As I read the RHIZOME DIGEST today, I encountered Duchamp's biting
observation: "our century is completely retinal" [in <a href="/cgi/to.cgi?t=1291">ken goldberg's
review of jordan crandall's "drive."</a>] Quite accurate, the cost of such
perceptual focus is deafness and paralysis. The ARS Electronica has
presented an essay, "The Conquered Banner … bring on the noise!",
found in their compendium, "CyberArts 98" which epitomizes this
condition. The essay disparages studio music and its adherents. I have
formulated a reply to this essay and its bigotry; though it is refracted
by my musical specialization, nevertheless I felt that RHIZOME readers
may find it a provocative means to engage in the discussion of the role
of music in new media.

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Against Music: The Prix Ars Electronica
http://www.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~penrose/ars/ars-critique.html by Christopher
Penrose

As a composer and listener of music, I was deeply offended by the long,
complaint-rife rant, "The Conquered Banner … bring on the noise!"
found in the Prix Ars Electronica 1998 compendium, CyberArts 98. The
article reveals a disturbing disdain for studio music: works that are
purely musical without visual composition.

I was quite surprised to receive this lavish hard-cover book via
international mail. Beneath its gloss it is quite disappointing,
particularly as it is a completely silent record of the competition. If
designed to be a coffee table book, they have succeeded. The content of
CyberArts 98 suggests that ARS juries look, and not listen, specifically
for works that are successfully represented in shallow media. The
production cost of such a book, is ten-fold that of a cd-rom or even a
DVD. It is quite tragic and strange that ARS has exclusively chosen this
archaic and glossy medium to represent the art of avant-garde
technologists. One is left again to wonder whether we are traveling
forward or backward in time.

"The Conquered Banner … bring on the noise!" is offered by ARS as a
description of the music submissions for 1998's competition. The article
is filled with petty bias such as: "… [ARS] must accept the limits of
perception offered by the CD/Tape listening format…" Parochial
statements such as this provide quite saddening evidence that the ARS
music jury is perhaps visually dependent and hearing impaired. They are
either incapable of or unwilling to experience sound as a total
experience. There is incredible variety among the listeners of our
world, and there are many who find the audio recording medium ultimately
rich. Some even find the medium visually stimulating without the
intended imposition of external visual composition; the stark lack of
visual stimuli afforded by audio recordings provides a powerful catalyst
for synesthetic perception. Moreover, ARS' suggestion that the recording
medium is fundamentally limited marginalizes the rich advancements in
digital audio signal processing that are currently overwhelming the
music community. Is the ARS jury tragically unaware or incapable of
perceiving these developments? In music, is visual accompaniment always
more powerful and valuable than the musical spaces afforded by highly
complex signal processing technologies and the intense panscopic control
of the digital computer music studio?

There are also other audio artists that attempt to transcend the
admitted limitations of the cd recording format. They choose to utilize
multichannel audio, Ambisonics, and other spatialization technologies.
If it is the desire of ARS to encourage composers to extend the
boundaries of pure music, then ARS will somehow have to provide
facilities for these works to be auditioned as intended by their
composers. For example, I have never felt free to submit a multi-channel
musical work to a competition such as ARS Electronica, nor have I felt
confident that an ARS jury would listen to a binaural work with
inter-aural headphones as intended. Instead, what ARS intends by calling
for composers to extend their notions of music is to solely interrelate
and effectively relegate sound to other media. This is unfortunate as
the extension of purely musical media is discouraged. This serves to
preclude and dilute music as a viable art form. Recordings often succeed
at communicating intense musical innovations; clearly ARS fails to
recognize that the medium is not the only message.

