Straying once again from the South London theme - but at least in the right geographical direction. Just back from the first day of a two-day conference surrounded by very clever people talking about mobile technology and its impact on music. The day started with a proper university lecture from Dr Michael Bull, outlining a somewhat polemical view of technology in which he updated Barthes' take on the Citroën DS (the modern equivalent of a Gothic cathedral, a magical icon built by the passion of unknown craftsmen and recognised by the whole population), to apply to the iPod. His narrative is that Western aesthetics are on a trajectory from the large and public to the small and private; the space where you go for therapy, transcendence, immunity, order and security - and of course music - was the cathedral, then the car, and is now the little white box and earbud bubble. The iPod is the best line of defence against Adorno's "chill of unmitigated struggle of all against all", but in the process of making ourselves warmer, we contribute to the chill around us (a bit like a fridge in reverse, perhaps?).
Well, maybe. No one can deny that the technology of individual consumption tends to have an isolating effect. However, most of the rest of the day was taken up in consideration of prototypes where the latest incarnations of mobile devices and networks are harnessed in favour of reclaiming the publicness of public spaces; whether by the placement of site-specific sound in public urban spaces; music-sharing and recommendations based on physical proximity to "familiar strangers" (BluetunA) or most interestingly (in my breakout at least) by creating a virtual public space (
Tactical Sound Garden) in which the city is "overdubbed" by a wifi-borne sound collage which can be collectively tended by its users. In all of these the atomised individuality of the mobile listening experience is subverted in different ways, each involving its own element both of community and unpredictability, and in many cases of participation. Which I would argue is part of the wider trajectory of music technology in our century which favours active participation where the dominant technologies of the twentieth century (radio, record player) favoured passive consumption.
Tactical Sound Garden has been a definite highlight so far - it's easy to let the imagination run a bit wild when considering ideas which are as yet untested, but I could imagine how this could somehow bring together the qualities of an open-ended, virtual
Musicircus with those of urban architecture - the combination of planned and emergent art in a public space.
