2013-11-10

Peter Price. Sound and material. 2013


source: egsvideo 2013年11月09日
http://www.egs.edu/ Peter Price, critical media theorist and composer, talking about sound, material, vibrations, time, past, present, future, organic, temporal, object, identity, sorting. In the lecture Peter Price discusses energy, force, process oriented work, space, cosmic trigger, fidget, and situation. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe 2013 Peter Price.

Peter Price, Ph.D., is a critical media theorist as well as a composer, electronic musician, and digital artist. Price is co-director of the fidget space, a platform for his collaborative work with choreographer and wife Megan Bridge. The project is based in Philadelphia as a research laboratory for new forms of art, performance and media. Peter Price completed his doctorate at The European Graduate School (EGS) in Switzerland. Today Price teaches an intensive summer seminar there. As a philosopher, Peter Price's project is to reassess the nature of musical meaning in light of two epochal shifts in the twentieth century: firstly the technological events of electricity and digital computation, and secondly the openings to thought initiated by Heidegger and unfolding today in continental philosophy. Price examines the history of western music as an epiphenomenon of the unfolding of western metaphysics. For today that means music needs to be thought in the context of the event of technology as Gestell. Peter Price follows Adorno in diagnosing a serious crisis in musical forms of music making and hears this as linked to the ruptures and fault lines of technological modernity. Rejecting the dominant thinking of music through the filters of style and genre, Price asserts that locating musical meaning today means staying attentive to the entirety of sonic phenomena, from avant-garde experimentalism to DJ culture, from ring tone downloads to what remains of the classical music tradition, and from the disappearing musics of indigenous peoples to the persistent roar of capitalist globalization.

Peter Price has published two books of music philosophy with EGS' press, Atropos: Becoming Music: Between Boredom and Ecstasy with Tyler Burba in 2010, and Resonance: Philosophy for Sonic Art in 2011. Both books are finding an eclectic readership from DJs to experimental musicians and theorists.