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inherits. M. Beatrice Fazi defines computation as “a method of organizing, systematizing, arranging reality... carried out via logical, discrete, finite, and quantitative means.”^{Fazi in Disintegrator 2024 - see also M. Beatrice Fazi and Matthew Fuller, “Computational Aesthetics,” in A Companion to Digital Art, ed. Christiane Paul (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 281–296.}

Anil Bawa-Cavia puts this so beautifully:

[C]omputation seems to set itself apart from the general field of technicity, in that it presents to us a distinct mode of explanation—a specific logos that is not merely subordinated to a pre-existing technē—to which I give the name computational reason. This is what distinguishes computation from, say, the hydraulic system of a car, or a plethora of other technologies; hydraulics can be explained by the scientific theory of fluid mechanics, and its functional role, namely to stabilize an object, is entirely subjugated to human rationality, which determines its relations within a technical ensemble. It cannot in its technicity proffer any novel explanation by means of its deployment in the world, and as such it makes no serious epistemic claims of the sort AI aspires to. By contrast, computation refers to a particular way in which logic, mathematics, and language hang together.^{Cavia in Roberto Alonso Trillo and Marek Poliks, eds., Choreomata: Performance and Performativity After AI (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2023), 265}

There is a common tendency to see computation through a kind of hard social constructionism — the idea that everything in the world flows downstream from human social behavior. Someone who engages in this line of thinking might suggest tha

Why do we care so much about working with this material for our current purposes, which involve anticipating alternative futures? That was absolutely at the heart of a critical Romantic project at the end of the eighteenth century, I would say. You can look at Marx as a critical Romantic philosopher and you can look also at those whole political movements that are reworking an understanding of, for example, the Roman state, the res publica—this is an active reworking to current political purpose, anticipating better futures. So this critical Romanticism that takes the past and reworks it without necessarily representing—that is, in the sense of describing, without re-enacting—is a foundation for a creative reworking, revisiting.

Over the past three years, I have begun to work more directly with technology, experimenting with combinations of pre-recorded and live sound. The shifting relationship between digital and live loops has offered a different perspective to my work; the mechanical reproduction of the loop through digital means makes explicit that each repetition is a carbon copy of what directly preceded it. Working with recorded sound within a live instrumental context has problematised my previously held notions of perpetually “becoming” by questioning what constitutes sameness. In contrast to Deleuze, I am drawn to what Lisa Baraitser has described as a suspended time, “no longer a line with direction or purpose.” ¹

In her excellent book Enduring Time, Baraitser states:

I am seeking … lived experiences of time that appear neither eventful nor vital, and whose “multiplicity” is overwhelmed by their singularity—the obdurate situation of poverty that does not change, of incarceration with no end, of the dead who will not return, of the slow circularity of time on the psychoanalytical couch. … I am drawn to temporal tropes that are linked together by an apparent lack of dynamism or movement: waiting, staying, delaying, enduring, persisting, repeating, maintaining, preserving and remaining. ²

Below, I will discuss what I see as different temporalities at play in my piece Dead Time (2019). I will consider aspects of the virtual and the actual as well as asking what it means to listen to events in which time seems suspended. I will suggest that combining live and recorded sound within a highly repetitive context might offer the possibility of a multi-dimensional perspective of time. The temporal aspects of the piece that are considered below are probably best appreciated by listening to the piece in its entirety. Time stamps have been provided for the examples discussed.