First Person: Twisting the System

Liverpool has a very rich tradition of live music, poetry and the arts coming together, right from Adrian Henri’s art happenings in the 1960s, to collectives/acts like The Kazimier, a.P.a.T.t. and Deep Hedonia, who’ve all fed into the existing Syndrome programme. How Syndrome has differed from these initiatives is that it has been regular, and we’ve explicitly made the programme a learning experience, where techniques, ideas and aesthetics can cascade through the project – and inform where we go next. For example, some of the ideas that came up during the Holly Herndon residency informed our choice of T C F as headline act for the launch of Phase 3, but this event will also feature some projection mapping techniques we developed while working on the a.P.a.T.t. show.

We set out to produce a series of events that were all about affecting audiences using new technology – so using advances in media to punch into the consciousness of the audience – but it's proven that Syndrome has been just as interesting in terms of the ways we shape the media we use.

For the time being, my conception of the 'post-human' is a state whereby we understand our languages, organs, limbs, even souls, as kind of ‘augmentations’ or ‘plug-ins,’ and therefore that there is no barrier to understanding further augmentations – brain scanners, data processors, MIDI interfaces, even flashing screens – as an intrinsic part of a system in which we live and operate. For example, in relation to Syndrome in Phase 3, T C F makes music that we intuitively understand as feeding from and putting back into a flux of data and processing – so having a computational aesthetic. Event 3.1 explicitly addresses augmentation with a residency from a neuroscience and code collective working with deaf musicians’ brains.

It’s timely, because people more intuitively understand what’s proposed by the ‘post-human’ as a result of the intimacy with which they integrate ‘devices’ into their lives, the kind of vernacular of ‘virtual worlds’ that comes with the internet, and the sense that we’re engaged in some kind of collective cognitive task on behalf of an algorithm.

Importantly, what artists can do in relation to the ‘post-human’ is not just represent it and push it forward, as with the brain-scanner performance works, but also critique it and complicate the assumptions that go with a kind of aggressive anti-humanist growth-obsessed political culture.

The important thing is that these works provoke critical thinking around the role of technology in our lives – whether that’s around the intrinsic goodness and opportunity offered by computation, or the horror implicit in a world without the frictive, unreliable human and its bricks and mortar home.

Syndrome 2.2: HOLLY HERNDON ++ from Mercy