ARS Electronica Computer Animation mention Virtual Actress Move Test

The most hilarious statement in the article is the politically-correct
complaint about the overwhelming representation of male academic
composers in the Computer Music category. Such a complaint is blatantly
hypocritical: just browse through CyberArts 98 and you can find
amazingly contra-feminist works such as Steven Stahlberg's Virtual
Actress Move Test (see Cyberarts 98 or my web site). Steven's 3D
modelled blonde bimbo is clad in a bikini and is strapped to a Tron-like
cycle/rocket, in reverse crotch-rocket orientation. She is lying prone
on the cycle with her large breasts realistically smashed against the
ribbed seat, and her ass acutely raised; her position blatantly suggests
that she is being fucked by the cycle. There is also what appears to be
a machine-gun or "laser-turret" mounted above her ass. Furthermore, her
head seems to be uncomfortably wedged between two rods and her hands
bound, suggesting that this woman might actually be trapped inside this
rape rocket against her will. Is this animation at its best? For ARS to
complain about male-domination in the music category and to crassly
reward and glorify the reptilian sex fantasies of a male visual artist,
is obscenely hypocritical. Male winners and mentions outnumber women by
a large margin in all categories. This is not something for ARS to be
ashamed of if the entries reflect the same distribution; this is a much
larger cultural dilemma. But for the Computer Music category to be
singled out for this distribution, particularly when the other
categories have this tendency also, and I personally know several
unrecognized women who have made music submissions, is thoroughly
asinine.

Within CyberArts 98 only the Computer Music category was subjected to a
long diatribe which marginalized a large segment of its entrants'
submissions. If studio music as an end is not desired by ARS, then ARS
should simply reject audio recordings as submissions. It does art and
culture no service to marginalize and discredit one of its rich and
sharply focused mediums. The fact that ARS has complained about an
over-representation of recordings in this category may simply indicate
that these recordings represent a breadth of music far more rich with
diversity and innovation than the jury process can reasonably
assimilate. Further, to complain about a lack of multimedia entries in
the Computer Music category when ARS has awarded distinctions and
mentions this year to works in the Interactive Art category that explore
sound and music (Audio Grove, by Christian Moller; Audible Distance,
Akitsugu Maebayashi; Sound Mapping, Iain Mott, Marc Raszewski, Jim
Sosnin) seems to reflect that ARS itself is confused about the
delineations of its own categories.

When ARS describes the distinctions it awarded to Aquiles Pantalleao
(Three Inconspicuous Settings) and Hans Tutschku (extremites
Iointaines), they seem to be apologizing because the works are
"nominally" recordings. For these works to be acceptable to ARS and its
discerning aesthetic, they must euphemistically bend reality and suggest
that the recordings are something altogether different. Has this medium
really fallen from favor to such a pathetic extent that brilliant
recordings have to be consistently over-justified and apologized for?
Further, the article takes great pains to distinguish the works as if an
audience would not be able to discern that they came from "… markedly
different traditions …" upon listening. If I were one of these
composers, I would be greatly offended to receive an award in such a
denigrating, apologetic manner. Is ARS that insecure about its
adjudication process? And why isn't the Golden Nica piece, Krachtgever,
an installation work by Peter Bosch and Simone Simons, subject to such
scrutiny? Perhaps because ARS can clearly see its concept, a computer
controlled matrix of stacked crates interconnected by springs, without
having to exercise the gruelling exercise of listening to it. I have not
had the luxury of hearing this work either, and I imagine the chaotic
sound it produces is truly remarkable. But I can't begin to understand
how a studio recording is inherently inferior to an installation, as ARS
suggests. It is not obvious to me that the recognition of recorded works
should require apology and excessive justification; such behavior is
quite offensive to studio composers and it sharply weakens the value of
ARS Electronica as an aesthetic forum. If this rhetorical behavior
simply reflects a concern to meaningfully represent musical works in
this silent coffee table format, perhaps it isn't so obvious to ARS that
they should consider documenting its competition with a modern medium
such as CDROM or DVD which can represent music with actual sound.
Unfortunately it seems evident that this rhetoric instead reflects a
larger tendency to irrationally ghettoize studio music compositions, and
reinforce the vulgar supremacy of the visual modality. Virtual Actress
Move Test is a case in point.

It is truly unacceptable for an institution to claim to value music and
then hypocritically criticize composers who produce and extend it in its
purest and most focused form: studio recordings. If the number of
musical entrants is too large and the labor to listen and process them
critically is too arduous, simply remove the music category from the
competition. ARS is unjustified in criticizing the recorded sound medium
and its composers simply because of their adjudication shortcomings. If
the jury prefers something sexy to peruse with its eyes, or a conceptual
work with concise and enticing documentation that substitutes for a
lengthy critical listening, then ARS submissions should be required to
have these characteristics. There is no room for music among exclusive
visual fetishism. I have heard many astounding recorded works that have
never received attention from ARS; this is not surprising as it seems
clear that ARS would much rather look than listen.