Science and Technology

'Science and Technology' plays with the audio-visual language of the synthesizer demonstration video through the sound of two devices: the Yamaha DX-7 synthesizer and the Roland TR-808 drum machine. The video explores the relationship between musician labour, automation and technologies of reproduction and dissemination embodied in these devices. Musical play becomes a cipher for collective forms of social improvisation, as well as a practice constrained by – and constantly re-inventing – the basic operations of musical instrument and musician alike. Figurations of the individualised ‘musician’ are rendered as a montage of textual fragments, performed as voice-over. Each fragment is rendered by this voice with a differing syntax, affect or mode of speech. This voice, acts both as a critique of the models of speech common to the digital pedagogy of YouTube tutorials, and as a poetic guide.