- Adele Fournet "Recorded Popular Music: Production and Reproduction"
- Matt Sakakeeny "Brass Instruments are Gendered Technologies"
- Sasha Geffen "Synthesizers and Cyborgs: Vocal Processing as a Transhumanist Gateway"
- Deirdre Loughridge "On Sounding (Not) Like a Person in 2016"
Moderator: Charlie McGovern
The interrelations of people and technology are overdetermined by gender and sexuality. What barriers persist in maintaining the dominance of men as record producers and engineers? Even in antiquated domains of technology, like drums and brass instruments, women remain starkly underrepresented. The ways that technology is gendered goes further, beyond the troubled categories of man and woman. Technological manipulation of the human voice, reinforced by visual presentations of the cyborg, allows artists such as Anohni and Björk to explore futuristic and mutated gender expressions. But how to identify a female voice that a male producer has transmuted into a cyborg through computer processing? The cyborg, as an idealized hybrid of human and machine, does not necessarily fulfill the promises of feminist and queer theory. Bringing together an array of technologies and gendered identities, these four papers unsettle presumptions about the human-machine interface. In each instance, dynamics of power condition the dynamics of people and things.