A possibly ill-advised idea for a presentation on computer music and posthumanism entitled “Computer Music and Posthumanism”.
I will introduce two flavors of posthumanism: critical posthumanism (CP) and speculative posthumanism (SP) and provide an overview of some of the ways in which they might be explored by thinking through philosophical issues raised by computer music practice.
CP questions the dualist modes of thinking that have traditionally assigned human subjects a privileged place within philosophical thought: for example, the distinction between the formative power of minds and subjects and the inertia of matter.
The use of computers to supplement human performance raises questions about where agency is ascribed. Is it always on the side of the human musician or can it also be ascribed also to the devices or software used to generate sound events? If so, what kind of status can be granted to such artificial agents? Does their agency locally supervene on human agency, for example? I will also argue that the intractability and complexity of some computer generated sound confronts us with the nonhuman, mind-independent reality of sonic events. It thus provides an aesthetic grounding for a posthumanist realism.
SP (by contrast) is a metaphysical possibility claim about technological successors to humans. It can be summed up in the SP Schema: “Descendants of current humans could cease to be human by virtue of a history of technical alteration” CP and SP are conceptually distinct but, I argue, the most radical form of SP converges with the anti-anthropocentrism of CP (Roden 2014). In particular, non-anthropologically bounded SP implies that the only way in which we can acquire substantive knowledge of posthumans is through making posthumans or becoming posthuman. I will argue that computer music development may have a role in this project of engineering a posthuman succession.
Roden, D. 2010b. “Sonic Art and the Nature of Sonic Events.” Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (1): 141–156.
Roden, D. 2012. “The Disconnection Thesis.” The Singularity Hypothesis: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment, A. Eden, J. Søraker, J. Moor & E. Steinhart (eds), 281-298. London: Springer.
Roden, David. 2014. Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human. Routledge.
enemyindustry 
music appreciation (as I know it) seems pretty intimately bound into our current manifestations, will there be much interest in such things if there is a post to our current forms of being and if so what uses might it serve?
Ha! Maybe. This was cobbled together for a fascinating looking workshop in Sheffield on Computer Music and Philosophy http://humancomputermusicphilosophy.wordpress.com/ I’ve been meaning to write something on this for a while, so this forces me to at least put my money where my mouth is. Also, all pretexts for mixing philosophy with noise making are good in my book.
be interested in seeing what you make of it.