Rhythmanalytics is a work-in-progress, diagnostic exploration of electronic music at the end of the music industry. DeForrest Brown, Jr. draws inspiration from conversations with techno originator Juan Atkins during the research and development phase of the 21st Century revival of the Cybotron project in collaboration with Berlin club/record label, Tresor—progressing techno beyond the dancefloor into an applied rhythmanalytical metaphilosophy. Rhythmanalytics maps the writings of philosopher Henri Lefebvre onto a timeline of the global techno economy and asks what happens to the once utopian, prosumer ideals of counter/cyberculture during an epochal transition from accelerationism to longtermism? The project unfolds across three separate events at transmediale, the festival acting as an infrastructure for Brown, Jr. to further develop Rhythmanalytics as the artist and thinker shapes the work into a forthcoming album and book supported by EMPAC (Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute).
The cover of Cybotron’s debut album Enter (1983) depicts a body being digitised mid-stride; visualizing the beginnings of a potential philosophy imagined by a precocious young Juan Atkins with guidance from Vietnam war veteran Rik Davis, who together sought to transmit auditory portals into an alternate reality they called “the Grid” directly into the “Alleys of Your Mind.” Cybotron—a portmanteau of cyborg and cyclotron (an atomic particle accelerator)—was the first of a series of coded terms of “technospeak” shared between Atkins and Davis that formed the basis of an ongoing understanding of post-industrial/information-age capitalist realism within a techgnostic exotheology. “The purpose was simple,” Davis once said in the book Techno Rebels (1999). For him, the project of Cybotron was a way “to survive when the vultures and thieves came to take away what I had inserted into the cultural matrix!” Similarly, Atkins, quoted in Techno Rebels, expresses that he felt that “the US government always tells people what to think about and seems to cover up the existence of UFOs.” He found this systematic control over information exchange to be a form of thought control—“taking away people’s hope so that they don’t look towards the future.” In envisioning an alternate future scenario, Rhythmanalytics seeks to dismantle the rave communal industrial standard of the hardcore continuum and construct a myth-scientific modal logic that embraces cross-disciplinary multitasking in search of an empirical understanding of amplified “synoptic audio.”
Employing his research of techno and the mass devaluing of the recording music industry from a Black theoretical perspective, Brown Jr. ‘reverse engineers’ analytic philosophy and its ideological relationship to digital-and-analogue user design experiences as a new form of techno-vernacular expression derived from Cybotron’s “technospeak.” Brown, Jr’s activations of Cybotron’s conceptual framework suggest a myth-scientific blueprint to make sense of Web3/AGI future shock and subsequent cultural amnesia of socially mediated trend cycles to reclaim music as an integral component of lived vibrational deciphering and maneuvering around and beyond the cyber/memetic structural spread of behavior and intellectual property.
The lecture is followed by a screening of Ari Benjamin Meyers' Marshall Allen, 99, Astronaut (2024).
transmediale would like to extend our thanks for the additional production support and residency provided by EMPAC / Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and to curator Katherine Claire Adams in particular. Further, the festival would like to acknowledge the support of Tresor, Berlin, for the loan of audio-visual materials presented at transmediale.
With support from the Embassy of Canada in Berlin.
