On Sound Unsound 3 of 8

Okay, so third seminar on sound unsound today with Steve Goodman. I'm very happy to have you here. And Steve Goodman is an artist, curator, writer and electronic musician. His book, Sonic Warfare, Sound of Affect and the Ecology of Fear, MIT Press in 2009. In 2019, as a member of Audent, he co-edited Unsound on Dead, published on Ergonomic Press, which has the inspiration for this course. So thank you for publishing that.

His sound installations have been installed at Tate Modern, the Barbican and Arabite Gallery in London, CAC in Shanghai and more. In 2004, he set up the Hyperdub and has released three albums, numerous mix seasons. Goodman has also been lecturing a lot, but And it's quite a rarity in the academic scene that we have you here today. So we are very grateful that, of course, as well. Today's lecture will be a kind of retake on the concept of audio virology that he

introduced in sonic warfare and now may be understood differently in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic. There will be some sound examples or video we'll watch. Consider using headphones for that one. After a lecture, which will be around an hour, including the video, we'll have the discussion, which is based on student presentations of 10 minutes each by James, Kara, and Vincent. And then Martina, Alvin, Zenobio, and Joey will be the risk. And by that, I will let you have the word, Steve.

Is there any way we can turn? Is anyone else here that little bleep when somebody joins? Yes. I don't know. Can we turn it off? Already infected my brain. Yeah. Good question. OK, maybe it runs here and I'll just crack on. Yeah? Yeah, I'm actually not sure how to turn that one off. OK. I'm moving the preferences. Yeah. OK. Thanks, Jacob. So just quickly to give you an overview of what we're going to do

to do for the next few hours. I just want to give a brief introduction to some of the themes we're going to be discussing. Then I'm going to show the video, which is really a bit of a, it's kind of an update to some of the ideas that were in the Sonic Warfare book, and a kind of quick 25 minute tour through some of the themes. And then afterwards we'll come back to just provide I think I want to talk a little bit about this idea of memetics because it's such a such a fascinating zone of thinking about cultural viruses because it's been relentlessly

critiqued and at the same time irrelevant of how trashed it's become within an academic context it's assumed a life of its own because of the idea of the meme, which has become part of our existence in social media networks and so on. So the kind of hyperstitional dimension to the idea of the meme that I want to come back to think about. And then we'll hand over to you to do these presentations and then hopefully there'll be some time at the end for a more open ended discussion about some of these themes. Okay, well just to go over what you've been given briefly.

So the basic idea of this session is to put in the context of the global pandemic, which we're all living through just now, some of these ideas that I brought together loosely under this umbrella term audio virology. It's a very loose collection of ideas, and so part of what we'll do is try and bring out some of the themes that connect all of these phenomena and important issues that we need to distinguish between some of these phenomena. As I said, one of the key sources for this idea of audio virology is the idea of the

cultural virus. So an audio virus is a subset of this broader category of cultural viruses, which has been increasingly popular since it was in particular, it's got some historical precedents, but in particular, the term was coined by Richard Dawkins, the neo Darwinian biologist in the early 70s in his book, The Selfish Gene. and the basic idea is applying a biological notion to culture and instead of the gene, which is the basic unit of biological evolution, he coins the term the meme as a basic unit of cultural evolution. As we know, the meme has taken on a life of its own within

social media networks and that usually refers to an image, an image in text or a moving image in text usually. So one of the key questions is what is there a sonic equivalent to this? Is there an auditory equivalent to that? And what are its broader repercussions? And so the areas we're kind of drawing from, or the themes I want you to bear in mind, the components of an audio virology. Well, one key question is how does this intersection between sonic culture and virality,

What is it about digital capitalism that brings together this convergence between viral culture and sonic culture? What does a global pandemic do to these ideas? And then the themes I want us to focus on or come back to maybe in the discussion is, I think really what an audio virology is, is if you're aware of the various strands of these kind of philosophical movements called speculative realism, audio virology is one way in which speculative realism deals with sound.

And what I mean by that is audio virology can be, I suppose, attempts to be, go beyond anthropocentrism, attempts to map out a flat ontology. In other words, instead of taking the human at the center and or at the top of the pyramid and looking down all of these non-human phenomena or inhuman phenomena, we have a flat ontology so we can think about the the agency of the inhuman the agency of the non-human on a par with the agency of humanity it also what it helps us also do is see things or hear things more maybe more appropriately from the point of view of

a virus from the point of audition of a virus or at least opens that set of questions so that's the first theme audio virology and speculative realism which is kind of a philosophical set of philosophical questions. The second theme is to do with digital sound design and yeah I suppose to do with various strands of digital sound design data sonification for example I think you talked about data sonification last week in relation to bacteria and part of the video that we'll watch shortly It begins with a recent sonification of the coronavirus.

So data sonification, that's one idea, one approach of digital sound design. Another one is generative music, generative music or algorithmic music. And within that field, there's often a transposition of genetic algorithms, evolutionary algorithms, or viral algorithms, transposed into musical algorithms. So the attachment of, through a process of transposition of the morphological mutation that you get from natural algorithms transposed into formal experiments with musical algorithms

or the evolution of musical form. In other words, giving experiments, you know, this is a long history of attempts to automate music. And one of them, and they all attempt to take the human more or less out of the compositional process and replace them with kind of automated algorithmic processes or ideas. So data sonification, algorithmic music, and finally in the category of digital sound design, you might also mention some sonic fictions.

And again, in the video that we'll watch, there's a part of it that deals in particular with a project by a Swedish sound artist called Leif Elgren called Virulent Images, Virulent Sounds from almost 20 years ago now, which plays with a fictional conceit that if you look at the virus structure if you look at an image of a virus structure then you can contract a virus so it kind of plays with this and this this is the uh these are the images of the viruses he's

talking about um and there's a cd which features supposedly um micro recordings of viruses themselves the vibrations of viruses um so data sonification generative or algorithmic music and sonic fiction and the next theme which is related to what we're discussing today's is call it brand psychology or I think I mean these are really very closely related themes pop music and brand virology in other words pop music is probably the most obvious you know pop music is the elephant in

the room because pop music has always been obsessed with creating pieces of music that will exponentially spread you know the at least in terms of capitalism and pop charts and things like this a criteria for pop success is how viral did that music go and this is closely related to a set of issues within brand psychology which focuses on a number of ideas such as earworms brain worms sticky music stuck tune syndrome cognitive itches involuntary

musical imagery in other words that the relationship between music and memory and obviously both best theorized by Kylie Minogue when she wrote her pop track I can't get you out of my head so some of these themes are also picked up in fiction and in the video we watch I refer to two two writers, Ishmael Reid, the Afro-American fiction writer, specifically his book Mumbo Jumbo, and William Burroughs, who in a number of texts, in particular Electronic Revolution,

and I think Burroughs' idea is particularly influential on on Leif Elgren's project, he kind of ponders with this kind of fictional idea that a virus isn't biological, it can also be audio visual. And just the next theme which is related to specifically Ishmael Reed's ideas is the relationship between black music, sonic fiction, sonic fictions of virality. And in the video we watch, I make reference to underground resistances, the Detroit techno groups, viral mythology, but you could also talk about Jamaican dub and dancehall in these viral terms. Then we

have as I mentioned the the relationship the the ideas of memetics as a theory an attempt to theorize cultural viruses and finally there's a there's a theme which I think is an interesting conclusion which is brought in in the the book that's on your reading list by Tony Sampson called virality which really uses the French sociologist from the late 19th century Gabrielle Tard to do a critique of memetics and to propose an idea of cultural virality which has kind of got more in common with the ideas of Gilles Deleuze for example Deleuze and Rattari and he has an idea

instead of a meme he has an idea of what he calls a kind of imitative wave or an imitative ray. So we may come back to that idea towards the end or we can touch on it briefly. So they are all the themes which I would group together loosely under the idea of audio virology. Before we watch the video I just want to show some quotes and then read small excerpt from the Sonic Warfare book that was on your reading list and then we'll watch the video. So I'm going to attempt to share these quotes. Can you see all three of the quotes?

Okay, so the first quote is from William Gibson's cyberpunk novel Count Zero. Bobby, do you know what a metaphor is? A component? Like a capacitor? Then we have two quotes from Kodurashen's More Brilliant Than the Sun. The first quote is an implicit critique of memetics. A non-sound scientist like Richard Dawkins talks very happily about cultural viruses, argues Sadie Plant, but doesn't think that he himself is a viral contagion. Migrating from the lab to the studio, Sonic Science not only talks about cultural viruses, it is itself a viral contagion.

