Musicking assemblages and non-human becomings: Mapping morphogenetic processes and distributed agencies in Wolfgang Buttress' the Hive.

The paper introduces the concept of musicking assemblages to account for the agency of non-human actants in a project by contemporary artist, Wolfgang Buttress, that involved creating a musical soundscape together with bees. Collapsing distinctions between popular music, contemporary art and scienti...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Publicado en:Popular Music Vol. 42; no. 1; pp. 42 - 59
Autor principal: Szarecki, Artur
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Cambridge University Press Feb2023
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
Descripción
Sumario:The paper introduces the concept of musicking assemblages to account for the agency of non-human actants in a project by contemporary artist, Wolfgang Buttress, that involved creating a musical soundscape together with bees. Collapsing distinctions between popular music, contemporary art and scientific research, the project exhibits musicking not as a result of human action but as emerging from intensive flows of matter-energy circulating between a multiplicity of actants, both human and non-human. Consequently, it presupposes a materialist ontology that breaks with anthropocentric hierarchies and encourages us to rethink popular music as always already involving 'becoming with' non-human others, in a way that overcomes the division between culture and nature, as well as its epistemological corollaries.