Home // Bio // Contact

Learning What To Do With Your Sinthome Instead of Enjoying It

Acousmatic (2021)

The unconscious is structured like language an auto-encoder...

In the mid-to-late 2010s, the discriminative topologies of Web 2.0 became increasingly indoctrinated into a larger order of neoliberal homogeneity. Alongside other entities like the nation state, the maritime shipping industry, and the IMF, Web 2.0's topological structures began manifesting themselves into almost all aspects of civic life—both intersecting with the constant surveillance of our actions and mapping themselves to our strangest fantasies and fixations. But through a process of latent audio-spatial deconstruction called the sinthomatic process, the vibrations of the past are resurrected through a deep learning network, haunting the listener by proxy of the sound object. And in rare moments of spiritual reckoning, the listener might be able to learn what to do with their sinthome by reappropriating this latent unconscious into an anarchical potential, allocating room for creativity and direct action.

In Learning What To Do With Your Sinthome Instead of Enjoying It, a deep learning model’s auditory latent space is re-appropriated for the purpose of various anti-solutional experiments. Through the lens of a number of different frameworks—including Lacanian psychoanalysis, spectral séance, and homotopy type theory—the piece reimagines various dysfunctional audio signals generated from GANs and VAEs as adversarial probes into latent signal space. These adversarial perturbations function as an attempt to reveal the patterns and structures of a contemporary world-historical unconscious. Learning What To Do With Your Sinthome Instead of Enjoying It thus imagines a number of possible futures in which latent space can be reclaimed as a completely autonomous region

Learning What To Do With Your Sinthome Instead of Enjoying It

Learning What To Do With Your Sinthome Instead of Enjoying It is a collaboration between Max Ardito and Elif Sansoy. Music was composed by Max, and text was written and read by both Max and Elif. The album was mixed by Michael Coleman and mastered by Mike Tierney. The album artwork was designed by Alex Van Gils.

Track List

  1. first bijection across latent space - [C]
  2. { δ } -f0af17449a83681de
  3. "the generative adversarial network"
  4. constructing the type system - [C]
  5. second bijection across latent space - [C <*> C']
  6. "the UGC economy"
  7. constructing the type system - [O]
  8. third bijection across latent space - [S]
  9. "finding the sinthome"
  10. { ε } - 86d5bc08c2eba828
  11. "ε is dissected"
  12. out.sinthome
  13. "the early stages of batch training"
  14. Learning What to Do With Your Sinthome Instead of Enjoying It
  15. out.sinthome
  16. final bijection across latent space - [S >>= C]
  17. { ζ } - 364aba675151243a
  18. Univalent Foundations of Dialectical Signal Space
  19. [the evolution of digital intimacy] ~ the spiritual connection via the network
  20. [the evolution of digital intimacy] ~ a tailor-made reality
  21. [the evolution of digital intimacy] ~ the expression, the language, the metaphor
  22. (outro)

How To Listen

Mac OSX / Linux

Download here, or open up the command line or terminal application and enter the following

curl https://well.cutelab.nyc/music/learning-what-to-do-with-your-sinthome.tar.gz | tar -xz

After the download is finished, the piece should be available in your home directory.

Dreaming Beyond AI

You can also find the piece on dreamingbeyond.ai