New Mimesis: simulation, models, metaphors and data in music

Co-organisers:

• WinterSound Festival and the Centre for Practice-Based Research in the Arts, Canterbury Christ Church University (Canterbury, Kent, UK)
• Music, Thought and Technology, Orpheus Institute (Ghent, Belgium)

Musicians search for ways to create or generate new forms, new structure, new processes, modes of development or modes of analysis or understanding. They may seek to encourage or map phenomena of growth, evolution, complexity and emergence. In a computational environment, artists often adopt models, simulations or data from other domains, perhaps theoretical, social, from the ‘hard’ or natural sciences or data from the ‘real’ world.

These effectively constitute a new mode of mimesis (Luciana Parisi, 2013); they are a way of describing a world – real or imagined, past, present or possible, material or virtual.

Do they also themselves become material, objects of observation?
What new questions, challenges and opportunities arise from this situation? 
Does the use of models and data from elsewhere bring its own obligations? 
To what extent might their origins of reference be important to or acknowledged by an aesthetic construct?
Is reference to a ‘real’ past – musical or otherwise – different in kind to that of an imagined future?

Simulation affords a new kind of knowledge (Manuel Delanda, 2015) – a new relationship not only between domains of action and knowledge, but between present, past and future (Jean-François Lyotard, 1992).

How does this transform the nature of the musical phenomenon? 
The locus and identity of the musical object?
Of our imagination, construction or perception?

Convenors:

• Matt Wright, School of Creative Arts and Industries, Canterbury Christ Church University and Orpheus Institute
• Jonathan Impett, Orpheus Institute

Schedule

Registration

Tickets are free, but please book your free place in advance here.