EXoElectric

ExoElectric started as a practice based experimental research project conducted in a series of workshops introducing soldering and basic electronics to people through experimental analog noise instrument building. The research aimed to examine possible consequences of learning more about analog electronics by participants. Are there conditions associated with play, experimenting and naivety when learning a new skill that lead to new ideas, thoughts of creativity? Are the circumstances of the material reality of experimental analog electronic instruments, particularly ExoElectric presenting ones, that lend to provide conditions of play?

As an extension and continuation of this work and as a (“female” born bodied) non-binary human I have dedicated this work to create intentional spaces where female identified and any of us outside of the binary can be freely introduced to soldering, experimental electronics and create their own experimental electronic music instrument in these workshops. We all start somewhere and none of us know anything truly, but the idea and work is to create spaces for us to learn some skills, gain some confidence to continue our exploration of experimental electronics or music, ultimately to create, connect and to play.

some notes on the background ideas of ExoElectric:

The naïve experience in learning by creating, and tinkering, has led to incredible discoveries and inventions. This experience has also led to new ways of thinking and doing things. The most common examples are in technology and are often all related to the resulting products that limits this conversation to the commodity, to the transaction. Therefore the turn will be away from technology and the approach will be through Asger Jorn’s writings on art.

Asger Jorn’s theory of art as the cult of life, including ideas of art aesthetics, aesthetic experiment and artistic enjoyment theory provides a useful framing to explore this proposition where to Jorn aesthetics means experiment and elaboration, not a known defined perfection. (Wark) Jorn’s theory was “based initially on the values of an unlearned and spontaneous art,  which returns art quite uniquely to the people and explicitly breaks with the concept of professionalism.” (Birtwistle) As a member and creator of the Situationist project’s early theory Jorn was fundamentally about proposing this framing of art as a way of life and in doing so redefining what art is and that it is inherently of the people and by the people, a collective act. As Mckenzie Wark explains in The Beach Beneth the Street Jorn’s ideas through the implications that ‘art creates a way of life….art that matters is a subjective realism that extends beyond the individual and invokes a collective practice…experimental social practice.’  Jorn’s ideas on the way to practice this is found in what he calls aesthetic enjoyment in which he places in the aesthetic domain describes play and spontaneity as providing an experience that leads to the enchantment, or enjoyment of something.  This description of naïve must also be placed in context with Jorn’s fundamental Situationist approach to deconstruct culture, and art being a driving force in shaping culture, as it is known, but instead liberating it away from the limitations of the transaction. If this is overlooked exploring this framing of art like this can be misinterpreted and lead to a misplaced creation resulting in what Jorn would frame in the same way he frames the “art of a naïve adult…represents nothing more than the clumsy attempt to master the current forms of classical art.” (Birtwistle) Instead it must be understood that the naïve approach is framed here not to recreate what has already been done, but in an unlearned spirit to experimentally uncover new ways of doing things, through doing things in new ways.

The naïve inherently have this approach to a new experimental situation of learning by creating and creating by learning, this is experimentation. This is how learning is done in experiences created to be experimental to provide conditions of learning and imagining. This is also the domain where even the expert, professional, or virtuous can find the opportunity to have a new experience. The expert and the professional have a disadvantage in an approach to play and spontaneity in that they have layers and years of professionalization and inherent training to maintain their authority as an expert and as Jorn explains the playful adult can be seen as irresponsible, and this results in a repression that creates inhibitions and self restricting behaviors preventing the behaviors needed to get to this place of experimentation. However, Jorn again provides an insight of hope for even the most professional adult by framing that ‘the spontaneous creative condition is the genuinely adult condition, while the condition which is repressed by reason is, in psychological terms, simply an artificial extension of an infantile attitude.’ When the professional or expert can understand this to the extent that they can embody play and spontaneity even and particularly in their own field of expertise, the art as a cult of life, has been experienced. Leading to the possibilities of experimentation and that partially of the advantage of the naïve. John Richards explains his idea of this through his work he calls Dirty Electronics where he creates a new instrument each time with his instrument making with events completed with a performance where he is “concerned with finding the moment of discovery to enable constant exploration and maintain a naïve stance…to create a tabula rasa.” (Richards) This

Richard’s Dirty Electronics are framed in the experience of doing-it-together (DIT) collective workshops in making an electronic instrument for a performance. For Richards, it is the performance that is the primary space to create and experience this ‘tabula rasa.’

