politics of gender in relation to higher education, creative practices and historical processes in electronic music, computer music and sound art. The starting point is a summary of research findings on the student demographics associated with the burgeoning of music technology (MT) undergraduate degrees in Britain since the mid-1990s. The findings show a clear bifurcation: the demographics of students taking British MT degrees, in comparison to traditional music degrees and the national average, are overwhelmingly male, from less advantaged social backgrounds, and slightly more ethnically diverse. At issue is the emergence of a highly (male) gendered digital music field. The special issue sets these findings into dialogue with papers by practitioners and scholars concerned with gender in relation to educational, creative and historical processes. Questions addressed include: What steps might be taken to redress gender inequalities in education, and i...
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Challenges of diversity are being raised around the world, for example in response to #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. Against this background, this article, adapted from a keynote lecture to the 20th ISMIR conference, asks how MIR can... more
Challenges of diversity are being raised around the world, for example in response to #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. Against this background, this article, adapted from a keynote lecture to the 20th ISMIR conference, asks how MIR can refresh itself and its endeavours, scholarly and real world, by addressing diversity. It is written by an outsider, yet one who, as a music anthropologist, is intensely concerned with MIR and its influence. The focus is on elaborating auto-critiques that have emerged within the MIR community: social, cultural, epistemological and ethical matters to do with the diversity of the profession, of the music with which MIR engages, and of the kinds of knowledge produced. One theme is interdisciplinarity: how MIR would gain from closer dialogues with contemporary musicology, music anthropology and sociology. The article also considers how the ‘refresh’ might address MIR’s pursuit of research oriented to technological innovation, often linked to the drive for ec...
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The chapter opens by reviewing recent directions in analyzing the creative process in music: research focused on the performer as creative actor, the contributions of nonhuman actors, the conditions within which the composer works, and... more
The chapter opens by reviewing recent directions in analyzing the creative process in music: research focused on the performer as creative actor, the contributions of nonhuman actors, the conditions within which the composer works, and the creative process as underdetermined and emergent. The chapter assesses the explanatory power of these directions and the extent to which they can be integrated, arguing that such approaches are necessary but not sufficient. Instead, the chapter proposes the need for anti-reductionist, explanatory accounts that probe the historicity of the creative process, the temporalities in which it is entangled, and how these relate to both the complexities of aesthetic identification and disidentification and the institutional conditions within which creativity proceeds—the last two issues highlighted by theories of genre. Thinking of the creative process in music in relation to genre highlights its profoundly social and temporal nature and how it cannot be r...
How is the internet transforming musical practices? In this article, through a study of five prominent popular and crossover music genres spanning the period from the late 1990s to the present, we examine how the internet has augmented... more
How is the internet transforming musical practices? In this article, through a study of five prominent popular and crossover music genres spanning the period from the late 1990s to the present, we examine how the internet has augmented the creative, aesthetic, communicative and social dimensions of music. Analysing the internet-based practices associated with these genres poses methodological and theoretical challenges. It requires new research tools attentive to the online practices involved in their creation and reception. To this end we adapt the Issue Crawler software, an established digital method that analyses networks of hyperlinking on the worldwide web. In addition, it requires a theoretical framework that can respond to music's profuse mediations in the digital environment. We propose that a version of genre theory offers such a framework. The paper concludes by reflecting on the implications of our analysis for theorising music and place and for historical periodization after the internet.
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How is the internet transforming musical practices? In this article, through a study of five prominent popular and crossover music genres spanning the period from the late 1990s to the present, we examine how the internet has augmented... more
How is the internet transforming musical practices? In this article, through a study of five prominent popular and crossover music genres spanning the period from the late 1990s to the present, we examine how the internet has augmented the creative, aesthetic, communicative and social dimensions of music. Analysing the internet-based practices associated with these genres poses methodological and theoretical challenges. It requires new research tools attentive to the online practices involved in their creation and reception. To this end we adapt the Issue Crawler software, an established digital method that analyses networks of hyperlinking on the worldwide web. In addition, it requires a theoretical framework that can respond to music's profuse mediations in the digital environment. We propose that a version of genre theory offers such a framework. The paper concludes by reflecting on the implications of our analysis for theorising music and place and for historical periodizati...
