Che vuol dire “musica elettronica dal vivo”?

This paper takes a trans-disciplinary theoretical approach on the thoroughly technologized performance practices of live electronic music (or live electronics) and related sound art approaches and considers them a most relevant artistic domain for investigating liveness (the “living” character of performance). We start with a few remarks concerning the terminology of liveness and their musico-historical backgrounds, stressing relevant theoretical points and problematic commonplaces in established views on the subject. We then focus on the core question: what is indeed living in live electronic music? and approach it from a system-theoretical standpoint and related epistemological views (cybernetics, system biology, neo-cognitivism, neo-phenomenology, etc.). The ensemble of human, technical and environmental resources taking part in the performance is denoted as a performance dispositif, i.e., as a hybrid and interconnected compound (“network”) as well as a systemic unit coupled to its specific environment (“ecosystem”). We discuss the relational dynamic tying together the several (human and non-human) instances of agency in the performance dispositif, and eventually argue for a strong notion of liveness, relative to a kind of ecosystemic agency emerging in the interactional dynamics of performers, machines (mechanical, electroacoustic, and computerized systems) and environment (site-specific material circumstances and contingencies). Finally, we contend that the hybrid ecosystems of live electronic performance are highly expressive tokens of the “technological condition” nowadays so peculiar of individual and social life: live electronics practices are instances of both the growing ecologization of technology and the technologization of the senses, they ultimately speak about the biopolitical dimension of our age.
Key words: liveness, performance, live electronic music, performance ecosystem, neo-cognitivist epistemology