It's a sensational infection by the spread of Ishmael Reid's term anti-plagues. Secondly, and this is where he's discussing George Clinton and Funkadelic and Parliament 70s funk band, an earworm or an alien orworm, an audio insinuation that seeps into the ears and taps out its mnemonics on its drums. It smirks sated because as soon as you drop the needle on the track you're in its domain. Okay, contemporary capitalism is accompanied by the colonization of the audio sphere by

an epidemic of earworms or audio viruses. The concept of the virus is applied to cybernetic culture from computer infections to the dynamics of hype has become generally prevalent. written 10 years ago by the way so no mention of global pandemic the concept of the bar blah blah blah blah there is now a burgeoning a problematic range of discourses they extend from theoretical biology and medical epidemiology to software programming cultural theory marketing strategy science fiction which finds in the virus biological and digital and cultural so much explanatory potential regarding the non-linear dynamics of cybernetic culture. Infesting the fissures of the

nature culture continuum, the virus is also at the centre of discussions on the aesthetics of artificial life, research generally and specifically in relation to generative music. To understand this ubiquity of the concept of the virus and its relevance to the contagiousness of vibrational events, some initial components of an audio virology will be sketched, paying particular attention to microscopic engineering, incubation, transmission, contagion and mutation of sonic culture. Methodologically, an audio virology implies the transcription of the terminology of music markets and anti-markets. Individual artists or producers, for example, become carriers, events become

incidents of outbreak scenes become fields of contagion trade becomes exchange an exchange of contagious sonic fluids or particles radio becomes a literal transmission network an acoustic cyberspace in both its analog and digital domains becomes an epidemiological field of affective contagion okay so now we're going to watch the video and i think the best way for us to do this is for us all to the best way to do it with the best quality possible is for us all to

log into the link which I'm gonna post and there's a vimeo link and there's a password which is corona which I'll also post I just posted it what do you think the best way of doing this Jacob should we like actually reconvene in half an hour I think actually for the sake of the recording I'll share the video on screen and if people want to go directly to Vimeo and watch it they can do that with the link that I just posted okay well I've just posted my link it's on the email right yeah yeah so you're gonna

play it on screen yes exactly okay um let's see that must be this one okay do you see the window what's that do you see the video yes Okay, then I'll just let it play. Yeah, so it's about 26 minutes, right? Noise, noise, noise.

The greatest single disease vector of civilization. The greatest single disease vector of civilization. Okay, this is weird. Sorry about that.

No noise noise noise the greatest single disease vector of civilization In April 2020 Marcus Bueller a musician and scientist at MIT Created a model for vibrational properties of the spike protein SARS-CoV-2 the aspect of COVID-19 that makes it so contagious, allowing the transcoding of aspects of the virus structure into music. The resulting deployment of what sounds like Japanese koto, jangles and chimes, was an ominous verbal of noises lurking underneath.

Viral counterpoint of the coronavirus spike was a multi-layer algorithmic composition that made objects at the nanoscopic level audible using a technique called transpositional equivalence, in which protein vibrations were brought into the audible spectrum while maintaining the key relative values of vibrations among amino acids. When we think about proteins, which are really the building blocks of all life on this planet, Proteins are made from what we call amino acids, which are little particles encoded by DNA. And if we look at these microscopic, nanoscopic chemical structures,

we realize that they're continuously vibrating at certain frequencies. More if done in the work, we have calculated these frequencies, these vibrations, and made them audible and used these audible frequencies to translate the sequence and the structure of these proteins in the coronavirus into musical expression. And what's resulting of that actually is quite complex piece of classical music which runs for about an hour and 15 minutes that encodes the entire three-dimensional hierarchical structure of the spike protein in the virus. For Buehler, aestheticising the virus offered the potential of some practical antiviral outcomes, making music from and therefore opening a portal into the language of proteins.

Buehler proposed that sonifying a range of different viruses, mutations, responses to changes in temperature, etc. could facilitate the comparison and analysis of antibodies with matching melodic or rhythmic structure that could bind to the spike protein. Bueller argued that his musical representation of the virus was more accurate than classical static textbook diagrams that were always unable to display the dynamics of the virus's constant movements and vibrations. The virus basically tricks human cells by pretending to be a friendly visitor.

It uses a lock and key mechanism to gain entry to the cells. The relatively benign sounding music doesn't really convey the deadly impacts this particular protein is having on the world. This aspect of the music shows the deceiving nature of the virus, how it hijacks our body to replicate, and hurt us along the way. So, the music is a metaphor for this nature of the virus to deceive the host and exploit it for its own multiplication. How do we understand the language that DNA speaks to define, to design proteins that appear, like I said, in living systems, in pathologies, like in viruses.

And when we have a way of translating the protein structure into music, we can begin to learn that language. So you can imagine listening to the protein in this virus and beginning to understand how it functions, how it works. Now, the human brain can do that, and we can think about creating antibodies that would bind very well to the spike protein to prevent further infections. But another way of doing that is using artificial intelligence. AI is a really powerful tool of teaching an artificial neural network, an artificial brain, if you wish, to speak that language of proteins. Bueller wasn't the first to make music from killer viruses.

composer Alexander Pajak in her 2010 Sons of HIV made audible the patterns of nucleotides and amino acids transcribed from the AIDS virus. These projects can also be situated amongst formless trends in generative music based on artificial life research and more generally neural networks and machine learning in which the transposition of evolutionary genetics into sound is fairly routine as a template for automated morphological mutation. Less formalist and dramatising the dark side of these artificial acoustic agencies through speculating on their weaponisation, Bueller's transpositions also remind us of Swedish sound

artist Leif Elgren's Sonic Fiction CD project, Virulent Images, Virulent Sounds, from 2003. According to Elgren's accompanying text, exactly one year after the terrorist attacks of 9-11, an article was published in the New York Daily News, announcing leaks from classified reports from the NASA Medical Research Laboratories, detailing new evidence that viral diseases such as AIDS and Ebola could be transmitted by visual channels. The idea was that exposure to microphotography of the virus structures could, through a process of what was described as dematerialisation-materialisation, pass through the retina and the brain and then emerge as a substantial living virus

entering a destructive relation with certain parts of the body. The fear, of course, that Elgren asks his audience to imagine was the potential such a powerful weapon could have in the hands of terrorists. But Elgren asks, if images can be virulent, can sound be virulent too? Elgren was fascinated by the direct unfolding of audiovisual media onto the body. The CD that accompanied the project was presented with eight microstructure virographs, obviously published with a health warning, and allegedly contained eight audio recordings of highly potent viruses, HIV, rabies, influenza, LASA, mumps, Ebola, synombre, and smallpox.

According to the Sleaf Notes, these micro recordings were carried out in a government laboratory in Tripoli, Libya, and couriered to Sweden on Minidisc in January 2002. Elgren's epidemiological sonic fiction concerned the transmission of a biological virus code through the channels of media culture. culture. Its journey, an effect of transmission of the virus structure through digitized ripples of intensity. A transmedia vector scaling up from viral code through the microbiological to the audiovisual, only to compress into code again. Even without this fictional context of mutant DNA, the sounds were pretty creepy. A chittering, yet viscous, sonic mutation.

And this passage concerns a virus which occasions bio... This trope of contagious media finds its predecessor in William Burroughs' 1970-1971 text, Electronic Revolution, his tactical manual for the use of audio tape cut-ups to provoke crowd violence, where he asks Riley whether a virus is perhaps simply very small units of sound and image. Perhaps to construct a laboratory virus we would need both a camera and a sound crew and a biochemist as well. Here Burroughs initiates what will become a recurrent refrain of the cyberpunk science fiction of the 80s and 90s.

The virus as anomalous entity trading between nature and culture. rendering that distinction irrelevant, as at home in the human animal, as it is in machines. One can also feel Burroughs' ideas on cultural viruses, with a dash of spinosism, coursed through the veins of director David Cronenberg, when he proposed that To understand physical process on Earth requires a revision of the theory that we're all God's creatures, all that Victorian sentiment. It should certainly be extended to encompass disease, viruses and bacteria. Why not? A virus is only doing its job. It's trying to live its life. The fact that it is destroying you doing so is not its fault.

It's about trying to understand interrelationships among organisms, even those we perceive as disease. I think most diseases would be very shocked to be considered diseases at all. It's a very negative connotation. For them, it's a triumph. It's all part of trying to reverse the normal understanding of what goes on physically, psychologically and biologically to us. Departing from a transcendent anthropocentrism, Cronenberg's quote illustrates a common thread in audio virologies, an inversion of polarities of what is considered positive and negative and an identification with

the virus. In Ishmael Reid's novel Mumble Jumble for example, the central protagonist is the Jess Groove virus or what Reid calls an anti-plague. This anti-plague takes its name from the proliferation of ragtime songs across radio networks in the US in the early 20th century that just grew or jazz grew. Jazz grew was a particularly interesting cultural contagion because it cured its victims of the rhythmically regressive influence of urometric musical civilisation. Instead of damaging the body, it could enhance a body's capacity to affect.

Jez Gru was an anti-plague, because it does not cause its host to waste away, but enlivens it. In Reed's fiction, it functioned as a weapon in a battle extended to cosmic proportions, ultimately entailing a contest between carriers of Jess Grew and the Aetonists, supporters of the mythology of Western civilisation, a clash between black and white magic. The Aetonists of the Wallflower Order noted that Jess Grew slips into the radiolas and dictaphones. They therefore monitored media to follow the progress of the epidemic. Moreover, for the Aetanists, Jeskru was an epidemic germ designed for the end of civilization.