Abstract This paper outlines the rise during the 1990s of numerous audit and accountability processes within the BBC. It draws on an ethnographic study of the BBC carried out in the later 1990s, which generated an analysis of the internal... more
Abstract This paper outlines the rise during the 1990s of numerous audit and accountability processes within the BBC. It draws on an ethnographic study of the BBC carried out in the later 1990s, which generated an analysis of the internal impact of these changes on the corporation. The paper frames this development within the larger political and governmental contexts to which it was a response. At the same time it notes the absence in this period of significant progress on the part of the BBC in reforming its governance arrangements, a source of continuing criticism of the corporation, and one cause of the voracious growth of auditing. The analysis stresses the visible performance of accountability as an attempted means of strengthening the BBC’s legitimation. It is argued that the processes brought a kind of institutionalised reflexivity to the corporation. At the same time audit and accountability had certain deleterious effects, stoking the growth of tiers of new management, which became an onerous burden on the production arms of the BBC and eroded their creative capacities. The paper therefore questions the utility of the kind and the degree of accountability and audit processes to which the BBC has been subject. It points to an irony: while the implementation of these policies responded to governmental pressures, the BBC’s elaborate performance of accountability and audit has done little to defend it against further encroachment by government in the form of accelerating reviews of its services and delivery.
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ABSTRACTThis paper outlines an approach to listening drawn from the anthropology and sociology of music, arguing that there is a pressing need for comparative empirical studies of listening. I suggest that the terms of the discussion... more
ABSTRACTThis paper outlines an approach to listening drawn from the anthropology and sociology of music, arguing that there is a pressing need for comparative empirical studies of listening. I suggest that the terms of the discussion should shift from listening to the broader category of musical experience, in this way allowing questions of the encultured, affective, corporeal and located nature of musical experience to arise in a stronger way than hitherto. I propose a focus on the relations between musical object and listening subject, where this entails analysis of the social and historical conditions that bear on listening, and of the changing types of subjectivity brought to music. The point is that neither these conditions, nor the forms of music's mediation, nor the relations between musical object and subject can be fully known in advance. I sketch three perspectives from anthropology and sociology that indicate the kinds of insight offered by empirical research which takes listening-as-musical-experience, and the situated, relational analysis of musical subjects and objects, as its focus.
Music technology undergraduate degree programmes are a relatively new phenomenon in British higher education, situated at the intersection of music, digital technologies, and sound art. Such degrees have exploded in popularity over the... more
Music technology undergraduate degree programmes are a relatively new phenomenon in British higher education, situated at the intersection of music, digital technologies, and sound art. Such degrees have exploded in popularity over the past fifteen years. Yet the social and cultural ramifications of this development have not yet been analysed. In looking comparatively at the demographics of both traditional music and music technology degrees, we highlight a striking bifurcation: traditional music degrees draw students with higher social class profiles than the British national averages, while their gender profile matches the wider student population; music technology degrees, by contrast, are overwhelmingly male and lower in terms of social class profile. We set these findings into analytical dialogue with wider historical processes, offering divergent interpretations of our findings in relation to a series of musical, technological, educational, social, political, and cultural-inst...
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Music technology undergraduate degree programmes are a relatively new phenomenon in British higher education, situated at the intersection of music, digital technologies, and sound art. Such degrees have exploded in popularity over the... more
Music technology undergraduate degree programmes are a relatively new phenomenon in British higher education, situated at the intersection of music, digital technologies, and sound art. Such degrees have exploded in popularity over the past fifteen years. Yet the social and cultural ramifications of this development have not yet been analysed. In looking comparatively at the demographics of both traditional music and music technology degrees, we highlight a striking bifurcation: traditional music degrees draw students with higher social class profiles than the British national averages, while their gender profile matches the wider student population; music technology degrees, by contrast, are overwhelmingly male and lower in terms of social class profile. We set these findings into analytical dialogue with wider historical processes, offering divergent interpretations of our findings in relation to a series of musical, technological, educational, social, political, and cultural-inst...
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... HAVE to open by asking, reflexively, what register I should use for this review. Let me be frank: Susan McClary is a friend (not a close one); and for any woman working on the broader cultural theorisation of music today, she is an... more
... HAVE to open by asking, reflexively, what register I should use for this review. Let me be frank: Susan McClary is a friend (not a close one); and for any woman working on the broader cultural theorisation of music today, she is an extremely helpful and necessary presence. ...
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How does music materialize identities? This article argues that music is instructive in conceptualizing the materialization of identity because it opens up new perspectives on issues of materiality, mediation and affect. These... more
How does music materialize identities? This article argues that music is instructive in conceptualizing the materialization of identity because it opens up new perspectives on issues of materiality, mediation and affect. These perspectives are intimately related in turn to music’s plural socialities, which necessitate a novel approach to theorizing the social. Music, it is proposed, demands an analytics that encompasses four planes of social mediation; while these socialities, with other forms of music’s mediation, together produce a constellation of mediations – an assemblage. All four planes of social mediation enter into the musical assemblage: the first two amount to socialities engendered by musical practice and experience; the last two amount to social and institutional conditions that afford certain kinds of musical practice. The four are irreducible to one another and are articulated in contingent ways through relations of synergy, affordance, conditioning or causality. By a...
