A working notebook on embodied electronic music, electromagnetic-field research, signal-as-material, open instrument, anti-product, and performance ritual, and adjacent enquiries.
The term cybernics was coined by Yoshiyuki Sankai at the University of Tsukuba to name the convergence of cybernetics, mechatronics, informatics and neuroscience in the service of human assistive technology - a definition I do not contest. My work here extends the same root in a different direction: from the instrumented body toward the artistic, the sonic, and the speculative. Seen from this perspective, Sankai's augmentation is itself an instrumentation.
To instrument, to augment: two sides of one surface, distinguished by teleology and direction of information flow - the telos orienting the path inward or outward across it - not by kind. Sankai's HAL exosuit reads bioelectric signals at the skin, infers motor intent, and returns mechanical force to the limb - a closed sensorimotor loop whose telos is restoration or amplification of the subject's own agency. That is augmentation in the assistive sense. But notice that augmentation already presupposes instrumentation: HAL cannot augment without first instrumenting the body - rendering myoelectric activity as readable, transmissible signal. The cybernetic tradition proper (Wiener, and the etymology of κυβερνήτης, the steersman) is precisely about this: control predicated on measurement. So instrumentation as the enabling substrate, and augmentation as what it becomes when the loop is closed by feedback: the body's response to the returned force is sensed, and the next stroke corrected against it. This is why assistive cybernics is cybernetic - the refinement Sankai achieves is the quality of that closure, the loop's continuous reading and correcting of the body it assists. To instrument is to make the body legible as signal; to augment is to feed that legibility back, through feedback, into the body's own purposes.
My practice takes the same substrate and points it at a different telos - not the closing of the loop but its refusal. Picture the signal driven from the interior surface, arcing through the body - and that arc, the passage through, as the felt experience - to cross the exterior surface and depart, unreturned. That is instrumentation as composition: the signal diffused, diverted into a second system, the composition, the field made audible, the listener. Augmentation completes the figure by closing it: it catches the emergent signal beyond the surface, transforms it, and drives it back across the exterior to the interior, where it meets the changed body and is read again - the loop circulating, feedback refining each pass. Both strokes arc through the body; both are felt. The difference is what becomes of the feeling. Augmentation reads the felt response as error to be corrected, returning it to utility; the open instrument lets it cross and go, returning it not to use but to perception. This is not a metaphor; it's the literal control-theoretic structure. The open loop is what makes the work art rather than prosthesis: art is precisely the refusal to close the loop back onto utility.
This is also a shift from the first-order cybernetics of the external steersman to the second-order position (von Foerster) in which the observer is inside the loop being observed. The question shifts from how do we control the system to what does it mean that measuring the body changes it. When I instrument the body as compositional material, the performer is not a steersman external to the signal - they are constituted by the act of being instrumented. The EMF or an NFMI sensor stream, a REBUS gesture: these instrument the body (and its electromagnetic surround) not to return capacity to it but to externalise it as sonic and artistic substance.
There is a latent claim in make the body legible as signal that touches the phenomenology of the body - the distinction (Husserl, then Merleau-Ponty, sharpened by Helmuth Plessner) between Leib and Körper, the body-as-lived versus the body-as-object. Instrumentation does something philosophically violent and interesting: it converts Leib into Körper, the lived body into a measured object, and then the compositional act hands that objectified signal back to perception as something to be heard. So the work doesn't just instrument the body; it stages the conversion between the two modes of embodiment and makes that conversion audible. I extend the instrumental moment of cybernics beyond its assistive teleology, treating instrumentation as the primary artistic act, where Sankai treats it as the means to a closure.
PhD Candidate & EMCT Graduate Resident, Goldsmiths under Dr Eleonora Oreggia. Research into the electromagnetic spectrum as artistic and sonic material, mutli-channel spataialisation, immersive & embedded audio, real-time graphics environments and live-open-instrument design.
The Modular Prime Ladder Method, the Goldbach Distance function d(e), and the Abundance Principle. Papers in preparation; selected drafts available on request.
