What is your vision for the future?Visions of the future are interesting — especially visions of the future which come from the past. Kurenniemi had some very interesting visions of the future. For example, he obsessively documented every banal detail of his life on audio and video tapes, and in journals filled with drunken musings and sexual fantasies. His hope was that he could be reconstructed as an AI from all of this marginalia in the year 2049, possibly housed in a golf-ball-sized spacecraft filled with other AI constructs, which could float endlessly through the galaxy. Kurenniemi would have been considered a trans-humanist in the parlance of today. Like Elon Musk, he believed that technology would one day allow us to transcend nature and the crises we have inflicted upon it, perhaps to travel to other worlds and repeat the process. But his ideas of auto-poetic music instruments are strongly rooted in the mid 20th century discourses of cybernetics. His sound technologies are conceived as autonomous, closed-loop systems which rely on internal feedback to reach a kind of homeostasis from which musical patterns emerge.
Lately I have been reading a lot about post-humanism, and in particular how humans can no longer consider themselves autonomous, self-making subjects separated from each other, and from the non-human worlds of both nature and technology. Utopian futures are quite unfashionable after the consumer excesses of the 1970s and 80s sunk the hippy utopias of the 1960s. Somehow we prefer to imagine how bad things can become, and current thinking around issues like climate change illustrate the cynicism and apathy to which most people cling. But if I permitted myself to think about a utopian future, it might be one where all these supposedly autonomous little boxes— which we use to preserve our senses of self and to extract wealth from all the other little boxes— could be turned inside out to really show the connections between them. I don’t believe that art alone changes society, but it can tell stories that become cultural narratives, which can eventually change societies. So right now I am trying to imagine exploded, inside-out synthesizers, which sigh and cough and sweat and breath and mingle fluidly with everything around them instead of hiding inside hermetic metal and plastic boxes, and perhaps which also die and decay and return to the Earth somehow. And I consider whether such inside-out synths might potentially point towards new ways of living, doing, making, and being.