| Title | 8. Iannis Xenakis’s Materialism |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | On the Dialectic of Real-time Computation |
| Contributor | Ramón del Buey Cañas(author) |
| Oswaldo Emiddio Vasquez Hadjilyra(author) | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0390.10 |
| Landing page | https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0390/chapters/10.11647/obp.0390.10 |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Ramón del Buey Cañas; Oswaldo Emiddio Vasquez Hadjilyra; |
| Publisher | Open Book Publishers |
| Published on | 2024-10-09 |
| Long abstract | Despite the ongoing resurgence of materialist philosophy, Xenakis’s work is rarely associated with materialist thought. This is peculiar since Xenakis’s lifelong commitment to physical matter properties transcribed to compositions, and his philosophical constructions and renditions of material processes in instruments, code, writings, and performances, instantly elucidate his preoccupation on how we relate to matter. Given the little effort to grapple with Xenakis’s materialist work philosophically, this chapter approaches the question of materialism in Xenakis’s work, through his relationship to philosopher and information theorist Abraham Moles and the real-time capabilities of the UPIC, and argues that in the ongoing conversations in materialist philosophy, the work of Xenakis, in its dialectic understanding, plays a pivotal role. |
| Page range | pp. 143–156 |
| Print length | 14 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
Ramón del Buey Cañas is a Spanish researcher, with a formal background in Philosophy (BA, MA), and Environmental Humanities (MA). He holds a PhD in Philosophy from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. He has been a visiting scholar at Duke University from 2022 to 2023. Currently, his academic research links computation, music, and materialism. His publications include books in the Party Studies series, together with Brandon LaBelle and Víctor Aguado Machuca (Errant Bodies Press). Since 2018, he is a member of the Board of Directors of the Asociación de Música Electroacústica y Arte Sonoro de España (AMEE).
Oswaldo Emiddio Vasquez Hadjilyra is a Cypriot-Dominican artist and electronic musician, with a formal background in Mathematics (BSc) and Philosophy (BA, MA). He is currently a PhD candidate in the transdisciplinary program Media Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University. His research interrogates, in theory and in practice, the philosophical and aesthetic implications of treating digitality and computation under a materialist framework. In 2024, along with collaborators, he represented Cyprus in the 60th Venice Biennale.