Review of Popular Music in the Post-Digital Age: Politics, Economy, Culture and Technology

A book review of Popular Music in the Post-Digital Age: Politics, Economy, Culture and Technology. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018

The Contemporaneity of Class Relations

‘Class’ is a fiendishly complex and dynamic concept. This is of course true for those working with and through class explicitly, but perhaps even more so for those of us working on social issues in general. We often hear talk of ‘the’ working class, ‘the’ middle classes, or indeed ‘the’ capitalist class, which can give the impression that they are pre-determined, even static, categories; or that their very nature is something inherited, passed down from one generation to the next, and that perhaps they come with certain guarantees – particularly in relation to political identity and electoral politics

Lac Bugs, Petrocapitalism, and Data: ‘Mediatic Musicology Without Music’

A review article of Kyle Devine's 'Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music'. MIT Press, 2019

The Politics of Medium Specificity

Ryan will share some ideas that stemmed from his PhD research, focussing in particular on the (often reviled) notion of “medium specificity”. In the history of art criticism, medium specificity came to symbolise the hard edge of modernist formalism and gave rise to reactionary projects such as contemporary art’s “postmedium condition”. Ryan is interested in reconceiving the notion of medium specificity through its radical expansion, steering it away from its formalist origins to understand artistic and cultural forms as mediums of production in the context of a global capitalist present. He invites you all to read and respond to a rough draft of a paper-in-progress, in which he attempts to outline a “politics of medium specificity”

Can Music be Contemporary?

If, as Peter Osborne suggests, contemporary art is both a generic and trans-medial concept, then the question of music becomes problematic. So much so, that it begs one to ask whether or not ‘music’, in its medium-specificity, can ever be considered contemporary? The answer to this question may seem clear, as ‘contemporary music’ is a phrase attached to a number of institutions, events, ensembles, and has been since at least the latter half of the twentieth century. The use of the term in these instances, however, serves a historicizing function and addresses tropes such as ‘music of its time’, or as a differential marker to distinguish the ‘newest modern music’. In this talk, I will consider the dual relationship between music and contemporary art from the perspective of historical contemporaneity. From this perspective, the historical present is considered as the relational product of increasingly complex temporal processes and historical trajectories. Under the rubric of what Osborne terms the ‘postconceptual condition’ of contemporary art, I will argue that ‘music’ must be ontologically retheorized, or at least radically repositioned within a historical philosophy of art if it is to contribute meaningfully to a generic and critical understanding of contemporary art. What is at stake is either the concept of ‘music’ itself, as it has been historically received; or a notion of ‘art’, theorized by Osborne in the collective singular, that does not include within it specific artistic forms and practices

Music and contemporaneity: Temporality and scale in a globalised present

This paper summarised my PhD research, which focused on epsitemological dimensions of researching music (and other cultural forms) in the context of the global present

Beyond the dichotomy of 'theory' and 'practice' in artistic research

A presentation on the themes of theory and practice in artistic research as part of the Theorem exhibition, 2018

La condition contemporaine': Contribution à une réflexion en course

Invited workshop participant to discuss the project 'The Contemporary Condition', led by Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund at Aarhus University. The workshop was organised by Lionel Ruffel at the University of Paris 8

Is “New Music” Contemporary Art?

Postconceptual art is what the philosopher Peter Osborne claims to be the most reasonable classification when one attempts to grasp “contemporary art’s” critical-conceptuality from “the dual standpoint of a historico-philosophical conception of contemporaneity and a rereading of the history of twentieth-century art” (Osborne 2014). It is an historically determined condition that stands in opposition to “aesthetics” in any standard philosophical (and consequently, art historical) sense of the term. The postconceptual art project can be read as a counterfactual theory that aims to describe an alternative to the received historical progression from “modern, postmodern, contemporary” to critically register the historical impact of the anti-aesthetic practices of the 1960s and 70s. Instead, Osborne proposes a progression that reads “modernist formalism, conceptual art, postconceptual art”. A recent criticism levelled at Osborne’s proposition comes from the musical field, no less, with one commenter announcing that music seems to sit outside of this generic notion of contemporary art. Indeed, if we accept Osborne’s theory, the question of music (or any specific aesthetic medium) does become problematic. So much so, it begs one to ask whether or not music can ever be considered contemporary under these terms; and if it can, would it still be called music? In this talk, I will argue that “music” can indeed be thought of as both a critical and medium-specific category that operates within the discourse of contemporary art. To do this, I will suggest that new conception of medium-specificity must be theorised, which steps away from Greenbergian formalism, under the rubric of a Marxist materialist aesthetics. To finish the talk, I will begin to make an argument for the relevance of music, as a culturally and artistically specific medium, for the cultural production of historical contemporaneity more broadly, suggesting perhaps that music is the art of contemporaneity