Since the musical transmission of spiritual traditions such as voodoo that Jeskru carries remain encrypted from the perspective of the Western epistem, the virus proliferates the side effect of triggering white anxiety over blackness. And yet, like hackers, Reed's African Americans have a distinct BioWare, customised to Reed Jeskru's programme as anti-plague. Here, the musically transmitted virus becomes a black secret technology. And Reed's fable becomes an archetype of the Black Atlantic. It involves prophecy, and it involves conjuring, and it involves dance, and it involves mystery,

and it involves painting, and it involves sculpture, and all the arts. It was like multimedia. And these rights were practiced in New Orleans, in our country, in the 19th century. Uddu is merely a term for all the synthesis that took place in this country when different tribes came together. You see, we had Vons and Von people and Evos and Angolans, Dahomeans. You know, there was no distinction when people were brought over here, brought over different tribes. And tribes that wouldn't ordinarily come in contact with each other, even in Africa,

put all their skills and their mythologies and their art forms together here and they were influenced by Indians like in like I understand that when the African gods or spirit Loas were brought here they were very gentle but they came up against Indian influence in Haiti the Haitian Indians and it became some came mean and they're even white influences for example of leg Bob is a crossroads symbol in Africa and here. Papa Legba stands at the crossroads and he stands for the intersection of the real and the real world and the world of the invisibles. So this is the same thing that St. Peter does in a sense.

The Afro-American artists have been able to use the processes of this art form, which it really is and I think take it farther so you get ragtime the same process that led to new spirits being created in South America with no antecedents in Africa led to ragtime here read an early anthology by James Waller Johnson he said nobody knows how ragtime came about it just it just grew you see that's what I that's why I've just ruined mumbo jumbo as being a spontaneous rising. Techno also has its own viral mythology.

In the sonic fiction of Detroit Techno outfit Underground Resistance, UR, we find one of the most explicit hyperstitional systems outlining an evolution of rhythmic genetic strains in which colonialism is recast in a sweeping history of racialized population struggle. Unlike mumbo jumbo, it's a war of cosmic proportions. The sleeve notes to the Interstellar Fugitives album developed a kind of virology of rhythm. In a fictional report issued by the Intergalactic Bureau of Investigation, the city of Detroit becomes a rhythm machine, mechanically pulsing waves of rippling intensity across the urban skin, carrying sonic parasites to hijack your

nervous system. For UR, these sonic warriors are carriers of a potent R1 mutant gene, and are referred to as digital Ebola guerrilla operatives with reinforced rhythm awareness capabilities. Activation of the potential of the mutant genetic strain, similar to Jess Gru, results in the affective mobilization of populations in dance. The R1 strain is diagnosed as older than humanity itself and was sequenced into human genetics by probabilities still unknown. R, one communicates through secret coded rhythm patterns based around

the drum that is common in all human societies. It should be noted that these rhythms can also be vocalized, expressed through dancer art, and transferred by rhythmically oriented In UR's Sonic Fiction, the Bureau's control mission becomes an immunology. The report continues, describing a dangerous mutation. In a constant search for ways to combat the ever-increasing evil of the system's programmers, R1 has most recently employed a little-known frightening bioengineered mutant cousin gene that was created during a period of time ranging from the 1400s to the late 1800s in colonized

areas throughout the world, and especially in the new world of the Americas. The custom which we will call Z, for zero, to signify its complete erasure from history was the result of illicit genetic breeding experiments performed on enslaved human stock of the R1 gene. This Z model was elusive, chameleon-like, unpredictable and final. See the maroons, and although it could deceptively function within any given society, it would only take true directions from R1 using its enhanced rhythm perception. It could decipher R1 directives

from anything ranging from a fieldwork song to the rhythmic flow of a poet's lines to automated modern machinery. Combining a revisionist black history with science fiction, genetic theory, and ethnomusicology, UR dub history, re-versioning it to bring its ghosts to the fore. And yet, in an era in which going viral signifies success, UR's techno virology throws up many questions, and any celebration of the pandemic of techno over the last few decades is tempered by the whitewashing which this process entails.

rhythmic infection of the white body, infected by movement, but not, according to the report, the African spiritual dimension of the music, coupled with an economic parasitism. And yet, it is clear that for Read and UR, these sonic fictions, these audio virologies, offer a vehicle for speculation, a means to politicise, strategically co-opt, tactically infiltrate and sidestep the plague of white supremacy, to counter the autoimmunity and boundary policing of racialised cultural and economic systems resistant to change.

What can we make of this, admittedly partial and disparate, catalogue of audiovirologies? Why do we need a concept of cultural infection, when more neutral terms are available? In the age of pandemic, with a death toll of one million worldwide, is all this just in bad taste? Most of these audio virologies serve as a rhetorical response to the inhuman agency of an environment within which humans find themselves often helpless. Hosts, at minimum, these sonic fiction dramatize the sense that all is not well. At best, some have argued, inhuman coronavirus has proven capable of achieving what human radicals can only dream of, a global general strike.

This music as virus metaphor has been formulated in a number of ways and around a number of presuppositions relating to code, the concrete effects of abstraction, invisibility, and the latent power of decoding and deterritorialization. These are not merely songs about viruses. The analogy can take the form of an array of speculative conceptual probes from Bueller's medical diagnostic tool to a device for analyzing cultural evolution, for example, the mimetics of earworms, through to sonic fictions of virality as an aesthetic method, for example, cut-up, dub, and remixology,

or as a weapon in the battlefields of digital media networks. These sonic fictions often serve to open a dimension where sound and virus share means of incubation, transmission, infection, mutation and threat. Recently, in an essay for the Quietus, David Toope writes how corona mirrors the transmission and spread of music, the memory system that flows through boundaries and territories, acting as a virus that continually mutates into spectacular new forms. The difference, of course, is that one is death, the other is life. And yet, at their most intriguing, these audiovirologies often go beyond mere analogy

to encompass a weird identification, a transvaluation that inverts polarities from negative to positive, allies with the threat, and attempts to repurpose, to make constructive its destructive energies. While the modus operandi of pop music has always been a proliferation of earworms, it was piracy and a centrality of digital replication which accelerated the contemporary virality of music culture and the immuno-responses of platform capitalism. These days, streaming stats look increasingly like an epidemiological survey. AP avatar-fronted artificial acoustic agencies haunt platforms as entryist Trojan horses

ushering in an era of algorithmic blandification. Going viral has become a synonym for success. Drawing liberally from theoretical biology, medical epidemiology, software programming, Cultural theory, marketing strategy, and cyberpunk science fictions of biohacking that speculated on mutant entities able to inhabit freely the fissures of the nature culture continuum, such virally tinged discourses peaked in the 1990s. In the 2020s, they have come of age. From a hype economy running on contagious marketing, the viral logic of digital capitalism

and the devastating infrastructural potential of weaponized computer viruses. Not to mention Corona. Reality has caught up. What are you incubating today? Okay.

Obviously there's a lot in there, and I'm very conscious of time, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to give a brief introduction to memetics, and then I'll hand over to you guys to do the presentations, so we can leave as much time as possible at the end for discussion. is not something I really touched on in much detail in that video. That video was made a couple of weeks ago. It was actually an audio essay, but then it was an audio essay for Unsound Festival. And then they offered to make it a visual, a video essay, and paired

me with a video editor, and we just culled lots of virus images, corona images from YouTube and so on and put that together quite quickly. So as I said, memetics isn't really touched on in the video, but it's really the dominant source of ideas of cultural viruses, cultural virology, and it's, you know, in a way memetics in action is what a lot of branding and marketing theory and practice is engaged in these days. So it's kind of interesting phenomena because it's always been pseudo-academic.

It's never really, you know, there was a wave of activity in the 90s where it looked like, you know, there was a journal of memetics and people were getting excited about it, but it never really developed as an academic discipline that was taken seriously. But it's continued to spread one way or another. So initially it was founded by, actually sorry before I go on with this, just to say the video, the text on which the video is based is on your reading list. So you didn't catch everything that's said in the video. The text is the essay listening to COVID-19 that's on your reading list.

Sorry, so memetics is kind of founded by Richard Dawkins and Neil Darwinian in his book The Selfish Gene, but also further developed in the early 90s, I think, in an article which is also in your reading list called Viruses of the Mind. I think why a lot of the discourse came to, became fashionable, became interesting for people in the 1990s is because of computer viruses. Because computer viruses are what took this idea of a biological virus into the cultural realm, it kind of concretised or actualised that idea.

