Lecture - Georgina Born

On behalf of the Canadian Association of Fine Arts Deans (CAFAD), you are invited to attend the keynote presentation for the association's annual national conference. This year CAFAD is pleased to welcome Georgina Born, Professor of Music and Anthropology at Oxford University, and Schulich Distinguished Visiting Chair in Music at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University, to deliver a presentation about her current and ongoing research. Born's work reaches across a variety of disciplines - from music and media, to anthropology and cultural studies.

Directions in Digital Culture: Music as Exemplar
Georgina Born

In this lecture I draw on an ongoing international research program on the transformation of music and musical practices by digitization and digital media to draw out a number of consequential directions in digital culture today. While music clearly has its own specificities, I treat it as exemplary of larger processes. First, I sketch a number of initial findings from the program, which involved myself and five research associates working in six countries in the developing and developed world, while following music's transnational circulation. I then focus in on my study of the present evolution of digital art musics in British universities, starting out from a symptomatic political crisis in British music in 2012. From the diffusion of creative industries policies, the institutionalization of 'practice based research', and the exponential growth of 'music technology' degrees, to the novel aesthetic and technological practices seeded under these conditions, which manifest an array of ontological politics (Mol 2002, Born 2013), I draw out the frictional entanglement of political, institutional, technological, aesthetic and social change. To understand these epochal shifts, I suggest, we require a non-teleological, non-subject-centred way to conceive of how music history is being made in the present. I take a lead from current art historical concerns with the 'contemporary' and Paul Rabinow's 'anthropology of the contemporary' (2007), as well as Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's (1997) analysis of the 'intrinsic time' of experimental scientific systems, in that they undergo 'continuing cycles of nonidentical [or] differential reproduction' and together compose 'drifting, merging and bifurcating' universes. I suggest that the ensemble of digital art music lineages can best be understood as mobile congeries (Barber 2007): as populations (or fields) in flux. 

Georgina Born is Professor of Music and Anthropology at Oxford University and Professorial Fellow of Mansfield College. Until 2015, Professor Born will hold the Schulich Distinguished Visiting Chair in Music. Professor Born's work encompasses ethnographic and theoretical writings on music, media and cultural production. Her work often focuses on major cultural institutions including television production at the BBC, computer music at IRCAM in Paris (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), and interdisciplinary programs at the University of California, Irvine. Professor Born is a member of the European Research Council's Social Sciences and Humanities expert panels. She has also been an Honorary Professor of Anthropology at University College London, a Fellow of Yale University's Center for Cultural Sociology, an International Fellow of the Australian Sociological Association, and a Fellow of King's College Cambridge and of Emmanuel College Cambridge. In 2008 she was awarded the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association for her contributions to music research. In conjunction with her appointment at McGill University, in 2014 Professor Born will hold the Bloch Distinguished Visiting Professorship at the University of California, Berkeley. From 2010 to 2015 Professor Born is directing the research program 'Music, Digitization, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies', funded by the European Research Council's Advanced Investigator Grants scheme. This research program is the first to examine comparatively the transformation of music and musical practices by digitization through ethnographies in seven countries in the developing and developed worlds.
 
Georgina Born's keynote address is co-presented by Concordia University, McGill University, and l'Université du Québec à Montréal as part of the Canadian Association of Fine Arts Deans Conference.

Thursday, October 3 at 5:30PM
Concordia University
Engineering and Visual Arts Complex
1515 St. Catherine St. W.
York Amphitheatre, EV 1.605

Admission is free