Public Lecture: Mattin, Unconstituted Praxis

Friday 20th January 2012, 2pm

Goldsmiths, Room: New Academic Building, LG01

Free, all welcome

If previously, in improvisation, we tried to play our instruments  against the grain, against the way they have been conceived and designed, what if from now on we don’t just deconstruct the instruments but try to change the conditions that we are living in? Can we use these material conditions as instruments of improvisation in order to change them? If the material conditions that we are living in are immersed in a capitalist logic, can we pervert this logic by improvising ourselves?

What do I mean by ‘unconstituted praxis?’ It is a praxis without a false sense of agency, without self-congratulation. It is a praxis subsumed in alienation, not liberation. A form of play in which one does not know whether one is having fun or not. It is social in the sense that it questions what individual subjectivity is and how we are produced in a given situation. In this sense, an unconstituted praxis is the opposite of escapism. This praxis is like jumping into the void of the situation that you are in, where you will discover uncertainty in the certainty of where you are as if you were a nyctalopic idiot.

Mattin is an artist who works with noise and improvisation, often in collaboration with others. His work seeks to address the social and economic structures of experimental music production through live performance, recordings and writing. Mattin considers improvisation not only as an interaction between musicians and instruments, but as a situation involving all the elements that constitute a concert, including the audience and the social and architectural space. He has  produced records, performs internationally and runs two labels: w.m.o/r and Free Software Series and the chaotic net-label desetxea.

Together with Anthony Iles, Mattin was editor of the book Noise & Capitalism (2009). Taumaturgia and CAC Bretigny are about to publish Unconstituted Praxis, a book collecting most of Mattin's writings plus reviews by other people of performances and concerts that he has been involved in.

This event is presented by Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, http://www.gold.ac.uk/cultural-studies/