2017 CAST Symposium BEING MATERIAL: Evan Ziporyn, AUDIBLE
Evan Ziporyn, Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor and Chair, Music and Theater Arts, and Faculty Director of MIT CAST, is a composer/clarinetist with an international reputation for his genre-defying, cross-cultural works and performances. For CAST, he curates the innovative annual performance series MIT Sounding which blurs the boundaries between contemporary and world music. In this interview, he discusses AUDIBLE, the musical performances he curated for the “Being Material” symposium, and comments on sound’s material and immaterial properties.
BEING MATERIAL:
In 1995, MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte predicted that “being digital” would have us entering a realm increasingly unconstrained by the materiality of the world. Two decades later, our everyday lives are indeed ever more suffused by computation and calculation. But unwieldy materiality persists and even reasserts itself. Programmable matter, self-assembling structures, 3D/4D printing, wearable technologies and bio-inspired design today capture the attention of engineers, scientists and artists. “BEING MATERIAL” showcased recent developments in materials systems and design, placing this work in dialogue with kindred and contrasting philosophy, art practice and critique. Panels on the PROGRAMMABLE, WEARABLE, LIVABLE and INVISIBLE—along with a concert, AUDIBLE—explored new and unexpected meetings of the digital and material worlds.
AUDIBLE:
Human music making is a strange intervention into materiality. Blowing into metal, scraping on strings, generating invisible variations in air pressure that waft into people’s ears: it’s odd behavior, this end-in-itself patterning of soundwaves. Ironically, in the discipline itself, ‘materials’ generally refers to ideas and the way the mind organizes them: melodies, rhythms, processes, structure, i.e. everything other than physical beings, objects or forces.