Post-Digital Aesthetics and Poietics
Revised 2024
The term post-digital has circulated in media art and computer music circles since the turn of the millennium, often invoked to describe a phase in which digital technology becomes culturally banal - no longer a marvel but a mundane infrastructure. This apparent ubiquity prompts a strange reversal: where early digital music celebrated transparency, control, and sonic clarity, post-digital aesthetics seem to privilege friction, fragmentation, and failure.
Yet what does it mean to compose - or to listen - within a medium that is already everywhere, already invisible? What does it mean to make sound when the tools of production, distribution, and reception are thoroughly entangled in systems?
This project began as a response to these questions, with a particular focus on the field of computer music and sound art. Originally submitted in 2015, the thesis attempted to think through the emergence of post-digital aesthetics as more than a stylistic gesture - treating it as a critical, even ontological, inflection point in how we understand and engage with sonic practice.
A decade later, the questions posed here have only intensified. AI now listens and composes. Digital sound systems govern everything from protest policing to personal memory. Our ears are no longer ours alone.
This revised edition reframes the original work through the lens of vibrational materialism - an approach influenced by object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, and the philosophy of sound developed in my book, Sound Encounters. At its core is the claim that sound is not a fleeting illusion or a by-product of listening, but a real, affective event that exists in the world, with or without human ears.
To speak of a sonic object is to take seriously the autonomy of vibration - the capacity to act, to persist, to transform.
By revisiting the post-digital through this ontological framework, we can begin to understand computer music not simply as a discourse of cultural codes or aesthetic preferences, but as a site of material encounter - a way of engaging with what sound is and does.
Post-digital music, in this sense, is not just music made after digital tools have become normalised. It is music that contends with the residue of the digital - its glitches, its ghosts, its governance - and that often turns failure into form.
At stake in this re-reading is a shift from the poietic fallacy - the over-emphasis on authorial intent and technological process - to an ontology of sonic emergence. This is a move away from explaining music in terms of its method, and toward describing what sound becomes in its unfolding - how it relates, resonates, and resists.
As sonic researcher Florian Cramer notes, the post-digital is “a turning point at which digital media are no longer seen as the new thing,” but rather as a space where rupture, noise, and breakage serve as aesthetic material in their own right.¹
The structure of this work follows that trajectory. I begin by mapping the historical and ideological framework of technological utopianism, tracing its influence on digital audio culture and its discontents. I then introduce the concept of the post-digital as an aesthetic and critical response - not a rejection of technology, but a practice of making its limits audible.
From there, we turn to the aesthetics of failure and interruption in post-digital music, drawing on examples from contemporary artists whose work foregrounds material instability. We then move into a set of close readings - including Ryoji Ikeda’s data.convex and the collaborative work 10’30 - exploring how sonic objects emerge and act within complex digital assemblages.
Throughout, this revised edition engages with a wider set of theoretical concerns than the original thesis. It incorporates insights from sonic materialism (Cox, Goodman), posthuman sound studies (Eidsheim, Voegelin), and decolonial and feminist critiques (Thompson, Stoever, Goh).
These perspectives don’t dilute the ontological claim at the heart of the work - that sound is real - but they complicate and enrich it. They ask us to listen differently. To listen with others. To listen with care.
In an age when machine learning systems generate music, when listening is harvested as data, and when the boundaries between hearing, surveillance, and identification grow increasingly porous, sound becomes more than a medium - it becomes a terrain of power, relation, and possibility.
The post-digital, grounded in a realist sonic ontology, offers us tools for navigation.
Footnotes
- Cramer, F. (2014) ‘What is “Post-digital”?’, APRJA, 3(1), pp. 10-24.