According to Brooks [2017. "The Big Problem with Self-driving Cars Is People". IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News], artificial intelligence has had a variable track-record of usefulness in situations where context and environmental knowledge are responsible for shaping human interactions. In 2021, providing contextually aware training to supervised machine learning is still a non-trivial task for AI models that involve complex systems. In addition, knowledge held only across distributed members of a community, within culture, or tacitly within the wider environment of the ambient commons [McCullough 2013. Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press] evades consistent generalizable modellingeven in technical domains such as traffic flow management, atmospheric chemistry, or the prediction of election results. Yet it is precisely these interactions of context, community, culture and environment that also define how music can be created. The creative arts can themselves be thought of as a complex system. Assuming that creativity is nongeneralizable, this paper assesses creative processes through a humanities-centric lens of machine learning and robotics, aiming to better understand relationships between context, environment and experimental system in artistic research. These relationships are now themselves significantly digitally mediated, requiring a change in academic discourse away from artefacts which need discrete research justification towards a more holistic, and often non-linear view of networks that require cultural situation. In doing so, issues of creative accountability [Field 2021. "Changing the Vocabulary of Creative Research: The Role of Networks, Risk, and Accountability in Transcending Technical Rationality." In Sound Work: Composition as Critical Technical Practice, edited by J. Impett, 303-317.Orpheus Institute Series. Leuven: Leuven University Press] and the implications of substituting "creative question" for "research question" are examined within creative research. Early twentieth century ideas related to progressivism which have instrumentalized creative practice, particularly where technology forms part of art making, are challenged by re-KEYWORDS

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EditorialThe assembling of this issue of Organised Sound has been a lengthy, challenging but nevertheless interesting one. In the initial call for articles, we acknowledged that independent artistic practitioners, empowered by technology, have radically changed the digital arts climate in Western societies over the last twenty years, particularly music. As a result, we sought to review the role of the institution and ask how such institutions can drive radically new cultural development, rather than offering reactionary responses to independent commercial experimental artwork, or falling back on past models and aesthetics. We cast our net wide, seeking to illicit writing on oppositional cultures in contemporary electroacoustic music, our changing role as listeners and performers with technology in the sonic arts, the role of the institution and educator in the contemporary avant-garde, post-laptop music and the resurgence of the modular synthesiser among other such subtopics. What we hoped to present was a cross-section of the diverse and thriving contemporary electroacoustic music scene and the wider critical framing of this from a cultural, theoretical and musicological perspective.Simply, we failed. The response to our call was woeful. Yet this failure can actually be seen to demonstrate certain aspects of our original intention and its flaws. Perhaps our biggest disappointment was that so many composers were approached who are making innovative and arresting work, but do not see any imperative in writing about their work. Be this as it may, there was also a sense that the composers and sound artists we discussed this edition with no longer considered the notion of the avant-garde as one they engaged with or belonged to. The idea of the avantgarde with its inherent notions of rupture and a radical agenda were seen as reactionary and somewhat irrelevant in today's practice. There was rather a prevailing attitude of inclusivity. One that sought to present newness as a reframing of elements drawn together in different ways, but not one that was considered to be informed by a post-modernist perspective.For the editors, the question arising from this is similar to a statement written over two decades ago by Hal Foster, commenting on Peter Bürger's seminal text 'Theory of the Avant-Garde' (1984) that, 'for Bürger the repetition of the historical avant-garde by the neo-avant-garde can only turn the antiaesthetic into the artistic, the transgressive into the institutional' (Foster 1994: 13). If, as is suggested by the response to our call, the transgressive avant-garde in electroacoustic music has become institutionalized, then where is today's radical and politically motivated work situated? Is there any critique of the acculturation of the previous avant-garde?But perhaps we are actually asking ourselves the wrong questions. Perhaps the shock of the new is no longer shocking and there is no longer a desire for the 'new' per se. Perhaps the boundaries of sound-based conceptually driven music have been explored, from...