The Post-Digital
Revised 2024
The post-digital is not a historical period. It’s not about moving beyond the digital or declaring its obsolescence. It describes a condition - one in which the digital has become habitual, infrastructural, ambient.
In this condition, digital tools no longer feel new. They feel invisible. Their influence is everywhere, but rarely named. Post-digital aesthetics don’t celebrate this - they make it heard.
They refuse to let the digital disappear.
Defining the Post-Digital
Kim Cascone introduced the term to music discourse in 2000, describing a shift toward “post-digital” aesthetics as a response to the myth of digital perfection.¹ Artists in this field turned failures - clicks, crashes, dropouts - into compositional elements.
Rather than suppressing artefacts, they embraced them. Rather than polishing audio until it shimmered, they let it crack.
This wasn’t nostalgia for analogue media. It was a critique of digital ideology - the promise of flawless production and lossless reproduction.
David Berry and Michael Dieter later expanded the term, framing the post-digital as a condition of embeddedness.² Digital tools, they argue, are now taken for granted. The task for artists is not to adopt them, but to interrupt them.
Post-digital aesthetics are about friction - not celebration.
Failure as Material
In music, this friction often appears as glitch, dropout, system overload. What would once have been seen as a fault becomes the focus.
But post-digital work doesn’t stop at surface artefact. It goes deeper - into the operational assumptions of digital systems.
Richard Coyne notes that post-digital artists “foreground the glitches, quirks, and interruptions” that systems try to erase.³
This foregrounding is a political gesture. It says: the system is not seamless. The sound is not neutral. Listening is not frictionless.
When Oval builds loops from damaged CDs, or Ryoji Ikeda composes from corrupted data files, they’re not just innovating. They’re resisting the demand for legibility.
They let the machine stutter.
Listening to the System
The post-digital reframes listening. It’s no longer just the reception of sound. It becomes an engagement with systems - with code, latency, signal path, compression artefact.
Nina Sun Eidsheim calls this a “vibrational practice” - where listening includes the space, the interface, the body.⁴
What we hear is not just sound, but the conditions of its production.
The buffer becomes part of the piece. The hiss is no longer background. The error is no longer error.
Post-digital music teaches us to hear systems breaking - and to listen through the break.
Post-Digital ≠ Nostalgia
Critics sometimes mistake post-digital aesthetics for retro fetishism - a return to tape, vinyl, or lo-fi. But that misses the point.
Post-digital artists don’t turn away from the digital. They work inside it, and against it.
They repurpose discarded formats not out of sentimentality, but to confront the speed of planned obsolescence. They glitch not to sound cool, but to expose hidden protocols.
As Florian Cramer writes, the post-digital doesn’t reject the digital - it “integrates its noise.”⁵
This is composition as rupture, not romance.
Politics of the Audible
Post-digital practice is also about what isn’t heard. About what systems suppress. About what friction reveals.
Marie Thompson reminds us that glitch, when stripped of context, risks becoming aestheticised whiteness - a performance of disruption that ignores the lived experience of sonic marginalisation.⁶
Jennifer Stoever goes further, showing how listening itself is racialised - how certain voices are heard as noise, others as music.⁷
Post-digital aesthetics can reveal these structures - but only if they’re willing to confront them. Glitch without critique is just a texture.
A sound that resists must also be accountable.
Conclusion
The post-digital is not a style. It’s a stance.
A way of refusing transparency. A way of letting systems speak - and fail.
In the next chapter, we explore how these aesthetics operate in practice - how failure becomes form, and how post-digital music composes with artefact, not against it.
Footnotes
- Cascone, K. (2000) ‘The Aesthetics of Failure: “Post-Digital” Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music’, Computer Music Journal, 24(4), pp. 12-18.
- Berry, D. M. and Dieter, M. (eds) (2015) Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Coyne, R. (2014) ‘Post-Digital Aesthetics and the Return to the Real’, in Berry and Dieter (eds), pp. 69-82.
- Eidsheim, N. S. (2015) Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- Cramer, F. (2014) ‘What is “Post-digital”?’, APRJA, 3(1), pp. 10-24.
- Thompson, M. (2017) ‘Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in Sound Studies’, Parallax, 23(3), pp. 266-282.
- Stoever, J. L. (2016) The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening. New York: NYU Press.