Steve Goodman Kode9 · Audio Virology (On-Line Lecture)

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Thank you. The School of Arts Knowing Through Sound Open Program. Before diving into today's session, I would like to remind you all that our sessions are available online through the School of Arts Facebook page and YouTube channel.

So if you missed Delphine Sardos' talk on ambience, Salome Vogelin's take on how to know from the invisible, Minas Abbas-Natzari, phonocentric adventures in design fiction, Claudio Martinho's Resonant Environments or even Miguel Carvalha's Computational Listening, you can access those lectures at any time. With that being said, and proceeding with our overarching research project on how can sonic objects and methodologies be framed as epistemological tools, we have the pleasure to welcome Steve Goodman, also known as Code9, to our series. Steve Goodman is a musician, DJ, artist, writer and researcher. He recorded three full-length albums under the Code 9 moniker, all released under his own imprint, Hyperdub.

The first two, Memories from the Future and Black Sun, were outputs from his long-standing collaboration with the late vocalist and dub poet Steve Gordon, also known as the Space Ape. In 2015, Goodman released Nothing, which has been described as a treatise on existentialism in our surreal, cybernetic and near post-human age. Beyond his career as a producer, DJ and a pivotal figure within the bass music scene, Goodman has been researching and writing on cultural and media theory, sonic studies and cyberculture. A member of the now both extant and infamous CCRU, Goodman completed his doctoral thesis in 1999 entitled Turbulence, a Cartography of Postmodern Violence. In 2010 he published Sonic Warfare, Sound, Affects

and Ecology of Fear through the MIT Press and in 2019 as a member of the Audient Collective he co-edited the essay Ontology and Sound and Dead, edited by Urbanomic. With today's theme in mind, To these brief biographical notes, I would like to add the 2004 sonic piece Bacteria in Dub, a collaboration with Space Ape Luciana Parisi and Miss Haptic, and Steve's participation on the 26th chapter of Urbanomics Plague's podcast series. Today's lecture, entitled Audiovirology, aims to further his investigations on the compliances between culture, biology, sound, technology and mimetics, specifically through the foundations laid out in the capitalism and schizophonia chapter of sonic warfare.

Under cognitive capitalism, virality is rendered as a measurement of success. The prosperity and therefore the validity of the units of content is accessed by the interdependence of its virulence, the ability to affect a host, and its contagion or replication level, its capacity to proliferate transversely across a system or a network, affecting new agents, bodies or nodes. Thus, under the guise of such sociocultural hyperstructure, becoming viral stands as a pivotal target and constitutive component of cultural objects teleology. Such units or memes seem to respond directly to a series of quantification protocols analytics and statistics that map their isomatic advancement through parameters of

visualizations clicks hits accesses identifications or sharing rates in that audio virology is presented as a subset of the cultural virus construct proposed by neo-darwinian thoughts arguably goodman's work seems to operate within a spinozian framework moving across a body mind and nature culture continuum, opening the possibility of a sonic virus that, despite its metaphorical nature, doesn't renounce its actuality, brought into being by cultural forms which would stand precisely on the refusal of the Cartesian mind-body dichotomy. The global scenario articulated by SARS-CoV-2 over the past two years asks for updates on the concepts and notions of virality.

His urgency is perhaps more preeminent within the construct of a cultural virus and subsequently within the idea of an audio virology. Remaining true to its personal methodology as a concept engineer operating a super collider of transmedial references, Steve Goodman summons Boros' media guerrilla tactics, Julian Henrique's conception of a sound system as a global transmitter and Kojo Ejun's Sonic Fictions and future rhythm machine among many others in order to investigate what an audio virology would yield after COVID-19. So Steve thank you for being here and the decks are all yours. Thank you. Thanks to Jose and yourself for the kind invitation to speak today.

for obvious reasons we can't be together but hopefully what I'm going to discuss kind of put some maybe a slightly unusual point from the global pandemic situation that we're all living through so let me just briefly outline what we're going to do for the next hour hour and a half and then I'll give a short introduction. Sure. So the first thing I want to do today is just talk a little bit about the video we're going to play and then after the video I'm going to kind of elaborate and take some of the

concepts that were contained within it further. So after the video I'm going to give some examples, some additional examples of what I refer to as audio virology. Then I'm going to discuss some of the concepts that relate to that idea. idea and then I'm going to focus in on a strange pseudo-academic discipline of memetics which ironically kind of failed I would say kind of failed as a an academic discipline but may perhaps in tune with its its modus operandi has become autonomous of any academic field as such has become a word, a contagious word that has infected all of our understandings of

how the internet and social media operate. In other words, the meme, the discipline of memetics. Then I'll talk a little bit more about the relationship between the meme memetics within the attention economy of contemporary digital capitalism and then we'll see how much time we have left. So to begin with I just want to say some, just give a little bit background to the video audio virology that we're going to show in the next few minutes. It was originally commissioned as an essay by Unsound Festival in Poland for their digital, the digital version of their festival

which took place at the end of last year. It was supposed to be an essay. I wrote the essay which came out in their book intermission and I was supposed to attend the festival and give it as a lecture but obviously circumstances intervened so I ended up making it as an audio essay. I presented it to to unsound and they decided actually we'd look at it with some visuals so they paired me with a video editor and we culled lots of visuals from youtube and around the internet and what you're about to see is is the end result um so what is audio virology well