You know, even to the level I think Richard Dawkins talks about in Viruses of the Mind, where you could have a magazine which has got the virus code, a computer virus code written in it. And you can, so the magazine is a host for the virus. And I think he's kind of interested in the way that viruses could skip different media, jump between media and this is what Leif Elgren is interested in as well so he talks about you know typing in the program for a computer virus copying it from a magazine releasing it onto the internet and so you have something goes from a physical medium uses the human as a as a kind of transmission medium to get itself from a physical medium of

a magazine into the internet where it can through digital replication and cloning can spread around so so the idea of the computer virus is really interesting for fueling this metaphor because it really is you know it essentially is a metaphor this idea of a virus um which doesn't mean to say it's not real but it's never really got much past the idea, metaphorical or analogical idea. We can come back to that later. So memetics is kind of spread by neo-Darwinians, Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Susan Blackmore. There's a small literature mostly

written in the 90s also in the 2000s about memetics so it's perpetuated by academics journalists viral marketers software developers based on this simple idea that in culture we have a meme whereas in biology we have a gene a basic building block so the meme for Dawkins is a self-copying message system regulated by a decision-making process of an evolutionary algorithm selfish gene you know neo-darwinian so that algorithm is about the survival of the fittest so it has a whole series of implications to do with culture and competition imports a whole series of darwinian ideas to do with competition which are you know intrinsically problematic

it's a mode of algorithmic propagation characterized by an inheritance mechanism that resists variations caused by environmental interaction and achieves the widest prevalence dependent on its parasitical fitness. So the meme, so whereas a gene is a genetic replicator, a meme is a non-genetic replicator. A replicator determined by a universal set of rules that compel it to fight for survival in a so-called meme pool. The meme pool is a repository of all of the competing cultural strains. In other words, the mimetic code spreads by advantage using, for example, an audio clip as a

carrier or host to increase the viral contagiousness of the idea concealed within it. As a neorationalist Dawkins is most, Dawkins is most, his favourite example of a cultural virus is religion. He wants to call science non-viral and religion viral. So here's a whole bunch of problematic critiques of religion based on their virality as opposed to their rationality. So memetics is kind of runs on this idea of the similarity between a population of minds and a computer network,

arguing that the mind, like a computer running viral software, becomes an arbitrary vehicle or medium existing in a randomized evolutionary search space. The mimetic code attaches itself to these vehicles seeking out others which in turn play host to the most successful replicator programs. So mimetics, the idea of a mean, you know, for Dawkins, a lot of mimeticists like to talk about religion but it could be anything from a catchy tune to a fashion fads such as for example um wearing a baseball cap backwards how these kind of small quirks of fashion proliferate blow up crazes fads you could argue that fashion itself is a

an extremely um viral cultural phenomena the way it catch the way fashion trends catch on and proliferate and spread. But you know in the literature of mimetics there's a few examples of of sound and music that recurrently pop up. One is the evolution of birdsong and the other one if we could take an example from the book by Susan Blackmore called The Meme machine where she gives an example of a musical memetics she says the um sorry this example uh use example of music as memetic imitation and this really the core to what we're talking about

today is the idea of imitation the way in which things get copied and spread blackmore uses the example of a catchy musical tune A number of these tunes, for instance, the sequence of notes played on a piano infect the listener's mind, using it as a vehicle to get out of the meme pool, where tunes can then compete for survival. Once the evolutionary algorithm runs, all that follows happens at the expense of other, less contagious tunes. is often fierce as Blackmore proposes there are more memes than vehicles. Like this the

mind that receives the tune becomes in like a tape machine that is always switched to record mode but only retains the best coded meme. Now there's a lot going on in these ideas I mean part of the idea is trying to get towards what happens to us, you could say maybe subliminally or unconsciously or non-consciously, or the way in which different kinds of media hypnotize us or mesmerize us. So it has something in common with affect theory in the sense that affect theory is kind of interested in the things that we don't

necessarily have conscious control over the things that we don't necessarily have a cognitive grasp over that slip into our slip into our nervous systems slip into our brains without us necessarily controlling it or noticing it and which we often pass on to other people where are we so that's we're in I think I'm just going to briefly touch on some of the critiques of mimetics just very very briefly and then we can come back to all of this after your presentations we can have an open discussion so the critiques of mimetics

are numerous and apparently quite fatal although none of this has stopped the idea of the meme proliferating. The first really a really good source for some of these critiques is in the Tony Sampson book Virality in chapter two what spreads particularly the first part where he directly engages with the literature of mimetics so the the critiques really break into four subcategories and often they revolve around the problematic nature of importing concepts from

biology superimposing them onto culture. The first problem is the idea of the meme itself, the idea that there is a basic unit of culture in the same way that there's a basic unit of biology, in other words, a gene. So this is critiqued from a number of different examples. It's essentially a critique of the naturalness of the meme idea, or the idea that in all of the examples that are given, what we identify as a meme, as a basic unit of culture, really

doesn't have anything consistent that we can pin down and look at scientifically and that's been questioned from many different angles. In other words this first critique is basically the poverty of the gene meme analogy. That is essentially just an analogy and any attempts to take memetics seriously as a social science have fallen apart. And the second bunch of critiques fall under the heading of kind of the contested functioning

of evolutionary inheritance. I mean, with genetics, genetic transmission is really about inheritance is about passing down the genetic line, various biological traits. viruses are non-genetic replicators, this is what makes viruses fascinating to a lot of cultural theory, to a lot of the examples I've given in music and literature and so on, that viruses are transmitted transversely. So whereas genes are passed down kind of vertically down a genetic line, viruses pass horizontally,

they pass across culture as opposed to downstream. So any attempts to import this issue to do with Darwinian inheritance, survival of the fittest and so on is problematic. Problematic because it can't really account for the change of memes as they spread. Not seriously, it can't really account for mutation in other words. So what's arguably missing from memetics with its focus on the meme as an unchanging unit of culture is the inability to take seriously innovation, novelty, the novelty that happens

as a cultural entity passes across culture, invention, mutation, novelty, and so on. So the meme gene analogy problematic is an ability to seriously understand mutation when it's focused on unchanging idea units. Thirdly, the environment, the relationship between the meme and the environment, or the insulation of the meme as an information unit to the environment through which it spreads. In other words, the idea of the medium being the message. How do you take this McLuhanist idea of the medium and the message being seriously when

you have these isolated, insulated units of culture, or the reduction of culture to purely information? And finally, the paradox between memetics as a supposedly neo-Dewinian understanding in which survival is the fittest as a selection algorithm how do you keep that how do you balance that with the way memetics is often put into practice particular in branding and marketing in other words people marketers deliberately trying to

engineer cultural viruses and so there's a bit of a paradox there the um paradox between the idea of a selection algorithm based in darwinian survival of the fittest and the intentional engineering of memes now we can come back and go into these in more detail if you're interested but as i said if you are interested there's a really good critique it goes through these critiques in the samson book virality um so i think at this point um stop me talking forever which is a danger um let's let's

pass it over to the presentations and then hopefully we'll have a significant amount of time left at the end for discussion. Sure. Thanks a lot. So we have three presentations, James, Cara, and Vincent. Who wants to start? Hey, can I share my screen? Yeah, sure. It should be possible. Oh, yeah, thanks. Okay. Can you see my screen? I'm so bad with, oh, okay, I've got a question. Okay, where is this?

Okay. Okay, well, I'm sorry. I don't know how to, how do I press present? Sorry about this. Okay. So yeah, so my presentation is kind of like expanding on some of the ideas that Steve has talked about thus far. It's really interesting, really found a lot of like fertile

ideas with stuff. So yeah, this is, I don't know, why isn't this loading? Can you see anything? Just a loading sign. Yeah, that's weird. Sorry. So yeah, I'll just, hold on. God, classic. It was working perfectly fine until now. So, okay, well should I, maybe I'll just show it in the... No, you seem to have 5,000 other windows open, maybe... I'll just show it like this, how about that, hang on.

Right. So yeah, so my presentation is kind of about like memes and biology. So what I've looked at is like the propensity for the sonic to be an interface for memetic information to cross boundaries in this sort of like process of transduction that we've talked about a bit in previous weeks. previous weeks. So essentially like how memes that can cross media boundaries might have a competitive advantage. And so the growing convergence between genetics, sound, digital technologies that we might see as an increasingly permeable set of frontiers for memes to cross and increasingly interaction between genes and memes. So there's a vaguely recurrent theme of like birds over the next 10 minutes. So I thought I'd hand the sort of presentation to them

because they're sort of like meme lords of the animal kingdom. So yeah, so we're sort of like the logarithmic potential of magnetic transmission is something that we're afraid of, like the catastrophe that arrived with Covid was precluded by a series of non-starsis in the pathogenic hype cycle. So perennially almost arriving with a family of H5N1, H7N9 and so forth, all under the umbrella of avian flu. A series of influenza strains which are known for for the properties of signal transduction between bodies of birds and homo sapiens. Similar narratives frame the discourse around the emergence of COVID with reference to the introduction into human circulation from pangolins.

So to sort of adopt a term from sonic theory, humans might have a competitive edge over viruses because of the increasing capacity for them to manage transduction. I was thinking so this interface between computation and genetics means that information more readily passes between these materially distinct media as we find new ways to leverage computing power and the signals passing from silicon to carbon-based systems equate to this sort of warfare in which the competitive advantage of a new virus on humanity is hemmed in by the accelerating scale of algorithmic infrastructure chugging away at cracking its genome. So once the right sort of password is found, a vaccine can be produced to unlock the molecular machine of the virus.

