Glenn Gould, as an Android

I just stumbled upon an article on a music blog that describes a collaborative project between the University of Memphis' Institute for Intelligent Systems and the Glenn Gould Foundation, which is to create a reactive Philip K. Dick-style android to recreate Glenn Gould's 1955 recording of J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations (which was so famous to have its own Wikipedia page).  This android will be created using patented "Frubber," a patented skin-like polymer, and will able to process external stimuli known to have affected Gould, including numerology, in order to create micro adjustments to the performance. No I'm not kidding.

What I find most fascinating about this is the way that this android, if it is ever actualized (I do have my doubts) would be caught within a web of discourses surrounding genius, the inherent worth of music, and especially control of the mythological past. This android emerges as a figuration, a kind of artifact or relic, in the center of a romanticized, untenable past on one end and a hopeful, boundless, future on the other.  To me, that Glennbot doesn't exist yet is less important, than the fact that we are seeing a coalition (can I say collusion?) of multiple institutional forces, all of whom are willing to devote, I assume, enormous amounts of capital for the creation of this android for the sake of 'art.'

Now part of me wants to go be happy and get a beer or something, because we are using technology for good.  We're not spending all of our money on weapons, iPhones, and sustaining slave-labor in China, but we're also spending money on Art.  I mean, art can be problematic (see Plato)... but come on- this is really cool art!  Our own real life Glenn Gould.

That was tongue-in-cheek, by the way.  Though I was telling the truth, I find it disheartening, and even a little bit disturbing that we're creating the future by... recreating the past.  And as you know, the act of creating is never a passive activity.  Instead, this android privileges the rhetoric of genius and the eighteenth-century Classical tradition, both of which are basically created and sustained through language of hetero-masculine hegemonies, instead of investing in the ways that technology can be advanced to allow living artists to create something new, and as of yet unimaginable.

As a living, breathing musician who loves Bach as much as the next guy, I want people to focus on expanding boundaries and exploring the limits.  I do hope that this Frubbery friend is only a flaccid premonition (to misuse Donna Haraway) of things to come.  I want to see technology continue to expand art, overflow so that life, imagination, and art become one beautiful tripartition.  Like I said earlier, this guy is a pretty cool toy, but not a whole lot more.