I'd say it's a set of discourses which for me stretch back quite a few decades and I suppose came to their apex within cyberpunk fiction of the 1990s where for example you had things like audiovirus you had an idea of computer viruses as something which was simultaneously a computer virus simultaneously was able to move between bodies and machines. So kind of flattened out the distinction between bodies and machines. And within cyberpunk fiction of the late 90s, you know, a company that really pulled together discourses from science fiction, more generally

software programming, theoretical biology, medical epidemiology, marketing, branding, a very transdisciplinary set of discourses. And I always wondered, especially in relation to memetics, you know, I always wondered, is that what is the auditory? What is the sonic equivalent of this idea of the meme. The meme as a basic building block of culture, as a cultural unit of transmission. And so this idea of ultra audio virology really came together through thinking about, you know, what is the meme of the ear? What's, you know, what's, what is the meme of

the ear and also how does sonic affect get transmitted spread incubated how does it mutate and so on now obviously the fact that we've just we're still in the middle of a global pandemic kind of puts a slightly different light on some of these discourses so that's that's what prompted me to to i suppose do some kind of update on the chapters that focused on audio viruses from my sonic warfare book from around 10 years ago in other words how does the global pandemic reflect on refract inflect these discourses about sound and virality so if we could play the video now

please i think we can yeah there it is noise noise noise the greatest single disease vector of civilization in april 2020 marcus bueller a musician and scientist at mit created a model the 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 with an ominous verbal of noises lurking underneath. The 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 which runs for about an hour and 15 minutes, that encodes the entire three-dimensional hierarchical structure of this spike protein, the virus. For Bueller, aestheticising the virus

offered the potential of some practical antiviral outcomes, making music from, and therefore opening a portal into, the language of proteins. Bueller proposed that sonifying a range of different viruses, the mutations, responses to changes in temperature etc could facilitate the comparison and analysis. 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. 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 Signs 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 dematerialization materialization, 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 sleeve 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 considered the transmission of a biological virus code through the channels of media culture.

Its journey, an effect of transmission of the virus structure through digitised ripples of intensity A transmedia vector scaling up from viral code through the microbiological to the audio-visual 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 biologic alterations in those who survive. And these alterations are genetically conveyed, giving rise to a race of mutants known as the fever fleets.

Some of these mutations are favorable and some otherwise. A top government official bluntly warned, Virus B23, now loose in our overcrowded cities, is an agent that produces biologic changes in those affected, fatal in many cases, permanent and hereditary in those who survive and become carriers for that strain. which, as a matter of survival, they will spread as far and fast as possible to destroy enemies and quite literally make friends. Junkies, however, are only likely affected by the virus and remain characteristically unchanged.

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 course through the veins of director David Cronenberg when he proposed that They understand physical process on earth requires a revision of the theory that we're all God's creatures, all the 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 Ismael Reid's novel Mumbo Jumbo, 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 jez grew. Jez grew was a particularly interesting cultural contagion because it cured its victims of the rhythmically regressive influence of urometric musical civilization. Instead of damaging the body, it could enhance a body's capacity to affect. Jesgru 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 Jesgru and the Aetonists, supporters of the mythology of Western civilization, a clash between black and white magic. The Aetonists of the Wallflower Order noted that Jeskru slips into the radiolas and dictaphones. They therefore monitored media to follow the progress of the epidemic. Moreover, for the Aetonists, 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 bio-ware customised to Reed Jess Grew's program as anti-plake. 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. Buddha is really a term for all the synthesis that took place in this country when different tribes came together. You see, we had Vons and Vons people and Igbos 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, 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 some became mean. And there were even white influences. For example, Legba 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 invisible. 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 led to new spirits being created in South America, with no antecedents in Africa, led to ragtime here. Read an early anthology by James Wallen Johnson, he said nobody knows how ragtime came about, it just grew. You see, that's why I just grew in 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. And like 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 Jez Gru, results in the affective mobilization of populations in dance. The R1 strain is diagnosed as and transferred by rhythmically oriented machinery.

In UR 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 cousin which we will call C for 0,

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 sea 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 our one using its enhanced rhythm perception. It could decipher our one 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 the 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 Reed 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 racialized 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-viologies serve as a rhetorical response to the inhuman agency of an environment within which humans find themselves often helpless. Hosts, at minimum, lead 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 musicals 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, 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. Creepy, 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, which 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 welcome back um as you can as you probably noticed from the end credits there a lot of the

music and the sound you are listening to was from some of the projects i was talking about uh particularly some of the data sonifications of marcus bueller um and also the leaf elf elf Elgren's the kind of chittering crackling sounds were from Leif Elgren's project virulent sounds um virulent images virulent sounds um okay so let's continue with this idea which is referred to in in that piece um which David Toope the the music writer David Toope refers to as kind of the metaphor of music as a virus and I want to kind of go drill a bit deeper into that idea

so there's a quote from William Gibson the cyberpunk author his books count zero Bobby do you know what a metaphor is a component like a capacitor so i think this raises the question of you know it's all very well calling something a metaphor in other words um you know making a comparison between two things but what if what a metaphor is more like a machinic process so that comparison or similarity between two things actually has a kind of linguistic function and a cultural a cultural function so we'll go deeper into this

a couple of quotes from Kojo Eshin's book more brilliant than the sun also from the late 90s non-sound scientists like Richard Dawkins talks very happily about cultural viruses so richard dawkins in his book the selfish gene which will if we've got time we'll talk about a little bit about later came up with the word meme the meme as the cultural equivalent of the gene what the gene is in biology the basic unit the meme is in culture so richard dawkins talks very happily about cultural viruses argues cd plan 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 that is spread spread by Ishmael what Ishmael Reed terms anti-plagues and finally another way of thinking about an audio virus is what we have come to know as an earworm an earworm an alien or worm an audio insinuation that seeps into ears and taps out mnemonics on its drums. It smirks sated because as soon as you drop the needle on the track you're in its domain. So in the video but well generally we could say there's a number of

ways in which this idea of the audio virus is taken up. In the video, I talked a little bit about digital sound design, so AI-driven data sonification of virus and protein structures. Viruses also have been deployed within generative music that uses evolutionary genetics and modeling as a way of creating evolving and mutating musical form. Also the examples we gave of Leif Elgren, Underground Resistance, Ishmael Reed and William Burroughs are all sonic

fictions of viruses within the field of electronic music and science fiction. And I mentioned it briefly, but there's a lot more to be said about the way in which particularly cognitive psychology understands ideas of earworms as essentially little catchy tunes that get stuck in your head. the idea of viral marketing has been very popular since the birth of the internet as a kind of cheap way of marketing a zero cost marketing which basically the idea is that the message itself does all the work because it propagates itself

of the population. So ideas of cultural viruses work within marketing and branding culture and specifically audio viruses as sonic logos or sonic branding or acoustic messages through which branding or marketing signals are delivered. And this all takes us back to Richard Dawkins' neo-Darwinian concept of the mean. Before we turn to that in more detail, I just want to outline quickly the basic components of what an audio virology would consist of.

