No Future Human Adversarial Networks Contemporary Digital Post-Post-Punk Against Algorithmic  Extractability

“A hyper-digital Post-Post-Post-Punk that reduces itself into  a bit-crushed thin line, a compressed signal of human expression,  folded from a multidimensional human voice into a flat singularity. Unreadable, without information, without features to extract.  A music that encrypts itself to block external machine-reading.  The post-hardcore-punk that will read like a broken AC to the classifier algorithm. Post-Punk practiced digitally processed to a degree  to formulate a ritualistic endpoint of music. Frequency crushed,  folded around a 128-bit private encryption key, which is stored on  a block of concrete, buried 2m below the earth, in a location only  passed on by word of mouth. A raw and hyperdigital sound of dissent, insurgency and insurrection.”

No Future is a staged contemporary music performance in which  a trio of musicians encounters a surveillance and feature extraction computer system. The ensemble is faced with a video- and  sound-analysis machine directed at the stage analysing movement, sound and all underlying characteristics. Detected features  and read-outs are projected directly onto the performers and  stage, so that the audience witnesses the surveillance in real-time.  The piece can be seen as a tutorial, in which the musicians progressively try to escape the readability and extractability of their  performance. They incorporate conceptual and technical techniques to put off the analysing machine and create a format that  has value to the human audience—and none to the machine. It  tries to be invisible or undecipherable to machine vision and feature extraction, but a shared encounter with the audience.  

The setting tries to imagine what a post-post-punk musical intervention can be beyond the historic aesthetic of punk music and  looks for a potential in algorithmic concealment, audio masking and visual disruption. Both human imagination and psychoacoustic specifics enable a mode of perception that relies on  human capabilities while impairing the machine vision. It aims at  creating a space that escapes the surveillance, feature extraction  and monetising of human existence.