Substantive Consumption: Exploring Relational Connections to Digital Musical Entanglements

This body of work sets out to explore ways to enact relational and substantive notions of care towards the system of digital music consumption. The things we actively care for in the world are predominantly what shapes the nature of our existence within it. But when parts of the things we love the most have explicitly harmful implications on a multitude of scales, it becomes both more difficult and more important than ever to care for the entirety of something, rather than just the parts that are familiar and personally meaningful. In order to consider the full extents of music as a complex system rather than just as a thing we love, we can explore the extents of its assemblage as an entanglement of human characteristics that have become both intentionally and unintentionally embedded within it. As the world becomes more digitized, our daily interactions become more predominately cloud-based and algorithmically mediated. Our consumption of music is no exception. Within digital networks the scale of human and environmental entanglement can often feel insurmountable and ineffable, while at the same time remaining largely abstracted and hidden from our every day experience. This research will seek to quantify and begin to understand the extents of these entanglements. Music is more conveniently accessed and consumed than ever, but what have we sacrificed to attain this level of convenience, and what are some of the consequences of doing so? There is a growing need to confront the consequences of the modern methods to which it is consumed. Through primarily critical, exploratory, and reflective design methods, this work will try to re-frame some of our notions of the digital world. This re-framing will be done in an attempt to gain a greater sense of literacy, and relationality to digital infrastructure, in a hope to prepare ourselves for a world that is only growing more digitally focused.