Grid Culture
Arseni Troitski, Eliot Bates · Focal Press eBooks · 2024
Bates and Troitski&s;s chapter documents how a music technology community comes to terms with its own capacity for critical discourse and knowledge production. Rooted in methodological questions posed by critical organology, this essay, expands on their initial ethnographic research about lines, which at a superficial level can be considered a platform , but which is also synonymous with a community of users that in aggregate constitute a discourse network . Lines, as a platform, community, and discourse network is primarily designed to support the development, documentation and user-generated code efforts specific to Norns and Grids, a set of hardware synthesis-related objects. Extending from the value/valuation questions, how do the vibrant materialities and the interface/design/reconfiguration aspects of these objects relate to the sociocultural norms and values found within lines? How does the concept of “grid culture“ emerge out of this particular imagined community in response to pre-existing and competing places of exchange and connection, and what are its various distributed meanings to the numerous lines users?