Contexts of/as Resistance

Abstract

Resistance as a state or activity entwines discrete entities or forces in a given context (contexere, to weave together). Something or someone resists something or someone, making this with-standing (re-sistere) essentially relational or agential. Live performance gives this play of agency a dramatic frame and focus, involving resources ranging from 'raw' re-appropriated materials to sophisticated information technology type artefacts. These resources support interactions of human and non-human agency, and mix physical and virtual materials which generate different kinds of resistance and behavioural response. This paper looks at different contextual framings of resistance that arise in live performance, using generic instrumental and gestural taxonomies from cognitive science and ergonomics to set notions of 'resistant materials' in a broader transdisciplinary perspective. Emphasis is on the kinds of context sensitivity at work when materials are creatively (re-) appropriated, the role of art being to resist and scramble classificatory systems governing conventional notions of agency.

:Music and Digital Media: A Planetary Anthropology

“…A different conceptual performance paradigm rejects 'command and control' approaches to interface design and 'standard ontologies of live electronic systems' (Green 2014, 62) in favour of ideas of 'audible ecosystem' or 'performance ecosystem' (Di Scipio 2003;. In a critique of the 'innovation' telos and positivist methodologies of humancomputer interaction research (Norman 2013), interface design becomes 'the very object of composition … and the array of DSP algorithms, and the methods by which they communicate among themselves, [are] the material implementation of a compositional process' (Di Scipio 2003, 270). Incubated in the UK at UEA and Edinburgh, this 'heretical' PBR retains the work of Tudor, Lucier, Xenakis and Herbert Brün along with philosophical ideas of self-organisation, autopoiesis, emergence and complex dynamic systems drawn from cybernetic and ecological writings by Von Bertalanffy, Maturana and Varela, Gibson, Ingold, Artificial Life theorist Peter Cariani and others.…”

Instrumental intentionality: an exploration of mediated intentionality in musical improvisation

“…A notion of collaboration with an instrument, the playing with real or attributed agencies (Norman 2013) is prevalent in a growing body of improvisational practice. To highlight a few examples: Stapleton's (2008) Dialogic Instrument series explores notions of resistances and mastery in performance contents through instrument design.…”