Reimagining collaboration through the lens of the posthuman: Uncovering embodied learning in noise music

Abstract

While education research has largely avoided posthumanist scholarship, this analytic lens challenges the ways in which researchers have conceptualized educational technologies, i.e. collaboration and embodied learning, as primarily humanist endeavors that overtly center on human subjects within educational processes. By exploring sites of research that overtly enact posthumanist conceptions of learning, education researchers can address this oversight. In this article, I investigate posthumanist collaboration within the noise music genre, positioning noise music as a posthuman musical tradition and, in turn, a posthuman educational context. In doing so, I reframe noise (in the broad sense of the term) as a tool for engaging the posthuman through multiple educational praxes both in and outside of this specific genre. To construct this argument, I place extant literature on posthumanism and noise in conversation with descriptions of performances from the 2017 Experimental Education Series, a quarterly workshop and concert series that features a broad spectrum of noise musicians, and interviews with teaching artists from this series. Through this constellation of texts, I advocate for noise music to not only serve as a site for future research but as a potential model of posthuman education more broadly.

Declaration of interest statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Two of the performances, one by Amanda Schoofs and the other by Angel Marcloid, exist online (see Linski, 2017a, 2017b). While the performance by Sarah Hennies from this series was not videotaped, a video of a different performance of the same piece does exist (see Herting, 2017b).

2 Throughout this article, I intentionally separate the terms meaning and knowledge to avoid the humanist implications of the latter (see Snaza et al., 2014). However, in citing other sources that use the term knowledge within posthumanism, I do use the term occasionally throughout.

3 Unfortunately, video of this performance does not exist.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter J. Woods

Peter J. Woods is a doctoral candidate in the Curriculum & Instruction department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he studies mechanisms and manifestations of learning within culturally situated forms of creative production. He is also an active DIY musician, performing noise music under his own name and a variety of genres with different groups. Additionally, Woods runs FTAM Productions, a record label and concert promotion organization focused on experimental music.