Re: [microsound] post digital

[The pHarmanaut <pharmanaut@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Since there was no 'Digitalism' movement, and this art
> is primarily concerned with digital means of
> production and distribution, the term struck me as
> nonsensical.  Still does.

I think that this is much too narrow of a way to interpret
"post-digital"--as I've understood it, this term means to distance
microsound, glitch, and other related musics/audio/sounds/silences from any
sort of so-called "digital revolution" (as Cascone writes in the CMJ
article, inspired by Negroponte, the term "post-digital" refers to the fact
that "the revolutionary period of the digital information age has surely
passed"). Post-digital doesn't refer to works that reject the digital;
rather, it refers to works created once the digital revolution has become
passe. I think that the term makes the most sense when thought of as a
critical reaction against early tendencies to view digital audio production
as a purer, noiseless, perfectly copy-able form--hence the emphasis on
errors, flaws, glitches, artifacts, and such.

Perhaps post-digital relates to digital in the way that postmodern relates
to the modern--that is, as its simultaneous rejection/critique/abandonment
AND its fulfillment/completion/extension. As I believe Ulf Poschardt points
out in DJ CULTURE, the postmodern can be seen as less a critique or loss of
the modern (though modernists might not see it this way) as it is the
logical historical trajectory of the modern spirit. Perhaps the same is true
of post-digital and digital.

-=Trace