In other words, the transposition of virus concepts into sound and music culture. So that's concepts of incubation, transmission, infection, mutation and strains. So incubation refers to the conditions of emergence of an audio virus. Its transmission is spread through cultural networks. Infection, the way through intense interpersonal encounters, sonic viruses pass from one body to another. Mutation, which is very important when we come to talking about mimetics.

way in which what's referred to as an audio virus mutates over time, evolves, is subject to environmental pressure, which changes its form. In other words, it's aesthetic evolution over time. And an audio virology gives us a kind of allows us to see the conventional vocabulary of music culture style aesthetic styles genres and so on as virus strains strains of different virus that interrelate with each other symbiotically okay so in the last got 15 minutes to do this

I want to drill a bit deeper into this idea of the meme or the origin of the meme. I think it's an open question how we relate these ideas to what colloquially and everyday language now we refer to as a meme, which usually is a unit of audiovisual culture. It could be an image with a slogan on it, it could be a short video. And so I suppose part of this project is about thinking through the auditory of what's become known as the meme in social media culture.

so memetics the idea of the mean which is developed in walkensbrook's selfish gene but also in his essay viruses of the mind is a neo-darwinian supposition perpetuated by academics journalists viral marketers and software developers it's kind of an academic discipline that never quite got off the ground for various reasons various methodological reasons but somehow is nice to become autonomous from that and become extremely virulent um dawkins meme is a self-copying message system regulated by the decision-making process of an evolutionary algorithm darwinians so that algorithm

its mode of algorithmic propagation is characterized by an inheritance mechanism that firstly resists variations caused by environmental interaction, and secondly, achieves the widest prevalence depending on its parasitical fitness. So you could also refer to a meme in this sense as a non-genetic replicator, whereas a gene is obviously a genetic replicator. So the meme is a replicator determined by a set of rules to fight for survival in this so-called so-called meme pool the cultural equivalent of what we understand is the gene pool biologically in other words the memetic code spreads by advantage

using for example an audio clip as a carrier or host to increase the viral contagiousness of the idea within it the similarity between a population of minds and a computer network Dawkins argues 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 often in the discourse of memetics, a common example of where memetics intersects with music is in the evolution of birdsong. And that's an

example where the biological and the cultural come together in an interesting way. Other Other examples of mimetic imitation within musical culture, in her book The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore uses the example of a catchy musical tune. A number of these tunes, for instance, a sequence of notes played on a piano infect the listener's mind, using it as a vehicle to get to the meme pool, where tunes can then compete for survival. the evolutionary algorithm runs all that follows happens at the expense of other less contagious tune competition is often fierce as black more there are

more memes than vehicles like this the mind that received the tune receives the tune becomes like a tape machine there's always switched to record mode but only retains the best coded meme So what spreads through a social network is usually attributed to two largely within the discourse of memetics uncontested logics, logics of resemblance and repetition. The idea of resemblance is the idea that the meme can be understood like a gene. So the resemblance between a meme and a gene. So cultural contagion is assumed to correspond to a distinctive biologically determined.

This is unquestionably a mechanistic virality, which is analogically compared to the canonical imprint of genetic code. So already, I think it's important to question this analogy between the meme and the gene. If we're going to begin to unpick this language of cultural viruses. And secondly, repetition. What spreads is said to occur in a representational space, collective contamination in which individual persons who become part of a crowd tend towards thinking in the same mental images, real and imagined. So the idea is the reasoned or the or the rational individual is seemingly overpowered by a neurotic mental state of

of unity unique to the crowd which renders their subjectivity vulnerable to further symbolic contagious encounters and entrainments this idea this explanatory power of the mimetic algorithm proposing that it produces media biological and technological that become progressively more evolved through the survival of the fittest more prosperous vehicles designed purely for the fecundity in other words the fertility of the of the cultural bar the longevity and the fidelity how efficiently it copies itself of the means. Mimetics attempts to go beyond the need for a transcendental designer god

and the conscious self, defined by the agency of the human soul or free will. It's an intriguing mode of filiative evolution that determines cultural propagation by way of an illusionary consciousness state, what memetics calls the self-plex, structured around the reality of the memeplex. Both the illusion of the self and the false claim to free will are themselves due to memes that get inside the human physical system and persuade it that it has both a self and a free will to trick it into further propagation of memes. So the basic idea is that we are kind of humans are vehicles through which messages, cultural units, memes, clusters of sound pass.

We're merely carriers to something which crosses, passes through culture, passes through populations transversal. There's the key difference between the gene and the meme. in a sense the gene is something that passes vertically down through culture through inheritance whereas the virus in the meme is transversal it passes not through genetic replication but through symbiosis and transversal replication there's there's a number of problems to the to the discourse of memetics which i i don't have much time to go into but i'm just

going to give a quick summary of them um the first one i suppose relates to this i suppose the poverty of this analogy between the gene and the meme and that that really that can only go so far and within culture in other words the object of study of memetics memetics as an academic discipline has never properly been able to identify the cultural unit the meme in itself and then you know experiment and test test out this theory there's a there's a there's a problem which is worthy of discussion to do with the analogy between gene and meme.