A critical-theoretical work coining capitalitarianism to name the fusion of capital accumulation with totalitarian control. Approaching publication-readiness; Zenodo DOI to follow.
Third Ear Recordings & PFly Music (label and distribution); past public-broadcast lineage via Gaia Live (1995). Listed here for context, conducted elsewhere.
To work across genres is to fragment. Each register - each idiom, each imprint, each name under which a record goes out - produces an instance of the maker: a partial self, real but incomplete, a simulacrum that performs a coherence it does not possess. The instances multiply and the centre is evacuated. This is not the rich plurality of a self with many facets; it is a hollowing, in which identity is distributed across so many partial renderings that no integral subject remains behind them. Electronic music has long mistaken this for craft - the alias as artistic license - but the alias is the symptom, not the method.
There is a figure for this in geometry, and it is unusually exact. Read each instance as a dimension of the self. In high dimension the volume of a ball behaves against all intuition: almost all of it concentrates in a vanishingly thin shell at the surface, the interior emptying to nothing - and the total volume, rather than growing as dimensions are added, rises briefly and then falls back toward zero. Both facts map. The self's substance migrates to its surface, to the instances, and no centre remains for them to be instances of; and the whole, summed across all its dimensions, does not swell with each new one but contracts. The intuition that proliferating across genres enriches the self is precisely the low-dimensional intuition the geometry refutes. More dimensions of self, less self. The plurality is not richness; by the geometry of its own multiplication, it is subtraction.
The same operation, industrialised, is what the mobile device performs on everyone. The phone is an instrument in the precise sense set out in the note on the name: it reads the body - location, gait, touch, gaze, dwell-time, voice - and renders it as transmissible signal. But where the open loop of the work refuses to return signal to utility, the device's loop is closed, and closed onto another's purposes: the rendered body is fed back not to the subject's agency but to the platform's. The digital self is the artefact of that closed loop. It is a Körper - a measured body - circulated as though it were a Leib, a lived one.
This is the violence, and it is the same violence the work stages, inverted. Where instrumentation-as-composition converts the lived body to signal and hands it back to perception, the device converts the lived body to signal and hands it back to extraction. The producer fragmented across genres and the user fragmented across a feed are undergoing one process under two teleologies. To notice this - to make the instrumentation audible rather than ambient - is the only resistance the work can offer: not to refuse the instrument, which is no longer possible, but to refuse to let its loop close in silence.
The closed loop described in the previous section is not a property of phones. It is the capillary form of a larger system. The thesis I am writing elsewhere names that system capitalitarianism - the fusion of capital accumulation with totalitarian control - and its mechanism, the means by which a fused regime of profit and power now reaches the individual, is precisely the instrumented body. Where older control operated through law, border and barracks, capitalitarian control operates through capture: it renders the subject as signal and closes the loop onto its own accumulation. The body-as-instrument finds here its most fully articulated and most sinister form. The phone is the apparatus's sensory organ; the digital self is the subject it manufactures; the hollowing is not a side effect but the product.
Naming this is the work of theory, and theory has priority: without the concept, the apparatus stays ambient, felt as mood rather than seen as structure. But a diagnosis pitched only at the level of argument cannot reach the place where capture actually operates, which is the sensorium - below and before argument. This is why the work is not illustration but demonstration. The open instrument takes the same operation the apparatus performs - the rendering of the body as signal - and refuses to close the loop, returning the signal to perception instead of to accumulation. In doing so it makes the closed loop audible by contrast: you hear what capture sounds like by hearing what its refusal sounds like. The practice does not decorate the thesis; it is where the thesis is tested against experience and found to hold.
Hence two languages, and the necessity of both. A theoretical language to name the apparatus and hold it still long enough to be seen; a creative language to make its operation perceptible, and to model - in the small, provisional space of a performance - what an instrument that refuses to close its loop might be. Neither alone suffices. The essay without the practice is diagnosis without demonstration; the practice without the essay is sensation without a name. This notebook is the place the two are kept in view at once.
