From Technical to Technological: Interpreting Technology Through Composition

This paper traces the development of technology as a discourse and as a way of understanding human activity. In our everyday activity, the notion of technology is often consumed by its purely practical, equipmental, interpretation. Such an interpretation assumes the cultural neutrality of technical things, fully justifying the equivocation of the technical with the technological. Since the 1950s, art has increasingly come to concern the social, cultural, and historical frame in which artworks obtain meaning. It is proposed that computer-assisted composition be understood as a means for generating interpretive frames, one that questions the positivist framework normally associated with so-called “technological art.”