Secondly, mimetics tends to underplay the importance of environment, the importance of the role of the environment in the transmission of messages. So if we think about this conventional information theory of the passing of signals uh usually the the input of the environment is understood as the noise that interrupts the signal or the noise that threatens the signal and memetics really doesn't have much to say about that especially the role of the environment or noise has in the mutation of of the meme the mutation of the signal that's attempting to be transmitted. In other words, it underplays the role, the idea that the medium is also the

message, not just the message is the message. And then there's a paradox that comes up when when people attempt to implement memetics practically, and the cultural sphere in which this happens is branding and marketing and the problem arises through the idea within let me just move this one the idea within viral marketing discourse you know what viral marketing discourse once or what it claims through this idea of like a the virality of a message is

that the message does all the work of self-replication but obviously if you're a viral marketer or you're using viral branding you want at the end of that process there to be a grand reveal where suddenly after thinking that the the the the you you were coming across the message uh perhaps serendipitously or spontaneously or coincidentally at the end of the process the viral marketing message reveals itself as promoting approach a product and so there's a there's a tension here there's a paradox here between

this kind of mysterious magical quality of the viral marketing tells itself that it's using and the fact that it always has to demystify itself at the end of the process because it's always interested in selling a product or promoting a product. So there's a lot more to be said about those critiques, but I suppose just to, by way of conclusion, it's worth thinking about or pulling back a little bit from this. Really what this is all about is the relationship of memory to the attention economy of digital capitalism or what we might call viral capitalism.

And the way in which psychology has tried to, and I suppose the history of pop music is the history of an industry looking to cultivate cultural viruses. Pop music is about the engineering of earworms or brain worms. And this is, you know, in a way brand psychology and viral marketing is attempting to build on these innovations made within popular music culture. There was a fleeting moment in the video of Kylie Minogue's track, I Can't Get You Out of My Head, which probably is pop music's most distinct distillation of this idea of

audio virology. Within psychology, these earworms are often referred to through what's called stuck tune syndrome or the idea of music or cognitive itches or involuntary musical imagery and cognitive itches which you know you have a tune stuck in your head you have a piece of a melody stuck in your head for example or a lyric and the only way to get out um and because it's stuck in your head it repeats and the more you try and extract that earworm from your brain the more it implants itself and the more the harder it is. There's some amusing material online if you search for

of like different techniques that people use to try and extract earworms from their memory. I mentioned it briefly in the video, but within Afro-Diasporic electronic music culture through Sonic Fictions, the idea of the audio virus in a very different way from within marketing and brand discourse has been taken up through the idea of the dub virus, the dance hall rhythm method, or as I mentioned in the video, underground resistance, viral sonic weaponry. So just to conclude, if anyone's interested, here's some of the material that, if you're

interested, she takes this a bit deeper. There's a number of things I've written. And then the Dawkins references. And I think probably one of the best books for dealing with the critiques of mimetics is Tony Sampson's Virality. And I haven't had time to talk about it today. But interestingly, he uses the French sociologist from the late 19th century, Gabriel Tard, who develops an alternative to memetics through his idea of the imitative ray or wave that spreads through culture, a kind of memetic wave that spreads through culture. So I think I'll leave that there so we've got time for questions.

Thank you, Steve. That was awesome. And I would like to personally thank you for including Kylie Minogue in your playlists. I was just thinking about the Carolee Jespen, Jespen's hits Call Me Baby, it was another pop hit that was really viral a couple of years ago. So before opening the session for the Q&A I will frame myself and ask just two questions that I think that are connected through different scales. So the first is directed to the framework in which the the notion of an audio virology arises. So you've mentioned in your talk and essay a concern with anthropocentrism and the need to surpass such predicament in order to undermine the hegemony

of a single localized position or experience. However, research and discursive vectors are attempting to think with or as non-human persons. And I'm mentioning all of these discourses that have the xeno prefix. In those discourses, isn't there an inherent risk or even a fatality of actually fueling the assimilating capacities of an anthropocentric position? Because if to know a world is to build a world, knowing that world feeds back the human under the guise of the human. So isn't this kind of anti-anthropomorphic discourse a way of actually fueling the notion of a trans-descendant human

that is capable of understanding other epistemologies? I think that would be the first level of the question. And then moving forward to the models that you've presented. So regarding those zonification models, isn't there a similar predicament? Like in this case, by overextending models beyond their initial theoretical scope. Like when Alexandra Padjak, while describing her Sounds of HIV album, claims that we are literally, and I think this is the key element, we are literally listening to HIV, I cannot avoid to a certain suspicion how much of the HIV is ever present in transposing it into semantics and syntax systems of music and the same thing can be asked for any kind of visualization for that matter

their models they are models of uh they are brought into the realm of the human intelligibility so we are just operating on the necessary biases to produce models and then just to close up i was thinking about how margaret thatcher was so keen in applying berta lanthi's general system theory in politics and social design and politics and how like this kind of New Age Buckminster, this New Age discourses by Buckminster Fuller drawn by this geodesic structures and geometry. I'm not sure if I made any sense, I was trying to improvise from notes. Yeah I mean I would like to ask you for some clarification on the first, I think

that's super interesting um you know the the idea that you could end up um with the opposite consequences of what you're intending through through almost giving too much um weight to the non-human so like a little uh expansion of that point because i'm just genuinely interested i I think it's an interesting point. The overextending issue... Again, I'd like a little bit more time for you. Okay. I think they have some very important questions, but I'd like for you to just push a little bit further what you want to do.

