The article investigates non-linear dynamics of networked culture, emphasizing the entangled relations of power that transcend the dialectic of the vernacular and the institutional, along with its back and forth movement between subversion and co-optation. To that end, it focuses on a controversial digital marketing campaign for the Ministry of the Interior in Poland, analysing its initial reception, subsequent remakes and more enduring political effects. In particular, it demonstrates how the public outcry it generated interacted with other media events, proliferating connections in a non-dialectical manner. Consequently, the unfolding of the campaign involved a multiplicity of often incongruous potentials of expression that fluctuated around enduring cultural patterns, ultimately reinforcing attitudes and institutions that the backlash was supposed to challenge.
The paper introduces the concept of musicking assemblages to account for the agency of non-human actants in a project by contemporary artist, Wolfgang Buttress, that involved creating a musical soundscape together with bees. Collapsing distinctions between popular music, contemporary art and scientific research, the project exhibits musicking not as a result of human action but as emerging from intensive flows of matter-energy circulating between a multiplicity of actants, both human and non-human. Consequently, it presupposes a materialist ontology that breaks with anthropocentric hierarchies and encourages us to rethink popular music as always already involving ‘becoming with’ non-human others, in a way that overcomes the division between culture and nature, as well as its epistemological corollaries.
ASMR, an online phenomenon comprising videos in which a performer employs technologically processed sounds to evoke a pleasurable, tingling sensation in the viewer and foster a sense of intimacy has been rapidly gaining popularity in recent years, with its aesthetic increasingly adopted in popular music. The paper investigates one example of such imbrication, Zaumne’s album, Emo Dub (2018), which samples voices from ASMR videos, transforming them into disembodied intensities, detached from their original context. As such, Zaumne’s music goes beyond either merely incorporating aspects of ASMR, or deconstructing it in a critical fashion; instead, it modulates its affective potential for affording mediated intimacy. Consequently, drawing on the concepts of networked affect and assemblages, the paper argues that Zaumne’s music exhibits a form of posthuman intimacy that does not pertain to relations between subjects, but rather to attunement with the impersonal dynamic of digital networks: the constant circulation of content, and the random and contingent affective encounters that produce transpersonal identities and subjectivities.
The article concerns the ways sound can afford the formation and recomposition of affective publics by acting directly on bodies, prior to the discursive framing of acoustic experience. In particular, it focuses on a violent altercation that broke out during a live hip hop concert in Poland in 2009, arguing that the deployment of sound might have affectively primed the audience to participate in the incident. In this sense, sound is conceived as a complex of intensive forces that pass across and in-between bodies triggering immanent processes of emergence and structuration, thus affording incipient and fragmentary publics to come into being.
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