As good residencies should, “Collaboration, Interactivity, and Managing Media: A Week with Intermedia Artistis Kevin Patton and Maria Del Carmen Montoya” stimulated more questions than answers for me. Helping me to continue to think through this residency is the press that is occurring around the Unsound Festival currently taking place in New York. I highly recommend the post on flavorwire where musicians in the festival comment on the future of electronic music. Comments focus on the importance of promoters, creating new sounds, educating audiences, the promise of future technological developments, the importance of technological advances not dominating creative thinking, avoiding trends and hype, and the merging of the studio with concert. What particularly resonates with me is the following comment by Newworldaquarium that democratizes the form. “[Looking back to] punk, it became clear that you didn’t need an education to play music, and with house and techno it seemed you didn’t have to have a band either. With electronic music today, I guess you don’t even need an instrument anymore, and maybe some day writing a piece of music will be as common as writing something for your blog or a Facebook status-update.” This comment is at odds with the comments of some of Newworldaquarium’s colleagues, but for me it speaks to participatory culture that technology makes possible.
Unsound Festival Artists Predict the Future of Electronic Music
Feb 8th, 2010 by dblandy@uoregon.edu