Sure, I'll try to do it as briefly as possible. To me, the argument of the first or the basic argument of the first question would be like, and this is quite common now, and I believe it was one of the main problems with speculative realism. I remember an essay by Robin McKay, and actually he was kind of perplexed on how speculative realism found so much restlessness in the arts due to the fact that speculative realism was kind of a forecasting beyond the human asymptote. So bringing it into the aesthetics, it was kind of weird. So in that I would say that any claim of an ability to think with or think as a non-human

would also yield or entail the capacity of the human to think outside itself and thus being able to escape like Wittgenstein's prison. So that would be like a feedback back into the initial position and maybe with more, to use your terms, violent aspects where you actually forget that when you are capturing data or information actually capturing, you are forecasting it or you are imprinting that data in what is being measured or analyzed as your own epistemology. So this kind of xenomaneuver, this is really a personal genuine question because I am having a hard time to understand how wouldn't this be like

a fortification of Anthropocene or Anthropocentrism in itself. I'm not sure if this was a good clarification or not? Let me try to just address that in some way. I mean, I think it's a very important question because firstly, I think, you know, I think it's right to place this idea of audio biology within the context of speculative realism with all the problems that that entails. Because it has this kind of flat ontology, which in fact makes it very difficult to make judgments, make epistemological judgments,

and also to... We could leave it for other time if you prefer. I think it's an important problem because it's a problem with affect theory as well, which is central to my book, and it's something that in the last couple of years I've started to think about a bit more, which is the problem with affect theory, by implication, by implication theories of, or at least the way I've framed theories of cultural virology is that they ignore epistemology or tend not to formulate epistemology

in particularly convincing matters. So I think this is an important question because it points to a gulf or a void within the discourse of affect theory and speculative realism more generally. I still, I'm not 100% sure that my brain is capable of answering that question. Okay. I suppose one thing I would say is that, we would be to challenge this idea, the separation between us as humans and the non-human world. us as humans are made up of mostly non-human at the molecular level and also I'd want to challenge

the idea that thought is strictly human. Oh I'm with you on that, sure. or that thought is something which is inhabited, thought is something that is hosted by humans and is used humans as replication vessels or development vessels. I mean, I suppose this is one way in which people are starting to think about artificial intelligence or the history of, for example the history of philosophy in relation to artificial intelligence as as the history of philosophy was there in other words to incubate thought until it could become autonomous from

humans so I don't have any concrete answers to your questions but I would just want to problematize them a little bit by um by throwing into into relief this distinction between the human and the non-human because what we understand to the human, to be the human is composed of mostly non-human. Okay. Yeah. I think you're mentioning, when you mentioned that, that's this course that that tries to correlate philosophy and I believe it's a general artificial intelligence, by it's, it's mainly, I, to my, to my knowledge, largely based on Reza Negaristani's intelligence and spirit program.

And I think you mentioned something that's really important, that's this idea of functionalism, like the thing or the mind or the thought. The mind in itself is not what it is, it's what it does. So if something performs as a thought or as a mind, it is not already precluded to the non-human. so a non-human might be able to have a mind if it performs as such, this would be like Turing versus Searle argument. Were you going in this kind of direction or am I just completely lost here? Loosely, I'm aware that Rez's argument, that's part of Rez's argument, although I don't know it in enough detail to deal with what he said to do with Turing and Searle.

I suppose the other point I'd make to do with the Robin Mackay essay that you mentioned was that these, you know, audio virology didn't come from speculative realism. As I've tried to outline, audio virology was existing in fiction and, you know, non-academic cultural discourses several decades now. So it was already, you know, and it existed as a kind of tool of speculation of like, what if we got rid of, what if technology took us beyond the distinction between humans and machines? So the speculative realism thing, you know, is something that kind of as a movement was going on maybe 10 or so years ago.

But I think, I suppose what complicates that idea is that a lot of these ideas of cultural virology were much more culturally widespread before it started to get theorized as such. within the field of speculation. And maybe this relates to some of your other points. I would want to hang on to, not to disregard your points, but I'd want to hang on to the ability, the speculative potential of using these ideas, such as cultural viruses, even taking on board the points you're making to do with reinforcing anthropocentrism and so on.

Okay that's more than fair, thank you very much. So I think we have a question that's being brought to us via Facebook from Diana, if I'm not mistaken, Diana is a student on sound art in the Netherlands, I think I know this Diana, so the question is hi, thanks a lot for this. Do you believe these music viruses live by themselves after being exposed? Meaning like humans lose the control of it after being exposed? I'm not sure if they are translating the question in the right fashion.

okay i mean i i i'm not 100 sure i understand that question but i'm just saying that this definitely you know i suppose the idea is that viruses these cultural viruses can lay dormant till they're taken up again but what is definitely being explored here is those moments perhaps more than moments but those moments when we lose control when when the cognitive apparatus breaks down perhaps temporarily um when our system of categories for scanning the external world or processing external world uh becomes insufficient or is scrambled um or where the body makes decisions for itself and where the mind is

merely retrospectively claiming ownership of those bodily autonomic decisions. I don't know if that answers that question. I think it does. I'm seeing now that we have Luane Santoush, and she's within the Zoom session, so we'll be able to hear her. Hola Luana, tu es bien? Let me see if we can get... Hola Luana. Hi. Okay, they're trying to make the connection, sorry. Okay, there's Luana here.

Luana? Hi, hello. How are you? Are you hearing? Yeah, perfectly. Very much. I have a question. Language and sound can be contagious, and given all the pollution that they have been suffering, for language organizations, what can be the vaccine to this virus? Do you think that art can give back a sense of truth? What can be the vaccine to these cultural viruses? Is that the question?