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... HAVE to open by asking, reflexively, what register I should use for this review. Let me be frank: Susan McClary is a friend (not a close one); and for any woman working on the broader cultural theorisation of music today, she is an... more
... HAVE to open by asking, reflexively, what register I should use for this review. Let me be frank: Susan McClary is a friend (not a close one); and for any woman working on the broader cultural theorisation of music today, she is an extremely helpful and necessary presence. ...
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This article develops a theoretical analysis of music and mediation, building on the work of Theodor Adorno, Tia DeNora and Antoine Hennion. It begins by suggesting that Lydia Goehr's account of the work concept requires such a... more
This article develops a theoretical analysis of music and mediation, building on the work of Theodor Adorno, Tia DeNora and Antoine Hennion. It begins by suggesting that Lydia Goehr's account of the work concept requires such a perspective. Drawing on Alfred Gell's ...
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Digital ethnography has a double meaning, referring both to the ethnographic study of digital cultures and to the development of digital methodologies to enhance anthropological, ethnographic and related interdisciplinary research. In... more
Digital ethnography has a double meaning, referring both to the ethnographic study of digital cultures and to the development of digital methodologies to enhance anthropological, ethnographic and related interdisciplinary research. In this paper we combine the two. We offer a critical and reflexive introduction to novel internet-based methodologies that complement offline ethnographic research. Our aim is to show the powers of such methodologies and how they can be used to supplement other sources of ethnographic insight. The chapter’s ethnographic focus is on two digital music cultures, both of which make significant use of the internet: Vaporwave, a contemporary genre, and Microsound, an established and long-standing one. By comparing the two genres, and analysing their online practices, we show how they represent distinctive moments in the evolution of the internet as a digital-cultural medium. We therefore contend that digital methodologies oriented to our actors’ uses of the internet must be attuned to its cultural and historical variation: to the internet itself as a cultural form, and its changing contributions to such digital-music assemblages.
Methodologically, we adapt tools developed previously for Actor Network Theory: the issue crawler software (http://www.govcom.org/Issuecrawler_instructions.htm). Brought to digital music genres, these tools analyse the exchange of hyperlinks amongst actors online, mapping, visualising and making available for further analysis relations among some of the many entities––labels, platforms, venues, festivals, funding bodies, distributors, critics, bloggers, fans, co-artists, allies––that mediate, and are mobilised by, such genres. Coupled with analysis of the two genres’ offline social and cultural formations, and supported by qualitative insights from genre theory and media aesthetics, such network visualisations offer ways of significantly deepening the analysis of genres with online emanations. Yet, importantly, adequate interpretation of the network visualisations demand that they are combined them with other sources of ethnographic knowledge. Use of these tools, combined with the methodological principles we set out, can be transposed, we contend, into many spheres of ethnographic enquiry where cultural scenes and practices combine offline and online manifestations.
At the outset, we analyse the distinctive ways in which uses of the internet enter into the aesthetic and communicative practices of Vaporwave and Microsound. We proceed to analyse the temporality of these practices––including the temporality of the web; through the case of Microsound, we trace the beginnings of the migration of electronic music cultures online in the mid-late 1990s, and through Vaporwave, we examine very current, transmedial aesthetic uses of the internet. Together, the two demonstrate how the web is employed, with various levels of emphasis, in several ways: 1) to circulate music in the form of text, recordings, and objects; 2) to cultivate, publicise and distribute knowledge and facilitate discussion, via blogs, mailing lists and fora; 3) to accumulate, and accelerate the accumulation of, cultural capital through the creation and exchange of symbolic, semiotic and material links; and 4) as an expressive and aesthetic medium, part of a genre’s larger transmedial aesthetic assemblage. Indeed, in the case of Vaporwave, the internet acts as a rudimentary content creator, providing––in the guise of recycled web content––the substantive material through which the music is realised. Our comparative analysis of Microsound and Vaporwave affords insights into the historicity of the web, showing how online communities and digitally-native practices have developed from ‘wide’, open, and often anonymous social networks to more ‘local’ and intimate communities that, in their small scale, seek to mimic or replicate ‘offline’, co-present musical socialities. In the case of Vaporwave, this historicity enters into the very aesthetics of the genre, as artists and other actors engage in knowing, postmodern play with the signifiers of the early days of web 2.0.
Methodologically, we adapt tools developed previously for Actor Network Theory: the issue crawler software (http://www.govcom.org/Issuecrawler_instructions.htm). Brought to digital music genres, these tools analyse the exchange of hyperlinks amongst actors online, mapping, visualising and making available for further analysis relations among some of the many entities––labels, platforms, venues, festivals, funding bodies, distributors, critics, bloggers, fans, co-artists, allies––that mediate, and are mobilised by, such genres. Coupled with analysis of the two genres’ offline social and cultural formations, and supported by qualitative insights from genre theory and media aesthetics, such network visualisations offer ways of significantly deepening the analysis of genres with online emanations. Yet, importantly, adequate interpretation of the network visualisations demand that they are combined them with other sources of ethnographic knowledge. Use of these tools, combined with the methodological principles we set out, can be transposed, we contend, into many spheres of ethnographic enquiry where cultural scenes and practices combine offline and online manifestations.
