DNK-Amsterdam

19 June 2018
Support Event #3: G Douglas Barrett 'The Brain at Work: Cognitive Labor and the Posthuman Brain in Alvin Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer'

For the third Support Event of DNK Days 2018, we are delighted to present G Douglas Barrett who will give a lecture on some fascinating recent research at San Serriffe.

In this talk, Barrett examines cognitive labor and the posthuman brain in composer Alvin Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer (1965). Alongside a discussion of the historical relationships between cybernetics, posthumanism, and political economy, it contextualizes Lucier’s neurofeedback experiments in light of the expansion of the military-industrial complex and the large-scale labor transformations of late capitalism. Read as staging the performer’s “brain at work,” Music for Solo Performer appears here as a response to post-Fordist economic models that prioritize cognitive over manual forms of labor.

G Douglas Barrett is Assistant Professor of Communication Arts at Salisbury University. He has enjoyed lives past and present as an artist, composer, writer, and tech worker. He has published in Mosaic, Tacet, and Contemporary Music Review and is the author of After Sound: Toward a Critical Music (Bloomsbury, 2016). The current talk is part of a work-in-progress project on experimental music and theories of posthumanism.

Location: San Serriffe Sint Annenstraat 30 1012 HE Amsterdam Doors open: 20:00, performance starts 20:30 Entrance: €5 suggested donation