Well, I mean, that is a question of perspective in a way, way because the examples within afro-diasporic music culture where they uh have taken up this kind of idea of sonic fiction the the in in sonic fiction of audio viruses um the uh the son the audio virus is used as a weapon against whatever you want to call it white supremacy or western civilization or western musical culture. So from their perspective, a vaccine is not the point. The point is transmission, proliferation and takeover. From this kind of

of perspective, the objective is viral takeover. So vaccination against that, to be honest, I think, you know, mainstream Western culture is often doing a very good job of trying to vaccinate against viruses that come from from black music culture. At the same time, you know, in other language we would call that appropriation from the perspective of these sonic fictions we call that viral propagation but we have a language for the idea of the assimilation and the recuperation of

cultural viruses that come from the outside of mainstream culture and that's you know idea of appropriation i i part of where this idea of audio virology comes from for me is trying to rethink in more complicated terms this idea of capitalist appropriation or capitalist recuperation um in terms of the equal and opposite version of that process which is viral propagation so something when mainstream culture appropriates something is simultaneously being infected so i suppose that's one um one answer to that question um from another perspective of course with something like you know with a cultural equivalent of

with a cultural equivalent of a dangerous virus such as covid it could be anything from like hate speech or far-right ideology this kind of mind fire what dawkins would call i mean he also expands that to talk about all religions as viruses of the mind but he's kind of crazy and we can bracket a lot of ideas um but if we think about i mean if we think about how do you vaccinate dangerous cultural virus how do you vaccinate a culture against dangerous cultural viruses then you bring up a whole series of issues to do with truth culture and what is the status of truth and reality in our heavily saturated cybernetic culture

and you know that's uh that can be a strategic question you know do you I mean, how do you, where is the virality? Is it the whole culture that is viral? In other words, it can't be resisted, and therefore the only response to it is to be, this I suppose would be the accelerationist response. The approach would be to be more viral than the mind viruses that exist out there. Or a more conventional response would be, as you're asking how do you vaccinate against these dangerous cultural viruses and I think contemporary culture is an ongoing laboratory an ongoing experimental site for

how to deal I think we're just learning how to deal with post-truth culture right now so I don't necessarily have any great ideas for that although this is an ongoing cultural experimentation certainly you know to take a more trivial example of the cognitive itch or the earworm or the the sticky tune the stuck tune syndrome some of the ideas that have been suggested by psychologists for removing earworms some of them involve repetition you know the idea that you you can you know by repeating and repeating to the point of parody that suddenly the earworm will disappear or what's called substitution, replacing an earworm with another earworm or

transplantation, giving someone else the earworm in the hope that you will extract it from your own memory. So the answer to your question is it depends what perspective you're taking. It depends what perspective you're trying to vaccinate from. Thank you very much for the answer. So Steve, it seems that Diana actually finished her question on Facebook, but actually it goes in kind of the same direction that Luana, the question of Luana's about what's the vaccination approach for it, let them live and accept it or control it. I would ask just if we could explore a little bit further this idea of vaccination.

vaccination, I would like to ask you if you could, if this would in any way relate to this distinction that you make in Sonic Warfare that I am very fond of between modulation and mobilization. So what would be a virus that modulates and a virus that mobilizes? And I think that there's a clear distinction between what you call black noise and white noise and sound systems within this construct. Well, I suppose the idea of modulation, you know, I'm taking from Deleuze's essay, Societies of Control, which is, you know, post-disciplinary societies operate through moulds, through cultural moulds, which modulate the behaviour and the thought processes of populations.

in other words instead of moving from what Foucault described as disciplinary society where there's lots of different enclosures in which we exist and move through as we go through our lives from from the family to the school to prison to mental hospital to to the factory to the workplace to corporation now you know we're leaving traces and databases all the time and it's a much more smooth method of control we're being constantly modulated we're self-surveilling as opposed to having to be surveyed through surveillance through the panopticon as such where there's a lot more self-surveillance going on so the idea of affective mobilization as opposed to modulation which i

developing sonic warfare it was really i suppose it's really a way of thinking about how do we nurture cultural viruses that that go in the opposite direction of modulation and i suppose that's why i talk about ishmael reed because he talks about i suppose about the origins of african American music culture in ragtime as what he calls the jazz the jazz groove virus or something this thing which just happened it spontaneously arose through an assemblage of different conditions of possibility social conditions economic conditions forced migration during

the Middle Passage, colonization, imperialism, slavery, etc. And the virus which manifested itself in in ragtime and using the transmission networks of early radio and then looking at the history of African American music cultures, ragtime through jazz, swing, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, house techno, hip hop, etc, etc, etc. These are examples where Anishmael Reid refers to jazz group, not, not, he calls a virus, but he also calls it an anti-plague. In a sense, he's talking about a cultural virus which vaccinates against the

the dangerous contamination and infectiousness of white American culture. So the jazz groove virus or the other kind of cultural viruses I talk about positively in sonic warfare are examples of affective mobilization, particularly in dance. which kind of reminds me of that idea of the the tarant the that dance from the south of italy the taranta which is spread by the bite of the tarantula spider and it makes people go into this

hysterical frenzy dance and you know it's this kind of idea how do we nurture audio viruses that have this enlivening effect on populations as opposed to killing basically between cultural viruses the viruses that kill populations and viruses you know obviously the word virus here is is confusing for some people but that's why i'm trying to think a bit more complexly about viruses, you know, viruses that enliven populations, as opposed to viruses that are contagious cultural systems that modulate populations that control them, that,

I suppose, function against becoming and change and innovation and escape. It makes a lot of sense. I think Tarantela is an excellent archetype of this kind of viralness, virality and even sexuality. So I think we have, well, we have three questions. We have one from Vasco Barbedo and then one from Alexandre Bezerra and then the co-curator of the program, José, also wants to ask a question, but I'm still going to think about if I'll allow him to do it or no. So Vasco, if you want to go forward. Hello, good evening. I just wanted to change the discussion into a more technical sphere,

if you don't mind. I wanted to ask Steve Goodman about if you could choose one of the projects of sounds that were in the video, like the sounds with the bells, for example, and just explain us what inspired you for making that sound in particular, and what kind of microphone you used or software. So just a more technical question. Thank you. I mean, that's easy to answer, and it actually takes me back to something I forgot to say about the first question, which that the kind of chiming music, it's not my composition,

that's the, that was the composition by Marcus Buehler, which used the protein structure, it was a kind of data sonification exercise, used the protein structure of the coronavirus, coded into music. And I think there's some, if you search for Marcus Bueller, let me just go, but I don't know if you can still see. Oh, it will be available. He'll, sorry, Vasco will be able to see the credits on Marco Bueller's. If you search for Marcus Bueller and coronavirus, you'll see his techniques of data sonification, how he got from this protein structure into music. And what I forgot to say to the initial question was that I don't trust any of these data sonification.

