Sonic Sabotage in Negentropy: AI as an Instrument of Disobedience in Post-Operatic Performance
Abstract
This essay examines artificial intelligence (AI) as an instrument of aesthetic disobedience in post-operatic performance, taking the speculative opera Negentropy: The Last Man in the Wasteland (2024) as a case study. Confronting algorithmic governance and the affective standardization of platform capitalism, the work mobilizes sonic deepfakes, generative algorithms, and biofeedback (CO₂) not to optimize, but to critically sabotage cultural production infrastructures. Grounded in a negentropic epistemology —understood as the strategic creation of localized disorder to erode control systems— and a post-techno aesthetic, it transforms error, temporal collapse, and distributed authorship into deliberate compositional forces. The analysis demonstrates how this performative practice articulates a metapolitical resistance across three axes —temporal, authorial, and affective— proposing strategic dissonance and algorithmic dysfunction as essential tactics for reclaiming sonic agency and envisioning post-optimized futures. The study also introduces Research through Sabotage (RtS) as a methodological framework that operationalizes this critical approach, defining it as a synthesis of Research through Art (RtA) and Research through Design (RtD) that prioritizes controlled dysfunction as a generator of situated knowledge.
KEYWORDS: Algorithmic Resistance, Post-Digital Aesthetics, AI in Performance, Negentropy, Sonic Disobedience.
Downloads
References
Auslander, P. (2008). Liveness: Performance in a mediatized culture (2.ª ed.). Routledge.
Betancourt, M. (2016). Glitch art in theory and practice: Critical failures and post-digital aesthetics. Routledge.
Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Polity Press.
Cascone, K. (2000). The aesthetics of failure: “Post-digital” tendencies in contemporary computer music. Computer Music Journal, 24(4), 12–18. https://doi.org/10.1162/014892600559489
Chesney, R., & Citron, D. (2019). Deep fakes: A looming challenge for privacy, democracy, and national security. California Law Review, 107(6), 1753–1819. https://doi.org/10.15779/Z38RV0D15J
Crary, J. (2013). 24/7: Late capitalism and the ends of sleep. Verso.
Fisher, M. (2014). Ghosts of my life: Writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures. Zero Books.
Galloway, A. R. (2004). Protocol: How control exists after decentralization. MIT Press.
Galloway, A. R. (2012). The interface effect. Polity Press.
Glissant, É. (1990). Poétique de la Relation. Gallimard.
Goodfellow, I. J., Pouget-Abadie, J., Mirza, M., Xu, B., Warde-Farley, D., Ozair, S., Courville, A., & Bengio, Y. (2014). Generative adversarial nets. En Z. Ghahramani, M. Welling, C. Cortes, N. Lawrence, & K. Q. Weinberger (Eds.), Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (Vol. 2, pp. 2672–2680). MIT Press.
Hansen, M. B. N. (2015). Feed-forward: On the future of twenty-first-century media. University of Chicago Press.
Hayles, N. K. (2017). Unthought: The power of the cognitive nonconscious. University of Chicago Press.
Land, N. (2017). Fanged noumena: Collected writings 1987–2007. Urbanomic/Sequence Press.
Nagle, A. (2017). Kill all normies: Online culture wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the alt-right. Zero Books.
Paquete, H. (2015a). Pareidolia: Glitch-Evento, Metodología y Espectro. INTERACT: Revista Online de Arte, Cultura e Tecnologia. https://interact.com.pt/articulo/pareidolia
Paquete, H. (2024b). Post-apocalyptic negentropy: The intersection of technology, environment, and generative music in opera. AVANCA | CINEMA 2024 – International Conference Cinema – Art, Technology, Communication. https://publication.avanca.org/index.php/avancacinema/article/download/662/1315.
Paquete, H. (2014c). Entropia disfuncional: Noise, glitch e caos nas artes sonoras [Tesis de maestría, Universidade de Aveiro]. Repositório Institucional da Universidade de Aveiro. https://ria.ua.pt/handle/10773/13696
Paquete, H. (2022d). Imanências espectrais: Reflexão sobre o pós-digital nas artes sonoras [Tesis doctoral, Universidade Aberta]. Repositório Aberto. https://repositorioaberto.uab.pt/entities/publication/4d87cfa4-25b4-4f88-be52-fe9467b44af7
Paquete, H. (Director). (2024e). Anaparastasis I astronkatidhanykteronomighyrin (I have become familiar with the nightly concourse of the stars) [Reinterpretación musical de la obra de J. Christou, 1968]. Concierto por Hugo Paquete & Rui Baeta (barítono) en Negentropy: The Last Man in the Wasteland. Planetário do Porto – Centro Ciência Viva, Porto, Portugal.
Paquete, H. (Director). (2024f). Anaparastasis III: The pianist [Reinterpretación musical de la obra de J. Christou, 1968]. Concierto por Hugo Paquete & Cláudio de Pina (pianista) en Negentropy: The Last Man in the Wasteland. Planetário do Porto – Centro Ciência Viva, Porto, Portugal.
Paquete, H. (Director). (2024g). Negentropy: The Last Man in the Wasteland [Ópera electrónica en vivo]. Concierto en el Planetário do Porto – Centro Ciência Viva, Porto, Portugal.
Poyau, M. (2011). The 80s nostalgia aesthetic of music’s hottest new subgenre: Hypnagogic pop. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/music-hypnagogic-pop
Rancière, J. (2004). The politics of aesthetics: The distribution of the sensible (G. Rockhill, Trad.). Continuum. (Obra original publicada en 2000)
Rancière, J. (2010). Dissensus: On politics and aesthetics (S. Corcoran, Trad.). Bloomsbury.
Rini, R. (2020). Deepfakes and the epistemic backstop. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 48(2), 144–178. https://doi.org/10.1111/papa.12162
Shaviro, S. (2015). No speed limit: Three essays on accelerationism. University of Minnesota Press.
Srnicek, N., & Williams, A. (2015). Inventing the future: Postcapitalism and a world without work. Verso.
Srnicek, N. (2016). Platform capitalism. Polity Press.
Wark, M. (2004). A hacker manifesto. Harvard University Press.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs.
Žižek, S. (2024, 7 de diciembre). Soft fascism and the return of collective aesthetics. Sri Lanka Guardian. https://slguardian.org/zizek-on-soft-fascism-ai-and-the-collapse-of-shame/
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
