In the late 18th century system came to be understood as synonymous with institutionalisation and regulation by way of an established order (Siskin, 2016, 151-2). This perspective on system’s relationship with institutionalisation, order and establishment set an early tone for a prevailing systemic pessimism active in contemporary popular culture that understands the systemic as necessarily entailing oppressive power dynamics and the infrastructure of subjugation (see Voss, 2024, 8-9). Within this pessimism the essential scalability of system (Siskin, 2016, 2-7) is indicative of its insatiable capacity for subsumption and the silencing of differences.
Systemic pessimism is given clear expression by Crary for whom ubiquitous and enveloping technological systems are imposed upon us at the cost of human agency, decision-making and creativity, setting us on the path towards redundancy at best and perhaps even extinction (Crary, 2022, 59). Of particular interest is the way that Crary’s concerns apply seamlessly to those regarding generative systems in creative arts, that the automation of creativity is its undoing. These concerns seem uncontroversial when focused on attempts to ‘leverage’ GenAI so that corporate entities might convert artists’ work into training data before redirecting the fees of composers, designers, illustrators, writers, etc., towards their shareholders by way of exuberantly resource hungry data centres while vacuously celebrating the ‘democratisation’ of creativity.
In contrast to the imposition of automation upon creativity is its localised emergence within it. In the work of The League of Automatic Music Composers—and many electronic musicians thereafter—we find the decisive inclusion of automation and a distribution of decision making between a network of human and non-human actors. The receptive state common to accounts of authoring and working with localised generative systems builds active reflection and a decentring of human agency into the development of creativity rather than excising its heart and collapsing it into consumption. In electronic musicking we often find artists inviting, designing and embedding automatic systemic processes into a diffusive network of creative agency and decision making at a localised scale that is often independent of corporate interests in the automation of art. This is not the imposition of technological systems as feared by Crary but the emergence of systemic creativity within existing and evolving networks of artistic production.
- Siskin, C. (2016). System: the shaping of modern knowledge (1st ed.). The MIT Press.
- Voss, G. (2024). Systems Ultra. Verso.
- Crary, J. (2022). Scorched Earth. Verso.