Although in a computer lexicon now alienated from its sonic origins, the idea of a password derives from the utterance of a series of syllables which can initiate a mechanical transformation, such as the opening of the castle gate or like a tavern door or that sort of thing. This, I believe, is a transductive event and in Beulah Pajak's work around listening to Covid, it sort of reorients this relationship as such. So if Dawkins sort of memocentric idea that we are meat puppets of genetic code is speculatively taken for granted, then perhaps we can play emphasis in a similar manner on the motifs which animate sociality, culture and sonics. the free agency of individuals families and states has been placed under the yoke of the

dialectical arms race between the mimetic process of the virus and the equally mimetic process of a vaccine so we're waiting to effectively hear when the password is proclaimed to get on with our lives so if the the gatekeepers of this site of material transduction are benevolent then we possess this safeguard against viruses. However, the lethal potential of an artificially generated virus has been contemplated within science fiction and public imagination for some time and represents an innovation in the virus's agency to build its own assemblage across this gap. And perhaps the key piece in Elgren's fear of dematerialization, rematerialization, is the recruitment of terrorist humans to weaponize and reproduce the virus. The fear of weaponized

pathogens reached its zenith in the early years of the war on terror when there was sort of talk about anthrax being timed against people. So I don't know, kind of thinking about how there's nothing categorically different about that relationship between the host humans reproducing the virus and the hummingbird's codependence with pollinating flower and how like multi-species hybrids can take many forms. So yeah, rather than posing itself in direct annihilative opposition to other systems, the most successful viruses are often those which live symbiotically. So if music is taken to be analogous to disease spreading, as Steve suggests, then cross-media

symbiosis can be read through the canon of music productions in the fashion. So perhaps you could, you know, take some license in mapping organic, the virus, organic virus-ridden world to analog and the biodigital to the sphere of digital music. And today's sonic ecosystem bears the signs of hybrid music virologies, which almost necessarily must cross the interface to become successful in wider circulation. So it's you know all these sort of boundary crossing types of going through different medias and sort of crossing into the system of the body which have their own adaptive advantages. So sort of music which has more effects on the body is something which

which I can account for is more proliferant than Many Nights Out have revealed that to me. If we see the landscape of music venues and sites of listening as a set of competitive niches for music, then those most successful at proliferating and becoming endemic are those best adapted to crossing a kind of digital acoustic somatic threshold. So I was also thinking about like sort of maybe high-prestitional nature of like Jurassic Park and how the antecedents of birds, the great reptiles, were wiped out in an event 65 million years ago. So the advancement in genetic technology to reconstruct them from data was depicted in what was essentially like a sci-fi film.

And in the film, the sound of these creatures was artistically portrayed as a roar, despite the sounds being unknown. So maybe representing some of the limitations that we actually have in like recreating like organisms from pure data or information about them. But if you contrast this with up so like this can be sort of seen as quite funny video of us trying to recreate what what a mummy sounded like, which is one of my favorite videos on the Internet. I hope it works because it's not really working. Oh, damn.

Okay, anyway, you should go back and watch it because it's like, basically, they try to make, like digitally print a mummy's sort of voice box and it's like the most like, they've put so much work into it and it just makes this sort of like, really simple tone of just like, anyway, so, if we see this like Jurassic Park hyperstition as technical fix to environmental collapse and species loss as encoded in data, that could one day restore sort of lost species out of the film. Then we see the becoming memification of taxonomies and the potential for signal to flow unhindered between genetic data and corporeal manifestations.

So like the genome of a freshwater trout is to the living swimming fish as a JPEG of a loss meme is to pressing control P and like holding it in your hand. So we're already experiencing some early onset forms that affect and memes, sorry, animals, which are most sort of aesthetically adapted to sort of to sensorily appeal to humans, or often those which are best placed to kind of, to sort of be conserved and things. So we see that in sort of charity sort of videos and things. So yeah, I was thinking about like bird, nematic sounds, and there's large canon of nematic sounds and circulations, archetypally being like the Wilhelm scream and stuff,

but looking at this one particular one, which is like the sound of the loon bird, which has been sampled in a lot of different music. So you've got it in, now let's see if any of these work, but you've got it in 808 state, Pacific state. You've got it in, you've got it in sueno Latino, and that sort of late 80s acid house track. You've got it in Rusty featuring D.W.A. You've got it in so many, and there's like a sort of good article on the internet, like chronicling its proliferation. And it became very like detached and took on a life of its own away from the, sort of very alienated from the actual life of the bird itself.

I mean, I'd heard it many times and I had no idea what it was. So I thought it was quite an effective, sorry, I can't get it to play, but anyway. Yeah, so yeah, maybe go back and listen to those. So there's a sort of symbiotic relationship happening between digital and organic worlds. And finally, I wanted to sort of talk about Whistled Bird Language, which is a sort of UNESCO protected intangible cultural heritage form of sort of human human language, which I should try and get this video to work.

Because it's basically in sort of some areas of northern Turkey, there is a language where people can speak through the mountain valleys, through a system of whistles. And because of its sort of high frequency nature, it sort of travels far. So it means that it's got like a more, I'm not sort of a sound theorist, but it's got more sort of acoustic potential to kind of, to be understood from further away.

Sorry about this. Becoming a comedy of errors there. But basically through the invention of mobile phones, maybe go back and watch it, but through the invention of mobile phones, this language has become increasingly threatened because of the incursion of the digital phylum meaning that it's more energy efficient for someone to use their fingers to type a WhatsApp message to another shepherd than it is for them to whistle like that, putting their fingers into their mouth and doing that. So it's really something that's been at least critically discussed as being

very affected by the advent of digital technologies. So we've got types of language of communication in a digital phylum placed in direct competition with sort of organic forms of sound. So yeah, if you take that sort of like William Burroughs or like Rosie Drydossi materialist view of language as a virus, yeah, you see these types of like communication as two competing viruses. So yeah, don't know how long I've been, but Yeah, I might just sort of end there, but I had a little video of like the bird techno-singularity thing.

Maybe you can send the links to all the videos in an email after the seminar today. Okay. I'd love to hear the state, that one that wasn't working. Okay, yeah, answer. some thoughts. It's so annoying for this end that I have. Yeah, because that was kind of, hang on. It's really like, it's something you probably will realise you know without knowing it. It's it's really prevalent. I think I know what it is but I'm intrigued to see if it's

what was the bird what's the cry called? It's called a loon yeah l-o-o-n loon oh my god but I think yeah there was sort of um I think it was on pitch for like an article where someone had like chronicled it's it's sort of transmission and stuff so it's pretty good for oh my god It's literally right at the beginning.

If it loaded one more second, it would be fine. . . . Okay, yeah, maybe just watch it back. I don't want to take up everyone's time. I think there's quite a few presentations. Yeah, please, please send us the links. You can also just send them and I'll be making sure that everyone gets the links. Cool. All right. Thanks. Yeah,

Yeah, cool. Thank you so much. So Chiara, would you be up for? Yes, sure. Great, thanks. Well, I don't have a presentation of images to show you. I will mostly focus on verbal presentation of the notes I took while reading all the input we had for this seminar. I will manage to highlight some of the points I noticed through reading those texts which I think are my contribution will be related mostly to the first point that Steve made on audio virology which is this kind of flat ontology which is something that I try to research too

in the visual field too but also in the sonic field so I don't I have heard of speculative realism but I don't I'm not sure I have a background to discuss about it but I think that this presentation will focus on that in these 10 minutes I have so in some of the there's a very certain view of the viruses generally in theory that I find the resemblance there of the new music as a virus and the general theory of virus as we have seen it through mostly Deleuze could say and some ideas of how this new world of effects based on obstruction and on issues

of the sensory experience are deployed in our new temporality which many people try to describe it as the planetary situation or capitalist realism or many different kinds of realisms that go on so if music as a virus as we have said has been deployed in many different ways and I will focus on this observation that music as virus relates mostly to code and to these effects of abstraction and this kind of invisibility that we could say and this late latent powers there and

So all these kind of descriptions related to this new world of effects, I have seen that are described in your introduction also as modulations of affect, which i find very fruitful in relation to this kind of what the less called as as this kind of how to say it this model of actualities that are going on today and they are deforming and all these agencies and mediations

of our world that are related to the virus. There's a certain part I'd like to refer to which is located in the Postscript on control societies and there's a certain relation to the notion of virus there. Deleuze says that types of machines are easily matched with each type of society. Not that machines are determining but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them the old society of sovereignty made use of simple machines levers police clocks but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage the societies of

control operate with machines of a third type computers whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses. And with that I would like to make a note to this kind of new field of energies we are talking about like we have seen in the book of sonic warfare. There is indicated that we are talking about sound and the sonic event as as a tool to describe new philosophies of materialisms related to vibration and to even to other kind of politics that are taking place there. So sound, in my view, there becomes

some kind of a very useful tool to see how all these modulations are taking place in latent ways. so it's the most intangible thing to think of materiality but it's the most effective one it seems like it's the most effective one the most effective one in the way we we form our perceptions and i think that there is a certain discussion of this idea of how we describe this this world of new effects and affect, how to describe all those forms of modulations that

many thinkers try to describe in the realism context. And I think that there is a certain kind of shift through in the way we think about that and the stance that all this kind of making realism works like it shifts its stance from classical western philosophy and this is something that as seen through the cultural realm as we've said through the evolution of like the mimetic kind of approach, I think I can make a correlation there with what Denise Ferreira da Silva made as a

contribution there. I had this reminiscence of her text thinking cultural difference beyond superability superability it's a Kantian term about perceiving effects of effects and causes but I found a resemblance there with what we're talking about in the ways that we approach all these modalities of effects beyond the modern text beyond the western thought in in the way that But she says, for example, she makes a very fruitful chronological or let's say historical review of how all this, how this game of perceptions and appearances towards, of course, cultural difference was produced.

produced, but she marks that each time we do such efforts, we are about to deal with views of the world, like we've said, all these efforts to define our reality. So she says that if all these texts of classical philosophy were mostly focused on certainty and indeterminacy, we should find new tools. I find a resemblance there with the way we deal with the sonic event. New tools to see that we don't have to deal with an unresolvable estrangement that takes place there, but with an entangled condition like the one we've sent about

that is full of abstractness, of new modalities of effect. So this entangled condition has to be expressed in new ways that describe this all these latent powers or these hidden things that are there described through this sensory realm whatever that means so virus there can be a very fruitful as we've said metaphor but also it somehow depicts how we deal with all these formats that change while describing realities in our case our our current reality probably this world of immediacies and agencies so i i'm just focusing on this critique on on this model of thought

i don't have any paradigm or example to focus on the sonic but i i i i i'd like to make this this point of critique towards the ways we think about these modulations and that is very important to realize this shift in perception and this shift in the models of thought so yes describing these capacities to affect is a way to to to highlight the urgency to create these new tools of discussing about this. I think that's all from me. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot. Then let's go to the last presentation. Vincent?

