Simon Deschamps: State Synthesis
Simon Deschamps is an artist based in New York.
Nation Synth, 2024, PLA, Wood, electronics, fasteners, 10”x5”x3”
Technologists today promise us the ability to manipulate reality with increasing effortlessness and fluidity, yet we feel more politically impotent than ever before. Answers to how we got here can be found in the history of cybernetics, an area of study concerning subjects as disparate as ecology, information science, computer science, military systems, neoliberalism and socialism.
Born out of a combination of research done by ecologists and the US military at the start of the 20th century, practitioners of cybernetics envisioned the world as a series of systems that function based on feedback, taking in information from the outside world and regulating themselves accordingly. This idea manifested itself in ecologists’ efforts to precisely understand, quantify and replicate the intricacies of the natural world, as with Howard T. Odum’s circuitry schematics, diagramming the energy flow of forests and other habitats. The Biosphere 2 experiment of the 90’s followed in this vein, attempting to create a self-contained ecosystem capable of sustaining human life.
Californian hippies were inspired by the promise of creating systems that functioned without centralized authoritarian control, leading to the libertarian ideology of Silicon Valley and spurning various attempts at utopian “network communities.” Hippy communes of the 70’s became a blueprint for other attempts at decentralized community building, such as Burning Man, Seasteading, and their immaterial counterpart, social media.
Some leftists saw the potential for cybernetics to create prosperous centrally planned economic systems. In the 1970’s, Chilean president Salvador Allende commissioned Stafford Beer to work on Project Cybersyn, an attempt to automate the regulation and organization of Chile’s economy. Inspired in part by efforts like Project Cybersyn, science and political journalist Leigh Phillips wrote his 2019 book, “The People’s Republic of Walmart,” arguing that more humane centrally planned economies can be created through the appropriation of the vast system of logistics created by corporations such as Amazon and Walmart.
State Synthesis is a synthesizer I created in 2024. 12 knobs that affect different parameters of the synthesizer are labeled with 12 political and economic indices used to assess and compare nations. The sounds produced by the synthesizer vary between sparse tranquil drones and chaotic, echoing arpeggios. Unsynchronized looping sequences of notes create phasing effects, giving the sound an undulating and ever-evolving quality. The controls of the synthesizer are unconventional as well, each knob affecting a multitude of disparate parameters in ways that are unpredictable to seasoned synthesists and the uninitiated alike. Viewers are welcome to dial in values of hypothetical nations and hear the results.
Synthesizers, like cybernetics, emerged from military research during the first half of the 20th century and since then have spurred similarly liberatory rhetoric. Pioneering synthesizer designer Don Buchla saw the technology’s potential to allow for a more democratic approach to music creation, one open to those lacking traditional music education. He stated: “I think that electronic technology offers us the possibility of divorcing ourselves from the necessity of virtuosity without divorcing ourselves from the possibility of intense and meaningful interaction with our instruments.” Buchla also viewed his devices as allowing for more free and individualistic self expression and designed them with this goal in mind. Regarding his reluctance to build keyboards into his synthesizers he stated, “A keyboard is dictatorial. When you’ve got a black-and-white keyboard there, it's hard to play anything but keyboard music. And when there’s not a black-and-white keyboard, you get into the knobs and the wires and the interconnections and timbres; you get involved in many other aspects of the music, and it’s a far more experimental way.”
Cybernetics and synthesizers are both pieces of now-retrograde visions of the future that have become assimilated into the background of contemporary life. The instruments that Stockhausen once shocked the public with have now become an integral component of popular music, and likewise the world-view once used to try to realize a Chilean socialist utopia became a tool used to optimize Amazon warehouses. Even after a century of development, cybernetics and synthesizers continue to possess radical, liberatory potential. Don Buchla’s dream of democratizing music has been realized for the most part, as the recording and distribution of music can now be accomplished by anyone with access to a computer; today's cybernetic systems are capable of organizing a more equitable society if we are able to redirect them towards those ends.