The preceding section gives theory priority: it names the apparatus, and the practice demonstrates the diagnosis against the sensorium. But this leaves a harder question open, and I want to keep it open rather than answer it prematurely.
If capture operates below argument - at the sensorium, in the pre-cognitive layer where the body is rendered as signal before any proposition about it is formed, can the apparatus be fully known by argument at all? Theory can point to it, but the pointing happens from outside the place where the thing actually works. The suspicion - and it is only that - is that the open instrument might do something theory cannot, that is produce knowledge of the closed loop in the register where that loop is real, the felt one. Not illustration of a thesis, not even its demonstration, but a form of knowing that argument can name only afterward.
The cost of answering yes is explicit, and I name it rather than hide it: it commits one to the reality of qualia - to the claim that there is a what-it-is-like to the captured body, a felt character of experience that no third-person description, however complete, exhausts. That is the hard problem in its sharpest form, and it is precisely contested. A physicalist will say the felt register is in principle wholly describable, and that I am mistaking the limits of current vocabulary for a limit of argument as such. But it is the question the work keeps putting to me - whether the making knows something the saying cannot - and this notebook is the place to leave it standing.
An annotated apparatus, grouped by the move it underwrites. The list is partial and will grow; each entry names a debt the argument actually incurs rather than a gesture of authority.
The founding text, and the source of the etymological argument: control predicated on measurement, the steersman who governs only what he can sense. Everything here about loops, feedback and the legibility of the body as signal descends from this.
The second-order turn the note depends on - the cybernetics of observing systems rather than observed ones, the observer inside the loop. This is what licenses the claim that the performer is constituted by the act of being instrumented, not standing outside it as steersman.
The coinage I extend. Sankai's assistive cybernics is the closed feedback loop in its most refined form; the whole "note on the name" is an attempt to honour it while pointing the same instrumentation at a different telos.
The origin of the Leib / Körper distinction - the body as lived versus the body as measured object - which the note's account of instrumentation-as-violence turns on.
The body as the ground of perception rather than an object within it. Sharpens why converting Leib to Körper is not a neutral act of measurement but a transformation of the perceiving subject itself.
A suggestive parallel for the surface model. Plessner classes living things by their boundary dynamics - the open and closed forms in which an organism's interior meets its surrounding world - and by eccentric positionality, the human capacity to stand outside one's own body. The interior/exterior surface across which signal is driven reads, in this light, as Plessner's boundary recast as a control-theoretic figure.
The canonical statement that subjective character may exceed any objective description. This is the warrant for the dated note's suspicion that the felt register cannot be fully reached from outside it.
The "hard problem" named precisely. The note's claim that making might know what saying cannot stands or falls with this debate, and the entry is here to mark the cost of the commitment, not to pretend it is settled.
The opposing pressure, kept honestly in view: the gap may be epistemic - a limit of current vocabulary - rather than ontological. This is the physicalist objection the note names against itself.
The account of instrumental reason - rationality reduced to a means of domination - that the closed loop's "return to utility" silently inherits. The device that reads the body to feed it back to the platform is instrumental reason made infrastructural.
The shift from enclosure to continuous modulation - control that no longer confines but tracks. The closed loop of the mobile device is a control society's mechanism described at the scale of a single body.
The closest precursor, and the one the capitalitarianism thesis most needs to situate itself against. Zuboff's "instrumentarianism" names almost exactly the instrumentation-as-power described here - yet she holds market-instrumentarianism and state-totalitarianism apart, as distinct species. Capitalitarianism makes the move she declines: it names their fusion. The debt is real; so is the departure.
The mathematical warrant for the hollowing figure, and the lineage worth naming for its own elegance. The result descends from Lévy's spherical isoperimetric inequality - mass on the high-dimensional sphere crowds toward the equator, the interior emptying - which Milman generalised into the concentration phenomenon now bearing Lévy's name. That the unit ball's volume both flees to a thin surface shell and tends to zero as dimension grows is not loose metaphor but a theorem; this is where its working lives.