When Objects Think Back
摘要
This second section of the book uses posthuman scholarship as a way to further examine manifestations of learning within noise music, focusing on the music making practices of the genre and the scene that embodies it. The first chapter of the section begins with a brief overview of posthumanism, describing how this theoretical lens challenges long-standing understandings of both learning and artistic creation in ways that amplify and align with the tenets of noise music. I then propose a posthuman understanding of Papert’s theory of constructionism, one that amplifies Barad’s notion of intra-active agency embedded within the affective relations between more-than-human objects, animals, and musically oriented ecologies that produce the processes of learning inherent to noise music. In doing so, I reaffirm the posthuman nature of noise music as a genre, one that constructs meaning outside of the anthropocentric aims of most Western music and through the distribution of creative production across assemblages of artists, audiences, technologies, and spaces. I conclude with an analysis of a performance by Evicshen, revealing the construction of meaning that the artist-as-assemblage engenders via the production of a posthuman object that thinks.