It's completely arbitrary. How do you go from a protein structure to music? All of these data sonifications are, as far as I'm concerned, completely arbitrary. I think they're interesting in opening up this kind of music as metaphor idea, but they're really very metaphorical. I'm very skeptical when it comes to data sonification into music because like a lot of the a lot of where, for example, genetic algorithms or evolutionary algorithms are imported into digital sound design domain. there's always a state i mean it's the same with a lot of artificial intelligence music projects just now there's a stage which often gets emitted which is where

the human kind of curates the sounds that have been generated in other words steers the automated process towards something which we can aesthetically associate with a kind of human music taste um so i forgot to answer that part of your initial question uh diogo but um i'm very skeptical of data tonifications because of or at least what they tell themselves that they are because of this often unacknowledged role of the the the human's taste in you know it's kind of like i think I think Brian Eno often uses the analogy of with generative or algorithmic music of gardening.

You know, you plant plants, you water them, the garden grows, but then, you know, you prune the plants, you tame the plants, you move them somewhere else. So, yeah. Okay, thank you very much. So, Alexandre Bezerra, fire away, please. Hello, can you hear me? Yeah, perfectly. Oh, nice. Thanks, Diego, for our mediation. Thanks, Gunman, for your presentation. That was class, and I'd like to ask you, it's not like a kind of question, it's more my thoughts about, like, in another point of view, because, like, imagine, like, you thought,

you told us about, like, the virus, They do not think they are bad. You know, they just want to try to survive. And like us, the human beings, do you know, we think like we are not bad. We are just trying to survive, surviving in this world, you know, but we are destructing this world. So we are kind of the virus of this world, you know. And imagine like putting another point of view is like we are the virus and the virus are the vaccine to the world, do you know? And this is like a kind of like a micro location for you. And like, what do you think about that? I mean, I'm a little skeptical of the idea that humans are the virus. I mean, I've seen this idea crop up, especially among certain ecological

or environmentalist ideas or ideologies that the human is the virus, planet earth and you know it's it's the anthropocene is the the impact of that and the um the you know in particular extremes of environmentalism we need to get rid of that virus we need to get rid of humans and you know and there's there's some overlaps with the far right and the this kind of strands of the environmental movement um so that's one thing I'd say. Bracketing that for a second, there's a really, I mentioned it briefly in the audio,

in the essay, in the video, but there's a really fascinating set of articles which went online, more or less anonymously, I don't know who did them, called What the Virus Said, which takes the point of view of the virus against the humans and it comes from a kind of, my sense is it comes from a kind of, you know, definitely a kind of post speculative realist perspective of the virus has shown up human radicals because it's managed to achieve in a year what radicals have been trying to do for centuries, stop global capital, you know, I say this in inverted commas,

stop global capitalism. Clearly, it hasn't stopped global capitalism, but it enabled some kind of strange pause or some kind of strange parallel to what a global strike would look like. So that's, I think, definitely coming from a radical Marxist position, the idea of you know what we can learn speculatively from assuming the point of view of the virus yeah and its opinion of the humans that it's that it's confronting um and this is you know in these essays i think the essay is called what the virus said um you know the the the virus in in its own thought process, you know, this essay very much anthropomorphizes the virus.

But again, if we bracket that for a second, in the viruses thought process, it just lists everything that has been disastrous about what humans have done to the planet. So I think as a speculative tool, it can teach us quite a lot to take to transfer our perspective into a non-human agent temporarily. I just issue a note of caution because I've also seen this idea of humanity as a virus cropping up in certain ideologies I definitely wouldn't want to promote in any way. Thank you. Thank you. Obrigado Alexandre. So Steve, before going to José, we just have I think a final question

from a student called Augusto Mojica. So he writes, first of all, I did not know your work, Steve, and completely fell in love with audio virology. It is fabulous. Secondly, I'd like to know if you believe, is there any will in viral constitution and the teleology besides plain replication, such as a drive that would emulate a conscience spread throughout the vessels of individual viruses themselves, something responsible for iterating the mutations and updates on the program within. I'm not 100% thank you for the, thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed it, but I'm not 100% sure

I understand that question. Could you read that then? Sure, going to the question, I'd like to know if you believe, if there's any will, like a will or drive in viral constitution, any teleology besides just plain replication. So I think August is addressing the idea of agency or consciousness or cognition within the virus. I'm not sure if I'm translating, August, I'm making my best to translate your question. I mean I think I think that obviously with a you know every entity to use Spinoza's language has a conicite which is is kind of like you know

the will to self-perpetuation and so I think every virus has a will to self-perpetuation which is kind of to say no all that is kind of agree with you in saying that perhaps the only will is to do with replication nothing else apart replication towards self-perpetuation maybe that's the case but i think i think everything i've talked about in the sense of the cultural viruses that i'm obviously slightly more positive about. I think there's something else going on there and the viruses are deployed instrumentally

and are tools or weapons. I don't know if it helps any of these questions, but I should probably, you know, personally where this idea of audio virology comes from is trying to diagnose my own... behavior in a sense my own irrational consumer behavior particularly as a DJ who you know buys a lot of music or used to buy a lot of records and in the late 90s when I was a jungle DJ there was a there was a point maybe about 1997 1998

when I noticed I was buying the same record over and over again, it always had a different name, but I was always buying the same record because you need to be up to date to stay current. I realized I was completely out of control. You know, my consumption behavior was completely out of control. So I started to formulate this idea that I was a host to a set of cultural viruses and that I was under their control in a sense. And this is where perhaps, I mean, I don't think this answers your question, but it's a more general point. I'd like to make the comparison between cultural viruses and possession

because I felt like I was possessed by these music cultures that I was obsessed by to the point that I didn't have any autonomy anymore. And I loved the fact that I didn't have any autonomy. I loved the fact that I'd lost my agency to these music cultures that I loved. And I suppose this is what fandom is about. This is what obsession is about. This is what possession is about within certain minor religions or cults. You know, how do we become possessed by cultural processes? You know, taking series, how do you understand those moments where we don't have agency?

