I have been mulling over a question for a while now:

How do we salvage materials from our inherited histories in order to reorient ourselves in the present and create new trajectories into the future that “work”?

This question has been haunting me for a few reasons. First, I’ve been thinking of the “making” of history as a mechanical activity. What is history, if not a thing that is meant to “work,” a mechanism that produces the self-determination of an individual, family, nation, planet. Second, as a musicologist, I am constantly thinking about musical materials—about music as its own kind of material thing, but also as a thing that impacts our material lives.

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Image is of Circuit Board Virgen de Guadalupe by Marion Martinez

This seminar invites participants to think about how modern holograms, ghosts, holobionts, and superorganisms reshape the material bases of film theory, including (but not limited to) the political value of representation and embodiment.

For example, to what extent is our investment in the idea that films “reflect” minority experience grounded implicitly in the flatness of screens? How might our political imagination of what is possible change if we envision different surfaces, different uses of light, and different realizations of a “flesh”?

A holographic theory of the political may get us closer to what Laura Mulvey, in her analysis of the phantasmatic screen body, called “the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without rejecting it.” How might her focus on “mechanisms, not meaning” allow us to better comprehend the holographic star image?

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Image taken from Ghost in the Shell (2017)

My dissertation stems from two premises: 1) that a science-fiction worldview has been at the heart of European and American political thought for at least the last century, and 2) that sound and music—including, but not limited to Western European art music—has helped shape this worldview as part of a social totality. In exploring how these assumptions take shape, my dissertation looks across many genres from satellite recordings in the early space age, to space lounge exotica, Western European art music, punk, prog rock, and cinematic horror.

I follow Gayatri Spivak’s original usage of “worlding” as an imperialist activity that naturalizes subjugating labels, creating a world for colonizer and colonized alike that looks like something a British cartographer might make. In looking across this array of genres I ask how genre boundaries map onto political ones, and how national histories produce the sounds of speculative futures.

The Anthropocene, for all its terminological newness, has the formal logic of an old story, a romance even—a utopian/dystopian hero’s journey where “man” explores, excavates, claims, defines, and kills the Earth and its inhabitants. No less real for its fictive power, it frames our current epoch, a fragment of time itself circumscribed and defined by Western man. This story places humans at the center of a universalizing fantasy of drama and adventure, man against nature, what Ursula K. Le Guin described as the hunter’s “linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic.”

What role does music play in this story? A double one: by appealing to its technological function Western music has been theorized as a site that both stabilizes and destabilizes the Anthropocentric linear narrative. At the same time, as a context-specific, coded medium, music can potentially participate in alternative epistemologies that destabilize the Anthropocene’s single-player techno-heroic form.

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Image taken from Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon’s film, Les Amours de la Pieuvre (1965)

The launch of Sputnik 1 in October of 1957 was heralded by a steady rhythmic beeping broadcast across radio and television. Like a metaphorical ticking of the doomsday clock, the satellite’s otherwise innocuous chirp signified what many United States citizens feared was a communist infiltration of both outer space and American living rooms. Yet the mythos of American exceptionalism held fast in the face of impending catastrophe; just as Walt Disney’s 1956 book Our Friend the Atom spun hope and pride out of the science behind nuclear devastation, Sputnik’s beeping was absorbed into the growing compendium of electronic sounds that underscored everyday American life and entertainment. While on one hand it signified a loss in an ideological war against communist infiltration, on the other hand it promulgated a heroic narrative of capitalist science in the service of national growth.

This slippage was made possible in large part by an electronic sound vocabulary that imaginatively and ideologically merged domestic spaces with space travel, synthesizing America’s two expansionist drives into the suburbs and into outer space—the latter barely veiled by political rhetoric that promised outer space as a neutral zone rather than its tacitly understood function as military high ground. Reporting on Sputnik 1, a television newscaster alluded to these sonically tethered territories: “Until two days ago that sound had never been heard on this Earth. Suddenly it has become as much a part of twentieth-century life as the whir of your vacuum cleaner.”

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Illustration by Charles Schridde for a Motorola Ad featured in Life Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post (1961- 1963)

Russ Garcia’s 1959 album, Fantastica: Music From Outer Space, opens with the track, “Into Space,” which begins appropriately with a countdown featuring a heavily-reverbed male voice:

“Ten seconds till firing time. Mark (beep): five, four, three, two, one.”

The sound of a rocket blasts and then fades out as electronic shimmers fade in—the kind of sound effect that in radio dramas, film, and television came to represent journeys into alternate dimensions of time and space. A languid flute melody materializes out of the sonic distance accompanied by a harp, bells, and a gradually emerging orchestra. An oboe takes over the melody and a rhythm section enters, first just the low pulse of a string bass, then a vibraphone and the sweep of a brushed snare. As if we might forget that this familiar orchestral lounge jazz is meant to illustrate a trip into outer space, a slowly ascending sine wave enters twice, seemingly mimicking ascent into the cosmos.

In the liner notes, Ashley Warren describes this opening cinematically: “We are catapulted into the atmosphere, surrounded by the deafening roar of rockets which fade into nothingness, and are enveloped by the silence of space and swallowed into a nebulous mist of weightlessness…floating far into space.”

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In this collaborative project, we investigated how people infer the emotions of others, particularly looking at the role of empathic accuracy in creating a compelling artistic performance.

We designed a set of experiments that measured the physiology of actors and musicians while they simulated positive and negative emotions during a performance.

The emotional and physiological reactions of audience members were also recorded and compared to those of the performers to assess the emotional experiences of each group. The project team included Heather Harden (Department of Psychology), Elizabeth Necka (Department of Psychology), Patrick Fitzgibbon (Department of Music), and myself (Department of Music).