From Technologies of Representation to Technologies of Performance
Xin Wei Sha · The MIT Press eBooks · 2014
Chapter 2 recapitulates the most salient forces motivating the move from technologies of representation to the technologies of performance. The forces derive from critical reflection as well as advances in computational media technology. We review core crises of representation that thread the modernist and postmodernist moments through the lenses of Latour and Bilgrami. With the advent of electronic computation, representation in its particular scientific form comes alive as numerical simulation and graphical visualization. This becomes concrete in the history of musical notation's role in twentieth- and twenty-first-century performance, and the impact of computer technology. A key phenomenon here is how the non-real-time computer model as a scientific tool transforms into a real-time instrument for live performance, thanks to increase in computer hardware power, the enrichment of the operators, and the transformation of attention from modeling in virtual computer space to shaping, manipulating, and articulating the material world live, in real time, i.e., the technologies of performance.