And how do we understand the substrata of agency? So I think, I mean, I think that relates to the question of the teleology of viruses. to whether, you know, because you kind of have to take a multi-perspective approach here. So, you know, we're viruses to other entities and we're host to other viruses. And so a lot of it depends on perspective. You know, you can obviously fall into a kind of relativistic notion here, but I think these are the dangers of speculative realism,

post-speculative realist culture, of post-truth culture, where we're all inhabited by memeplexes that are passing through us. How do we ground ourselves? How do we rethink things like epistemology in light of this very confusing situation where we're incubating viruses all the time, biological and cultural? How are we possessed by, how do we get possessed by culture? These are ongoing questions in my own mind. I don't have concrete answers right now.

So you know we are a Catholic institution so we're all about possessions and exorcisms so if you ever have a problem drop by. So I'm going to give the mic to José Alberto Gomes, the co-curator of the program. José, fire away man. José? Okay, so I think I'm on now. So we already passed our, I don't want to take you much more time. Steve, thank you a lot. It was a wonderful presentation and a wonderful conversation. First of all, I'm very glad that you have your opinion about data sonification.

you saved the moment about it. About my question, you already addressed it a little bit in your last question. My question, I imagine, I understand that you are in a different level of awareness about the audiobiology. So the both and the bad, the good one, the cultural one, or the the bad biology. So as an individual, as an artist, as a creator, how you deal with it? Because sometimes probably you don't understand that you are a vessel or a host, but I can imagine that most of the time you realize it. So you try, you take the ride and enjoy it, you

you lay down and cry because you are only a small vessel in a crazy network, or you try to make part of a mutation, or you are active in a way, as an individual, as an activist? That's a fascinating question. I mean, before I even started to hype it up as a label, I'd written about it as a cultural virus that I was infected by. and would take on this kind of hyperstitional dimension where I was kind of already trying to diagnose this obsessive behavior about certain musics I loved and where my where the agency was

like how okay I was a DJ so there was and I was a producer so there was some kind of agency there already but you know when I started to understand when I started to become conscious of my of being possessed being infected by these cultural systems you know a part part of my practice I suppose is in nurturing certain cultural viruses. I mean, I've always understood myself as a host to the musical movements that speak

through me in a sense that end up coming out in whichever form when I make music. But that's the result of a much broader cultural processes that are operating through me that I'm a host for and I have some agency in steering in certain ways um and obviously you know as a when you run a record label or your producer you're constantly making decisions about where to steer where to steer the assemblage of ideas and aspects and concepts and perceptions that you're inhabited that inhabit you

so I suppose part of the way I deal with this apart from just operating like any record label or producer does is by simultaneously theorising the virality that is operating through me and fictionalising it so I'm trying to operate on three levels the practical level of music making the fictional level of kind of speculative um you know bracketing the agency completely and understanding myself is completely

driven by what I'm possessed by and then the theoretical level which has to be more nuanced where you have to try and demarcate a border between where the possession stops and the agency begins. So I suppose my answer is it's a combo, you know, the way I practically implement cultural virology is happening at these three levels of musical speculation, fictional speculation and theoretical speculation. Wonderful. Thank you. So Steve, to wrap it up, we have a really short question coming from Facebook.

So it's really short one. Do you think that NFTs are cultural viruses? This is a hard one. I've been thinking a lot about this the last few days because 100% the way NFT has just kind of suddenly become a hype thing in the last few weeks. is like classic cultural virus phenomena. The thing is that NFTs are actually antiviral. And what I mean by that is since the birth of digital culture, digital replication or the infinite replicability of code has, you know, what that's done to culture is make it almost ontologically viral.

and in other words you know music you can replicate music as much as you want and you know this this is not good news for music producers who are trying to make a living same with the filming etc etc etc the you know the digital the artwork in the age of digital replication digitality is a right you know as everybody has been talking about for the last 30 or so years has eradicated the aura and so on and nfts are kind of have this antiviral tendency of like one of the first things for ages apart from obviously um the kind of immune system response of like uh digital copyright control type type things nfts are a way of like trying to

they don't stop the virality of culture but they attempt to through its relationship with the blockchain pin down the virality of culture so at least the whatever is the ownership or the the whatever you want to store on the blockchain to do to associated with a visual meme or a piece of music is, you know, NFTs in this sense works against the virality of culture, which has been undermining artists earning a living for the last however many decades, like 20 years or whatever. So that's something I think is interesting about

NFTs is like, is this the beginning of the end of the virality of digital culture? Will web 3.0 be an antiviral digital culture i don't know but it's certainly it's it's it's opened up a whole set of interesting questions um you know because it's potentially offering a way for artists to get paid that goes against this idea of uh infinite replicate replicability of code which is obviously essential to what virality is about. Steve, thank you very much for this trippy trip across your universe and cosmology.

So yeah, thank you very much. And thanks to everyone that's watching us here in Zoom and in our social media channels. So next week we'll have Warren Nidig with a session moderated by Christina Sa, our own, and Warren will be expanding the idea of Delusian and Gattari's body without organs to the brain in the lecture entitled Brain Without Organs, Art. So I think a lot of the concepts and notions that were discussed here, even the idea of virality, mobilization, modulation, will come up in Warren's lecture. So next week at 6.30 p.m., sorry. And that's it.

Thank you very much, Steve. Once again, thanks a lot. Thanks for all the questions. There were a lot of them. Thank you.