In the framing and approach Richards provides there are characteristics that, if not intentionally, most definitely speak to a Situationist project. From the collective approach, the publishing of schematics on his website free for anyone to download, and the celebration of the moment of experiencing naivety of a instrument and during a performance, even as a professional musician as he is. In a sense he creates what the Situationist project would frame as a detournemount. This experience of the detournemount “dissolves rituals of knowledge in an active remembering that calls the collective being into existence.” (Wark)

As a response to the Situationists proposition for the collective reapprorpriation and modification of cultural material the taking to and back, the deconstruction of the alienation to electronics is the first site of liberation to recreate the experience of electronics serving as my proposition. The electronic exclusive of the digital is important to distinguish due to the nature of the digital and the inherent potentials of virtuousness of digital programs. (Sennett) The sole use of electronics is also important in order to create a physical experience of an embodied practice.  Additionally the black box of the digital instrument provides limitations on experience in the realm of the naïve, and are representational in abstraction that detracts from the point of the material physical experience of electronic sound and making.

John Richards formulated the design of the actual Dirty Electronics instruments he defines as having a ‘reductionist aesthetic’ drawing from the idea of an infra-instrument presented by John Bowers and Phil Archer. What John Richards refer to as ‘reductionist aesthetics’ I will reword as exoteric aesthetics. The word reductionist has not only philosophical implications that are not in line with this approach, but also an inherent negative connotation that may impede in direct accessibility of the proposition and experience.

In the same way Richards’ primary interest is the performance, the ending and beginning here is the dérive in the spirit of a Situationist project. A dérive is “the experimental mapping of a situation, the tracing of the probabilities of realizing a desire..the production of situations as ends in themselves.” (Wark) This is experienced through the proposition of creating exoteric aesthetic electronics as an experience through the framework of a dérive.  Representation or expression are not the aim aside from the possibility of being moderately placed in play. Framing this in as a Situationist project it is not about representation but about a way of experiencing and doing things that have a level of capacity to become a new way of living or experiencing, of knowing. To understand the experience of the exoteric aesthetic electronic event use and practice will be required.  As an extension into developing and researching this design of experience as research itself, multiple iterations, and population composing the collective experience must also be varied. The value of the experience in relation to the population is also an important research question regarding the population’s predispositions and prior relations with the concepts, framing, and value of experience. Richards mentions the tension between materialism and experience in regards to Leaf Van Boven’s paper To do or to Have? That Is the Question that explores a quantitative based research approach to the question of what makes people happier, purchases of experiences or material objects. This is useful in drawing out the research of the experience and underworkings of alienation of person and electronics, and could speak to the design of experiences to be valued over time.

However, the limitation of this research is evident in a desire to look outside, underneath and most importantly beyond the framing of the transaction in relation to material and experience. For this gaze we can turn to critical theory and the idea materialism and experience.  This is where a research opportunity exists to connect and elaborate on the role that the actual materials play in experience and how understanding the continuous relationality of the two during an experience can speak to designing DIY projects and DIT experiences of the exoteric aesthetic electronics. The designing of these projects and experiences must be grounded in the concept of exoteric aesthetics particularly for curating an experimental experience that can facilitate research to identify the possible predispositions of the participants as well as the elements of the conditions that lead to a moment in which the participant(s) experiences the reversal of alienation into an experience of amalgamation, uniting electronics and participants. This is to be the test to be researched and questioned as being the first moment in which the participant moves towards a moment of feeling, experiencing the embodied practice of learning by creating electronics and creating by learning electronics that leads to consequences of the participant being able to imagine new uses, or ways of doing or making electronics. The questions would be does this create a new embodied relation with electronics? Is this relation relational or more of Timothy Morton kind of weird embodiment? (Morton)  Can tacit knowledge be witnessed to be researched, understood for potential to be able to access and understand conditions or elements of experiences that hold lasting value, or that can serve to speak to a start at imagining a different way of engaging with, creating or doing electronics. (Polanyi) The exoteric aesthetic electronics experience seeks to be critical theory as critical practice, and critical practice as a source in understanding and being critical theory. The exoteric aesthetic electronics experience as critical practice will start with my own learning by creating and creating by learning as research in itself. The first concrete part of this is the learning and creating an electronic sound device including a circuit board. This design, once completed, will be used in designed event experiences around researching the experience of the object. The second phase of this research will be learning by creating and designing a exoteric aesthetic electronic experience that makes an interactive installation as a site for research. This process would aim to be learned to be duplicated in an experience event for collective making of an exoteric aesethtic electronic experience and interactive installation, also as a site for research. The third phase would be to create a sound object to be created in a exoteric aesthetic electronic experience redesigned based on research findings from the previous research and applied to a new experience of creating and implementing a dérive to install what I am calling sound graffiti devices, the act of installation as well as the consequences of the sound graffiti devices being subjects of research in themselves. The final phase to speak to further future research would be creation of a non sound electronic device to be used in these same areas of research, to duplicate the research with improvements, controls and variations for extending the understanding but also as a control in itself to begin to understand the implications of the variable of a sound device in the experience and as the experience.