Deep Inside V1

Creator: Edwyn Kumar
Exhibition: Posthuman Romantics
Published: Feb 2021
Format: Music – SoundCloud
Content Warning: None

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Summary

If a post human was exploring its place and being in the world, what would it feel? What would an existentialist experience be like for an awakened artificial being. Deep Inside V1 explores that idea with sound and function behaving like the physiological mechanisms of breath, heart rate, circulation and thought. 

Created live in one take by Edwyn Kumar. Post editing for sound balance only.

Music Track

In Conversation with the Curator:

[Edwin] Deep inside v1, the sound piece I created is really about a little bit of a journey. So you know, what’s it like, for a posthuman to experience music? And so that piece was created by a posthuman. And I had that in mind during the whole process. The idea here is that music causes us an emotional response. And if we get an emotional esponse out of music, it’s because we have, you know, the way our brains are developed with, you know, the reptile brain and the prefrontal cortex later on… And the emotional center, that kind of sits between the whole thing and would that necessarily be a part of a posthuman? 

And so would they experience emotion the same way? And what if they experienced emotion in the inverse of the way that humans experience emotion? So we listen to music, and we feel something or we create music, and we feel something? What if, as a posthuman, it’s, it’s the creating, and the music is the outcome? So is, is that what’s going on here? And I know that as humans, humans can create music, and feel something while they’re creating the music. And, but we make assumptions about what that would be to up to a posthuman and one of those assumptions is is that they have the same evolved pathway of how human brain emotional centers and all that evolved, and clearly that would not be the case. It just wouldn’t obviously, there would be, at some point, humans would be the catalyst of that. But it doesn’t mean that you know, a smart TV that suddenly became conscious would would feel the same sense of emotion. So the exploration on the sound is – how does – what sort of emotion emotional response is a posthuman going through and what would that sound like? And so that’s kind of the, the idea behind the piece, it gets a little bit out of sync somewhere in the middle. Just the way our emotions tend to get a little bit out of sync in the middle and and then it kind of changes its tone, sort of towards the last and I hope you enjoy it.

[Transcript by Otter.ai, edited by Kay Slater, 2021]