The Sonic Architecture of Interdictor: Matter, Structure, and Code

Abstract

This dissertation examines composer Marek Poliks’s Interdictor—a sound installation of 558 computer fans on an aluminum hull—as a “reconversion piece” that leverages institutional resources to stage a strategic exit from the neoliberalized New Music field. Through a tripartite analysis, it first maps the field’s hollowed-out conditions, then performs a technical autopsy showing how the work’s C++ code materializes a logic of algorithmic precarity. Finally, a reception study reveals how critiques of the work’s “emptiness” inadvertently validate its core function: to devalue the field’s capital through a performed departure. This framework is tested and expanded through the creative component, Drinking Brecht, a collaborative work of experimental theatre created under the banner of Sister Sylvester (Kathryn Hamilton). Where Poliks’s model is one of alienating exit, this project explores collectivist, embodied participation. While the piece centered Hamilton’s voice as the primary storyteller, our collaborative process—engaging my own compositional practice and the artistic contributions of Jessie Cox, Ellery Trafford, and Hamilton’s too—became a site to consciously negotiate authorship across differences of gender, race, and artistic discipline. The piece thus functions as an open laboratory, representing a different form of Bourdieusian struggle that challenges monolithic authorship through a shared, yet critically examined, creative practice. Together, these case studies chart the complex and often contradictory strategies artists deploy within a reconfigured cultural economy