Reclaiming The Ambience
By Nikos Papastergiadis
At the outbreak of World War One the Futurist composer Luigi Russolo incorporated machine noises into his piece Awakening of the City (1914). Towards the end of that war, Erik Satie premiered five short pieces during the intermission of a comedy. He referred to these fugue-like pieces as ‘Furniture music’. The listener was not required to dedicate their attention to it but simply allow it to be part of the scene.
The possibilities of background music were not lost to developers and entrepreneurs. George Squier acquired several patents in the 1920s to transmit Muzak in public spaces. At the same time, musicians were experimenting with recordings of everyday sounds as the raw material to make musique concrète. By the 1960s many composers such as John Cage promoted the use of ambient noise and interactions based on chance.
Ambient music had another awakening. Lying in bed with a heavy dose of painkillers after being hit by a taxi, listening to the winter rain and music that was being emitted from a faulty speaker, Brian Eno pondered on the significance of ‘floating’ in an environment when the sources of the sounds were blurred. In the liner notes to his album Music for Airports (1978) he defined ambient music as offering an “atmosphere: or surrounding influence: a tint”.
However, music that sat in the background and engaged with the datum of everyday life remained on the fringes of popular culture for most of the 20th century. Brian Eno’s Music for Airports was intended to induce a state of calm for the anxious traveller. In 1980, it was installed at LaGuardia Airport in New York for the duration of an art installation. When it was transmitted at the airport of Minneapolis-St. Paul, it was removed a few days later because customers complained that it made them anxious. Charles Baudelaire also complained against this kind of complaint: “Anyone who is capable of being bored in a crowd is a blockhead.”
Pattern recognition and operations that are framed by prescribed rules are the core of algorithms. While artists in the 20th century embarked on experiments to broaden our aesthetic horizons through the incorporation of such techniques, we are now faced with a new condition: culture has been hijacked to make fear pervasive. In the world of techno-feudalism, so powerfully portrayed by Yanis Varoufakis, there is now an algorithm for every anxiety. They are being rolled out with a relentless pace, and the net effect is to put the citizen into a zombified sleepwalking state.
How do we reclaim the tools of chance and techniques of ambience for emancipatory and enlivening purposes?
I recall seeing a young boy acting bored while his parents tried to include him in their vacation. The boy did not want to be there. He was told repeatedly: ‘Look how lucky you are,’ ‘Isn’t this wonderful?’ He returned with a bland stare and a slothful shrug of the shoulders. Boredom was his only resistance. Disconnection was his only path to express disapproval.
Anthony Elliott begins his book Algorithms of Anxiety (2024) by quoting Fyodor Dostoevsky: “the individual is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find quickly someone to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which that ill-fated creature was born”. Elliott is of the view that anxiety is both turbo-charged in contemporary society and that individuals are desperate to rid themselves of their freedom by outsourcing it to smart machines.
Once again, we face the dilemma, at that very point where technology could enhance our agency, it not only comes back to swallow it, but we seemingly conspire in disowning it. So, the question returns: what is a form of agency that can resist the pervasive anxiety and irresistible stultification of the algorithm?
I suggest that awakening from the nightmare is akin to the act of punctuation. Art does something similar, it introduces a parenthesis; combines unlikely things together; inserts pauses and commas where others impose a full stop; hacks the grammar of things and reroutes connections – all along it redistributes control. Does art get out of this dystopia, or does it attune our skin to become aware of another ambience? In a webinar that I co-hosted: Art, AI and the Cosmos (2020), the artist Maja Kuzmanovic suggested that art starts from ‘not knowing’. Its orientation is the opposite of the algorithm’s realism that relies on a prescribed set of permutations and a limited repertoire of rules of the world, as if that is all that it can be. Art heads towards a larger reality of a possible real. It cultivates the craft of curiosity rather than feeding the poison of anxiety.