Can you hear me? Yes, a bit low now. So my presentation is a kind of response to the reading scent. So in Steve Goodman's piece called Audio Virology, efforts to sonify viral vibrations represent an impulse to discover fictions that move in the nanoscape or nanoscopic universes. The frequencies generated by interactive quivers amplified into abstract musical expression perceivable by the human ear

compounds the virality of pathogenic microorganisms as vehicular medium of acoustic agency. Audiovirology probes the cultural infection of music but also the virality of contagious vibrations found on the cellular level and how these phenomena exhibit the time of market algorithms, digital economy, scalar computation, but also the mode of mimetic reproduction and the spread of Ojovirus in contemporary capitalism. If generative music such as Marcus Bueller's Sonification of the Coronavirus is spike protein, or Leif Elgren's HIV or LASA is a quote metaphor for how the virus deceives the human, there is something amiss when we consider underlying sonic relations with the non-human as lazy comparative of who must perceive who, or why must anything and everything be transducted for human-ice thesis.

Instead, we must take this as extended practices for speculation in an age of network where no autonomy, singularity, or security is guaranteed. Indeed, a labor of heightening our consciousness and sensitivity to the very condition that exposes our own immunocompromised subjectivity within what Singaporean artists and theorists Toru Yan calls contigion economy, that is the changing ecology of containment and propagation, defense and infiltration. Taking overt inspiration from Delius and Gattari, for Tony D. Samson, there are two kinds of virality, the molar and the molecular. The former is, quote, endemic to new biopolitical strategies of social power, that is, a discursive and prediscursive means of organizing and exerting control via, for instance, the widespread imposition of generalized immunological defenses, anomaly detection techniques, and the obligation of personal hygiene in network security.

On the other hand, the latter is located in the accidents and spontaneity of desire. And unlike a body composed of collective representations, this is a sub-representational flow of events that translates outward as a contaminating desire event. end quote. Virality is composed and dispersed from varying degrees and we already know that the mutant and infectious promiscuity of the virus, its virulence, and contagious capacity originates from a highly complex set of rules, regulations, and evolutionary tendencies which science sought to extract. And yet this trial and error rationalization of other entities that affect our planetary existence still reeks of human exceptionality. optionality. On the other hand, lab made music based on gene model of algorithmic patterns

and evolutionary biology, but also computer-aided improvisations set the scene, cybernetic or otherwise, for the parasitical tendency of audiovirus to leak, outbreak, and hype. Returning to Steve's audio virology, he asks a question by the end of the video, which is the title of this presentation. What are you incubating today? We are confined by a to optimum health against the mutating violence of COVID-19, vibrational encounters and relational flows occur in corporeal and digital software and hardware contraction zones arbitrated by racialized political and technological regimes. To say that the pandemic further exposed the deadlocks of mobility

is not a gallantry but a precondition for indignance. In its being caught in a real abstraction, criticism and polemics directed to the virus alone fall short of death. Hence, the threat to public life should rather surge the hyper-attention to the mathematical movements of algorithmic contagion, the attack on the capitalist meshwork where molar and molecular activities are suspended, but also the kind of fictions and formats we incubate as hosts or asymptomatic carriers of both audible and inaudible dissemination of crisis. Thank you. That's about it. Thanks a lot Vincent. So we have today four responders of five minutes each. So let's try to keep it to five minutes each then we should have half an hour for the final discussion.

So maybe Martina will go first. Oh, sorry, I was muted. Can everyone hear me? Yes. Hey, Steve. Thanks for your presentation, everyone. I guess for me it's more like maybe I had a couple of questions for Steve, and it's perhaps things that I was thinking about also throughout Jane's presentation and Chara's presentation. I think we've been talking a bit earlier today and in the readings about what are the limitations

of new materialism, which is something that I'm interested in. And so I wonder kind of that faulty analogy between gene and meme that we touched upon earlier is also in a way similar to a limitation of an ideation kind between the virus and the sound. So kind of my curiosity is around the actualization of these fictions and what they actually accomplish when they are deployed. So I guess the reflection is more around new materialism and this goes about a flattened ontology which also chara's presentation made

me think about where in as much where i find that it is a really useful way to dissenter the anthropocentric narrative sometimes i'm afraid that it seems that we kind of moved on to the problem of the thing before having resolved the problem of the human if that makes any sense. And it kind of making me feel also some of James' example and the thing with the mummy and reproducing the mummy's voice and kind of deploying all of those very creative technologies. And I'm kind of thinking, what's the productive leverage of these fictions beyond the aesthetic, which is something that maybe I'm struggling to detect

in yeah maybe in some of the new materialist where you're thinking and so I guess my question would be around what constitutes that trespassing from a position of mere representation and mere indexing of like a material onto a different register aka like a virus made into vision a So yeah, so that's kind of my main question to Steve and also to chara and James and to anyone who's got thoughts about it. It'd be nice to hear from everyone. Thanks, Martina. I think we will make a mental or a physical note of the question and then take it after the other responses.

make a mental or a physical note of the question and then take it after the other responders. And yeah, please write any answers or further questions down, all of you, for the discussion. Alvin, do you want to go next? Yeah, sure. Okay, cool. So it's actually my first class at the new center and I've never done this before it's also like almost 1am here so i'll try to do my best um i guess it's just a few questions that i can raise that's open to us to discuss so it's more related to the latest text that steve shared um hi steve um that's written in the context of covet which really made me wonder

like why like the whole 5g conspiracy thing with covet um that's been going around well it was going around a few months ago like would that count as a kind of a version maybe a whack version of audio virology in a sense um and if i take i take that text as a kind of assemblage of different kinds of audiology, some more politically engaged with subversive potentials. It made me think about this other 1990s text, which is The Ring by the Japanese author Suzuki Koji. I think most of us know it as a film, the blockbuster horror film.

But actually, what's really interesting about the series is that in the original fiction, transmission uh it's it's actually not a ghost that's predatory and haunting other people um it's but it's actually through the transmission of a of an audio of a videotape that transmits this virus that ends up killing people and you have to show it to others um in order to not die and in the second sequel of that piece um the medium expanded from just the videotape to also print matter and some other media. But eventually in the final book, it revealed that it's kind of a

fuse ex machina, that they're kind of living in this simulation, it's not really happening. Yeah, I don't know. These are just some of the observations that I had in mind while reading the Steve's text. Yeah, great, thanks. Tenobio? Hi, can you hear me? Yes. Okay, so there's a lot of notes, but it's kind of disorganized. I'll try to put them together in a more more uh kind of the sense of it the first uh thing that i would to pop up

is the in the last seminar with uh leslie i was with this uh critique that uh i guess it was was in there and made about this, this speaking of the truth, but in the art paradigm is a kind of a different thing. But in the in the woman paper, he brought up this this inverse process at trying to to discover some properties of the living organism, in this case, the virus through sound and I was wondering, I have this kind of curiosity in my mind, like how can we,

like of course there's a lot of visual models that, I mean scientific laboratories and stuff like that there's a lot of visual models that then we can interpret uh the things and try to to catch some truth i don't know if if i agree if the the truth is actually achievable or something like that but we try like with our epistemological models and stuff like that and i was wondering about a sonic model instead of a visual model and how could it work, how could it function.

The other thing was about the pop music. Right now there's a lot of in the Spotify thing about this instead of a long spread, a long time spread of pop music, but actually a faster production, like a monthly production. Every month an album is being made and I don't know if this could uh change the the the critique of the the the spread because we we i don't know if we have time to to get infected by this pop music anymore it just it's just coming and coming and

we don't have this time oh also another thing is the the medium character, the medium feature of the virus. And I have this question, does virus has to be a flexible media, like a meta material, or it could work instead of a material, instead of thinking a virus as a material thinking as a function and thinking with its effect or affect instead of the code or the genetic code or the binary code or and so on and yeah also another

thing is this beyond the side of the replication the replication trace of the virus I'm thinking also about the destruction of the host because we have also this in the the computational virus then the virus actually tries to destroy or tries to damage something. Also the biological one, not the intention but actually happens. I mean eventually there's the destruction of the host and I was wondering about how would that destruction be

in the cultural medium, how meme would destruct the host. And that's it. Thanks a lot. A lot of questions, good ones. Last of the responders, Newe? I'll maybe share my screen. So this project that I was involved in early this year, we're trying to map the effect of

of the virus of COVID with Nairobi as a scene of subjection. And some of the interesting things that came up, this is some texts that I wrote for South of Nairobi, using the field recordings of the streets in times of COVID or how it happened when the government shuts everything down.

