The ‘post-digital’ aesthetic was developed in part as a result of the immersive experience of working in environments suffused with digital technology: computer fans whirring, laser printers churning out documents, the sonification of user-interfaces, and the muffled noise of hard drives. But more specifically, it is from the ‘failure’ of digital technology that this new work has emerged: glitches, bugs, application errors, system crashes, clipping, aliasing, distortion, quantization noise, and even the noise floor of computer sound cards are the raw materials composers seek to incorporate into their music.
While technological failure is often controlled and suppressed - its effects buried beneath the threshold of perception - most audio tools can zoom in on the errors, allowing composers to make them the focus of their work. Indeed, ‘failure’ has become a prominent aesthetic in many of the arts in the late 20th century, reminding us that our control of technology is an illusion, and revealing digital tools to be only as perfect, precise, and efficient as the humans who build them. New techniques are often discovered by accident or by the failure of an intended technique or experiment.
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Kim Cascone, The Aesthetics of Failure: ’Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music, 2000.
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