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Since 1967 the American conceptualist Robert Barry has taken his work to the limits of immateriality and invisibility, creating installations with wire and nylon thread, performing actions with inert gasses and radioactive materials and going on to work with acoustic frequencies, sounds and language. This volume documents a recent site-specific work.
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Charles Fourier imagined a whole society structured by music. Hector Berlioz wrote science fiction. Hugo Gernsback looked forward to telematic operas. John Cage imagined an infinite sound palette. But where are today's musical futurists?
Have you heard the story about the android that took to the operatic stage of eighteenth century London? Of the inventor who used musical chords to power an engine and fire a canon? What about the composer who helped the most beautiful woman in the world build a missile guidance system? Three True Tales About Music and Technology re-imagines these episodes from the sometimes tumultuous history of interactions between the sonic arts and technoscience as a series of folk tales and fairy stories—that just so happen to be true.
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The story of the compact disc is also the story of the end of physical media. It is the story of how the quest for perfection laid the grounds for the death of a great industry. For in the passage from analogue media, like records and tapes, to digital formats, like CDs, something changed in the nature of media and in the relationship we have with music. Music became code, a sequence of 1s and 0s, a flow of pure information. The material structure of the medium itself was always supposed to disappear. But the physical has proved to possess an uncanny knack for returning. Today the CD is a zombie medium, still popular amongst certain avant-garde record labels and Japanese consumers. Against all the odds, the spectre endures. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.