Telematic Music vs. Networked Music: Distinguishing Between Cybernetic Aspirations and Technological Music-Making
Eric Lemmon · Academic Commons (Stony Brook University) · 2019
Since the establishment of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) in the late 1960s, its subsequent development and expansion through the 1980s, and its final transformation into what we now know as the Internet in the 1990s, digital networking technologies have had a profound impact on culture and the means of artistic production.2 When these new networking technologies, including consumer telecommunications systems like cellular devices, were combined with the rapidly advancing computational power of informatic systems, many artists and thinkers-whether cyber-skeptic or -optimistic-began to see the Internet and associated computational systems as integral to their praxis.The notion of the networked computer's cultural importance is partially attributable to its central position as an every-day tool of communication, work, and social organization, and this centrality has been further propelled by the reality of our increasingly connected world.Qualities, such as the ease and speed with which information and communications could be transmitted-and therefore work disseminated and/or produced without the baggage of old institutions-or the glints of utopia or dystopia that could be seen in the freshly technologically networked world, were unsurprisingly put into the service of various artistic mediums.3 Time-based art forms, like music, were no exception.Today, there are two prominent forms of musical creation that are concretely linked to, and primarily produced through, the power of the telecommunications systems, which now connect just under 60% of humanity.4 The terms "networked music" and "telematic music" have become