From the audio played on the background you can hear someone shouting a mask, Hamsini, mask Hamsini. Do you have to share your sound as well? Yeah? I couldn't hear anything. Is it possible you could share? I think there's a setting to share the sound. Oh, okay. OK. I don't know if anyone else could hear. Maybe so. Can I hear?

Yes, that was something there. All right. Yeah, so the language of street vendors takes these new ones are heard. I'm seeing a mask I'm seeing my ask that's 50 50 book can and shillings like it opened for us don't us on a good day um

uh could you send us a link to the the website maybe so we can hear it better because it's kind of low volume, I think. I think the sound could last in some algorithm of sound suppression or whatever, which fits the class. I think I've gotten lost or something. can you and share the okay stop share okay okay the link

okay so uh basically what's the audio's uh the content of of the audio is how does that language reflect on economy and political atmosphere of Kenya? When maybe someone mentions about how in the morning how they saw outdoor police marching and how then that is interpreted as the discourse on the government, Julie, what it did on the lockdown.

This, which is what happened is like maybe two weeks into the lockdown, police had killed more people than the virus itself. So for a recordist who was trying to capture the virus, and which is affecting people, like a cartographer of viruses shaped in shadows of doomed streets collecting evidence

yeah so it's just like more more like that basically so yeah thank you thanks a lot um i think we can listen to the sounds individually through the link I think we should let Steve answer some of the many, many questions. We have like a little more than 30 minutes. But if you would pick a few of them and try to start the general discussion with that. Sure. Cool. Thanks for the presentations in particular. lots of kind of interesting and surprising examples.

I suppose the most general stuff is the stuff that interests me and so there's a few things that came up which I suppose theoretically and maybe politically situate some of these discourses. the point that was made by Chara I think which puts it in the context of Deleuze's idea of societies of control and which is very present kind of lurks behind a lot of the work the ideas is the sonic warfare. And as I suppose there's the I can't

remember who said this, but someone made the point of contrasting between molar virality and molecular virality. And I think in my in Sonic warfare that that takes place as the relationship between mobile affective mobilization and modulation. Now, you could you could ask this question of audio virology, you could ask this question of speculative realism or new material, new materialisms generally, it was like, what's the point of this stuff? What does it do that more humanist discourses do, humanist discourses that are more centred on identity and representation

and so on? What's the relationship between these kind of non-representational theories and theories of, I suppose from my point of view, the theories that have dominated cultural theory philosophy um and in a sense the dominant train of western philosophy um now i think it was martina who raised this issue of flat flat ontology and the relationship between the thing and the human and i mean i i think the way i understand it um and i i assume from what jacob said that you're kind of when you talk about new materialism you're also referring to the

critiques of new materialism waged by robin james in a recent book is that is that what you um suggested for people to read in the first week jacob yeah that was chapter three uh three in that book yeah i think you know i'm not going to attempt to speak for new materialisms generally or or speculative realism generally, but just, and I think audio virology overlaps with both of these bodies of work. And I would say that, from my point of view, the point isn't to ignore the category of human is the point is to look at what the human is made from, and what, what the fixation on the category of the identity of the human, and human identities,

it the blind spots that it produces. And in the listening to COVID-19 essay, there's a quote by David Cronenberg which kind of just flips on its head and kind of takes things from the point of view of the virus. And also there's a, I don't know if any of you have read the, it's in the footnotes to that essay. It's a series of texts that have been written, that have been circulated online in the last few months, written from the point of view of the virus.

I think it's useful to challenge the anthropocentric model because it's based on a kind of transcendence and an arrogance, which is what has got us into the situation of the Anthropocene in the first place. I know that Robin James critiques new materialisms for suggesting that they replace discourses of representation and humanism and so on. on. For me, it's slightly different. I think, audio virology, for example, or the kind of theoretical models that I

use, are a way of just looking at the blind spots of these representation or identity based theories, and finding the commonalities that lie beneath the segmentation of species of different agents into species or different human groups into identities and so on, you know, what lies under that? What commonalities are there before regimes of signification and representation? So that's one kind of ongoing debate that I think is interesting. It would be interesting to develop that more if people want to discuss that more.

related to that, I think for me what an audio virology, for example, one of the things that's interesting about it is the way that the question, the extent to which it makes it possible to understand, and this goes for affect theory as well, to what extent does it help us understand a post-truth culture? A culture in which, you know, we're not talking about a rational public sphere, you know politics isn't happening purely at the rational level you need to understand the way in which emotion and affect and unthinking transmission of ideas we need to understand how some of these processes are going on and i think the idea of cultural

viruses, and more generally, the affect theory opens up a lot of these, you know, for example, conspiracy theories, how do conspiracy theories get transmitted? And how did it become virulent, when it's quite clear that, and it seems to me quite clear, that a lot of the people who in conspiracy theories know that they're bullshit so how do these you know how do these non-irrational discourses spread so i think some of these new materialist discourses so these affect theory discourses some of these speculative materialist discourses and audio virologies begin to help us understand um for example the political sphere so not just the aesthetic realm

within a post truth culture, within a culture in which a lot of the dynamics and processes that are going on are emotional, sub emotional, irrational, involve processes of hypnosis, mesmerism, non-conscious transmission of ideas. And I suppose my final response without getting too into any specific presentations is just

do with i think maybe the final present the final respondent raised this idea of the virus's function as a full as opposed to viruses code and so on and in a way i think that's that's one of the most interesting things about these ideas these many different deployments of uh essentially this metaphor of the virus it's you know how does it how does it help us understand for example music culture well it helps us understand okay just as a beginning of thinking about that um it's quite clear that the virus loves the same things as we do as music lovers the virus loves intimacy the virus loves enclosed spaces with bad ventilation and sweaty bodies intimately

entangled breathing the same air you know so we share we already share a lot with the virus but there's something if you just bracket the idea of it's a killer virus for a second um what's interesting to me about its relation to music culture is its functions these abstract functions the way it's transmitted transversally so transversality decode its power of decoding of de-territorialization its ability to cross boundaries ability to cross borders as well as sharing some of our interests and some of our desires so that's my response is some of my responses to the responses I'm more than happy to continue discussing this broader issue of

its relationship to new materialisms and what do these ideas offer more than just kind of cool ideas that can be developed aesthetically how do they play out politically for example and i think i mean that for me that's why the underground resistance example is interesting because you know despite it being clearly a science fiction story that's that's that's going on with that viral mythology um why it's interesting for me is not you know so it's audio virology not as a philosophy or an epistemology or an ontology but as I should call it war strategy propaganda strategy or a tactical guide

to infiltrating a culture to dealing with a dominant culture that is set in stone so so you know you so talk about strategy and tactics propaganda and in a way the the practical way in which memetics plays out and it's interesting to contrast this with ideas of sonic fiction as propaganda in a cultural war is viral marketing. Because viral marketing is an attempt to implement memetics, in a way, an attempt to engineer cultural viruses, to send them out in the world, you know, it's often referred to zero cost marketing. You know, the idea of viral marketing is,

how do you get something to spread with as little effort or energy involved as possible? It's kind of lazy capitalism at its peak or capitalism with minimal resources so how do you produce something that you release into the the information sphere which spreads itself and it seems to me that's a big dimension in how a lot of political ideologies spread in especially but not just in this post-truth world that we currently occupy. And I think in the virality book, you know, Tony Sampson goes on to talk about crowd theory and Gustav Le Bon's crowd theory and

Le Bon's crowd theory is a big influence on Nazi Germany and Hitler and so on, you know, where the spread of irrational ideologies was virulent. So I think there's a lot of interesting questions about how virology, this idea of virology, cashes out in a political context, whether it be in the context of capitalism and the attempt to induce consumption, the attempt to trick you out to make you spend money to consume something. So on the one side and also the way in which political ideologies can spread, irrational ideologies

can spread contagiously. I'll leave that there if anyone's got anything. Yeah, please just jump into the discussion. You don't have to wait for me to call you out. Yeah, I have a maybe I can hope so I can condense it down. But I was thinking about this example of conspiracy theories. And what's the novel was talking about the time, the length of time pop song stays relevant, let's say. And it's very low and we have that new pop song every week that is the new hot thing. And in this case, and it's conspiracy theories that I think about this, maybe this is a relation more with immunology

in the relation of immunology and ideology. the thing that matters in this conspiracy theories or in these pop songs, I don't know, it's not about the specific one or about the content of the song of the conspiracy, but rather that the people are able to be affected by it. They are not, I don't know, they don't have any immunology response to it, or ideology response to it. So by immunology, you mean they're like critical faculties? Perhaps, yeah, some kind of immunoideology, I don't know. Not necessarily this, only this, but I mean, for example, it's not like, okay, we really need that the 5G conspiracy has to be bought by the people.

