Resisting reproduction in the digital age: notes on a sonic arts practice

In these reflections on my current practice using interactive technology in combination with instruments and objects, I will consider my recent work in the context of the material conditions of the genres of ‘new music’ and sonic arts in which they are principally situated. In particular, I am interested in how this practice disrupts norms of diffusion and reproduction by setting out specific conditions for its reception; these conditions are intrinsically related to the avoidance of stylistic categorisation and an engagement with performer agency. This discussion will necessarily be informed by Walter Benjamin’s seminal work, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction; the works in question, however, resist technological reproduction not only despite, but through the media of technological processes, as they enhance, rather than efface, a sense of aura, interpreted as a multiplicity rather than as a singular original.