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Musicking assemblages and non-human becomings: Mapping morphogenetic processes and distributed agencies in Wolfgang Buttress’ the Hive

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2023

Artur Szarecki Open the ORCID record for Artur Szarecki [Opens in a new window]
Artur Szarecki*
Affiliation:
Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Faculty of Humanities, Institute of Culture Studies, Fosa Staromiejska 3, 87-100 Toruń, Poland
*
E-mail: a.szarecki@umk.pl
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Abstract

The paper introduces the concept of musicking assemblages to account for the agency of non-human actants in a project by contemporary artist, Wolfgang Buttress, that involved creating a musical soundscape together with bees. Collapsing distinctions between popular music, contemporary art and scientific research, the project exhibits musicking not as a result of human action but as emerging from intensive flows of matter-energy circulating between a multiplicity of actants, both human and non-human. Consequently, it presupposes a materialist ontology that breaks with anthropocentric hierarchies and encourages us to rethink popular music as always already involving ‘becoming with’ non-human others, in a way that overcomes the division between culture and nature, as well as its epistemological corollaries.

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Article
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Popular Music , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , February 2023 , pp. 42 - 58
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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