It's about, okay, the people need to be open to all these kinds of ridiculous post-truth kinds of statements, be it 5g be that someone in the in asia ate a bat and now we the whole world or maybe china whatever the the races think of this conspiracy art it's not about being open to that and being immunocompromised to that maybe and to be able to be affected by it and it and and the flip side of that would be okay now we maybe building this critical thinking or this ideology of okay we're not we're actually not to be affected by but don't the contrary okay we can not be affected by that

we cannot be affected by viral marketing we can look at the hot new product on the market and say no i'm not affected by that i'm not bought into this capitalistic urge to consume and i think it actually just quickly in relation to the underground resistance thing it is almost like maybe it's the opposite of that where the viral the viral virology is not the the it's not the form that that it's important but actually the content or actually the the biology in underground resistance functions more as that as a function exactly a transmission of okay by this this idea by this fiction that's very cool that's very that makes the music more more

enjoyable i mean at least to me i think it's a cool story i think this fiction makes it makes it better let's say by way of that we can express this music and we can spread this in the just grew example can spread this afrological force that is anti-plague so maybe in that example in this in this kind of mobilizations that you call the the the virology right this kind of opposed to the the capitalist virology i don't know it's the contrary it's the the form or the function that gives way to the to the content or to the to this potential of the actual music instead of the the pop music that is just another instance of the same urge to consume and to keep being affected

by this pop virus. I don't know, maybe, hopefully that wasn't too much. So it's almost like a Trojan horse, like the, with the example of underground resistance you talk about it's almost like a trojan horse where the the form of the music is a carrier the viral the the viral function is a trojan horse and that it opens up a channel or a vector or a trajectory through which the content um i mean i'm looking at um simultaneously looking at the chat here through which the content of the black radical tradition is carried i mean just in relation to this pop example i mean one of one of the reasons one of the impetuses behind this

idea of audiology idea was was the observation that um within music culture there's a there's an old discourse of appropriation mainstream capitalist music culture um on the one side as a kind of organism that get in a small kind of underground music scene somewhere in the world which is very it's formally innovative somehow that begins to uh emerge you know it starts as a local scene begins to spread through the networks and you know becomes appropriated becomes incorporated into the main body becomes usually the usually this story is one of dilution watering down you know this is an old story it goes back to adorno and beyond to do with

standardization of music culture and so on and so this you know it's a story of appropriation innovation and appropriation um and what's been going on in the last few decades is the the ever shortening gap between innovation and appropriation. So this gap is getting shorter and shorter. I think this is somehow got something to do with what you were someone was talking about to do with the fast turnover of pop music, you don't even get a chance to be properly infected by it before there's a whole new wave of it comes through. it comes through. So these cultures accelerated, digital technology is in has been catalytic to this acceleration,

and this gap between invention or innovation and incorporate and appropriation, it's got shorter and shorter and shorter. And And I suppose audio virology is another way of looking at this idea of invention and appropriation because the story of appropriation is often one of victimage. We came up with this music, especially if you look at the history of the relationship of black music to mainstream music, we came up with this innovative style of music and it gets appropriated and a bunch of white musicians are making money from it now and the originators

are kind of ignored or left behind. It's a very unilateral model. The viral model doesn't contradict that model but at least it understands that when something is appropriated it's also spreading virally. You know that doesn't answer the question of economic, what I call in the essay economic parasitism in other words who's getting paid for that viral spread but at least understands that these processes are not unilateral they're bilateral they're they're multilateral they're going in many different directions the trade is is is two-way which is I think um somebody mentioned I think it was uh

James, you know, you mentioned symbiosis. Obviously, symbiosis is an evolutionary model, which is in the kind of direct conflict with the Darwinian model. What's interesting about symbiosis, or endosymbiosis is both parts of the trade change, you know, both sides of the exchange are mutated in the course of the of the engagement. Maybe that leads us to Zenobio's question of the virus that causes destruction of its host,

and how that is in cultural relations, on music, for example. if it's not a symbiosis, if actually the idea of the virus is causing damage without knowing it. And is that maybe like, I think it was Adorno-Holkheimer said that what actually was in the beginning for the good turned out in the negative after a while. Maybe that's a model of understanding that? But I think that this, when we talk about the virus destroying its host, there is still some sort of anthropomorphization happening because we ascribe certain faculties to the

virus that might not have any value for the virus because virus doesn't really destroy the host but somehow latches onto it to benefit from it. It's only for us that the virus destroys the host. So that's why I really appreciated the Cronenberg quote that somehow made it a bit more imminent and try to think about these dichotomies that we take for granted, but maybe if we really do this flat anthology into account, it might mean something completely different. I think that's right because obviously the um it's not in the virus's interest to destroy

the host before it's managed to replicate itself onto another host so it's it is a nuanced the idea of the virus destroying the host it has to be a nuanced idea that um if the virus destroys the host too quickly then it kills itself And how can we think that in a cultural sense? James is writing record labels. Maybe you can, James, maybe you can elaborate on that one.

It was kind of, well, not a full joke, but just in terms of the different capitalist interests which can try and over-commodify music or cultural production and just kill the golden goose in the pursuit of trying to squeeze money out of it. There's all kinds of ways in which that happens. I mean, I think there's also a certain fatigue with things that are too popular, maybe, right? There's some kinds of... even in memes, as we know today, there is this sort of, okay, this meme spreads too fast, it's everywhere, it's now being used in TV propagandas and

and everything is okay with now we are it's over. So I think maybe that, yeah, maybe that's the virus pretty too quickly and kill itself maybe. Or just these trains that go too fast. Yeah, go ahead, Catherine. Oh, sorry, thanks. Yeah, just to speak to the point about the kind of flat ontology with destruction, I think also useful for moving this into like a cultural realm is the link between the virus and affect that was brought up throughout the discussion too, because I think actually affect at least as it's maybe described by people like Masumi is kind of pre-social, it's sort of asocial and it's, it does have more of a sort of formal, I think, aspect that maybe

Luca was talking about. So it speaks to the way in which maybe, or maybe that's one way to kind of conceive this this flatness of the virus, which puts it in more of a position of this kind of like horizontally circulating thing that's not necessarily has this, it doesn't necessarily read as destructive very naturally in terms of its function. I was thinking a little bit about some of the things you were talking about a minute

ago, Luca, in terms of like immunology in relation to misinformation and things. And I've thought a lot about how there's lots of sort of artifacts related to digital culture that don't really fool younger people who grew up with certain types of communication. like if I see a spam email, I instantly know it's a spam email, but someone perhaps of like my grandparents' generation wouldn't be able to like intuitively discern the difference. So there's, and like, there's a lot of discussion in like kind of political theory about perhaps like

the rise of mass media and how that facilitated fascism of the 1930s. So that advancement in technological misinformation through the radio and things had that like, was basically a sort of an advance that the population didn't quite like know how to, weren't immunologically like sort of immune to that media sort of apparatus. So, you know, and much in the same vein, we're having this sort of this discussion around the effects of the internet and social media sort of platforms as well, and the sort of misinformation that's proliferating as a result of them. So, yeah, I don't know.

I guess there's an arms race perhaps between people intuitively growing up with types of technological media proliferation and knowing how to navigate it. Yeah, I don't know much about affect theory or this. I was even going to ask the chat in the chat to some reference to it, but I think it's this kind of critical distance, maybe, or position or immunology to use a metaphor about, yeah, there are things that we are not affected by. There are supposed to be, or the capitalist system makes us,

or wants us to be or spam in a or conspiracy or whatever but we we are able to build this position of yeah i don't know not believe in the hype to use the another music reference but but and yeah what what does that mean maybe maybe this position is a bit too much subject center or or assumes too much control of the subject to be able to okay i know i'm not going to buy into this hype but yeah I don't know what how that ends is but I think this is important in this current age exactly to be okay yeah not believe in every conspiracy not be super affected by it not be super affected by this this idea that okay the the not be super affected by the news in the end is

this super constant and ambiguous way of okay there's always a new headline that you really need to be able uh okay you really need to to solve this issue now you really need to donate to this cause right now and that's the we really need this action and actually okay maybe we need actually a a distance from you we need to be able to quickly quickly think is more than just be affected by it i don't know and it's not really a a few things to the familiar but that's the we we only have a few minutes left of the seminar today so maybe um steve you want to have a final Final word? Final remark?

Well, I suppose it's just a general question really to everyone. I suppose based on looking at the contributors to this course and knowing the reading, imagine the reading you gave in the first week, I suppose it's just Just what all of you lot as theorists and artists and so on practitioners find useful about the idea of a flat ontology, you know, escaping or sidestepping this idea of an anthropocentric framework, and what does it facilitate to you guys theoretically and practically? Well, that's a good one to end it with.

Thank you so much for your presentation, Steve, and for also the student participants and the responders. I think we have too little time for so much interesting material, but we also have like mental capacity capacity capacity that reaches a time limit um so i have been very very happy about this one um i hope you also enjoyed it also you steve um yeah a couple of familiar faces that's good as always if you have any questions i'm reachable per email and i'll try to get back

as quick as I can. One asked can we keep the convo going elsewhere? Well, I'm not sure if I can just let this window be open. I can do that. I'll stop the recording now at least.