At the outset, we analyse the distinctive ways in which uses of the internet enter into the aesthetic and communicative practices of Vaporwave and Microsound. We proceed to analyse the temporality of these practices––including the temporality of the web; through the case of Microsound, we trace the beginnings of the migration of electronic music cultures online in the mid-late 1990s, and through Vaporwave, we examine very current, transmedial aesthetic uses of the internet. Together, the two demonstrate how the web is employed, with various levels of emphasis, in several ways: 1) to circulate music in the form of text, recordings, and objects; 2) to cultivate, publicise and distribute knowledge and facilitate discussion, via blogs, mailing lists and fora; 3) to accumulate, and accelerate the accumulation of, cultural capital through the creation and exchange of symbolic, semiotic and material links; and 4) as an expressive and aesthetic medium, part of a genre’s larger transmedial aesthetic assemblage. Indeed, in the case of Vaporwave, the internet acts as a rudimentary content creator, providing––in the guise of recycled web content––the substantive material through which the music is realised. Our comparative analysis of Microsound and Vaporwave affords insights into the historicity of the web, showing how online communities and digitally-native practices have developed from ‘wide’, open, and often anonymous social networks to more ‘local’ and intimate communities that, in their small scale, seek to mimic or replicate ‘offline’, co-present musical socialities. In the case of Vaporwave, this historicity enters into the very aesthetics of the genre, as artists and other actors engage in knowing, postmodern play with the signifiers of the early days of web 2.0.
Research Interests:
Pre-proofed final draft of introduction to edited book
Research Interests:
How is time configured in processes of artistic and cultural production? And what does this tell us about ideas of history, tradition, and imagination? This panel invites papers that theorise the multiple temporalities of creative... more
How is time configured in processes of artistic and cultural production? And what does this tell us about ideas of history, tradition, and imagination? This panel invites papers that theorise the multiple temporalities of creative practices across the arts, music, and cultural production.
From the project temporalities of freelance artistic labour, to the microsocial temporalities of performance, improvisation or studio practices, to the longue durée of cultural heritage traditions, variable forms of time and temporality are evoked and produced in processes of cultural production. Drawing on diverse ethnographic contexts, this panel expands on anthropological theorisations of time and transformation by drawing on fieldwork exploring the temporalities of artistic, musical, and cultural processes. We wish to highlight the need to analyse the multiplicity of conceptions and enactments of time in cultural processes, taking seriously the contributions of the arts and music to the production and theorization of time. Art and music have a dual quality: they are situated within ongoing historical processes, but they also produce time in diverse ways. Rather than dwelling on analyses of particular artistic practices and their ephemerality, or on conceptions of heritage and deep time, we aim to highlight how the study of multiple temporalities in artistic and cultural production can inform our understanding of history, tradition, and imagination more generally and feed back into core discussions in the anthropology of time and cultural history. We invite papers from any ethnographic context to address the following questions raised by theme 4 (transformation and time): How does time figure in imaginative and artistic processes? How are pasts and futures articulated through material and aesthetic practices? How are institutions involved in canonizing the past, preserving the present or promoting change? How can aesthetics be thought anew in relation to temporal processes?
Propose a paper: https://tinyurl.com/y9qt5nvs
From the project temporalities of freelance artistic labour, to the microsocial temporalities of performance, improvisation or studio practices, to the longue durée of cultural heritage traditions, variable forms of time and temporality are evoked and produced in processes of cultural production. Drawing on diverse ethnographic contexts, this panel expands on anthropological theorisations of time and transformation by drawing on fieldwork exploring the temporalities of artistic, musical, and cultural processes. We wish to highlight the need to analyse the multiplicity of conceptions and enactments of time in cultural processes, taking seriously the contributions of the arts and music to the production and theorization of time. Art and music have a dual quality: they are situated within ongoing historical processes, but they also produce time in diverse ways. Rather than dwelling on analyses of particular artistic practices and their ephemerality, or on conceptions of heritage and deep time, we aim to highlight how the study of multiple temporalities in artistic and cultural production can inform our understanding of history, tradition, and imagination more generally and feed back into core discussions in the anthropology of time and cultural history. We invite papers from any ethnographic context to address the following questions raised by theme 4 (transformation and time): How does time figure in imaginative and artistic processes? How are pasts and futures articulated through material and aesthetic practices? How are institutions involved in canonizing the past, preserving the present or promoting change? How can aesthetics be thought anew in relation to temporal processes?
Propose a paper: https://tinyurl.com/y9qt5nvs