A sound project by Mattin operating a radical critique of the era of social media, which proposes to free oneself from it by reappropriating its own tools.
Seize the Means of Complexity by Mattin is a call for all social media users of the world to unite: "We are in the asshole of history. Broken individuals struggling with mental health, media obsession, need for attention and legitimation. Burning souls searching for validation, suffering from imposter syndrome in a post-Netflix wasteland. From the ruins of our subjectivity, something can be built; something must be built. To seize the means of complexity, we must comprehend the tools of algorithmic subsumption, and leverage that knowledge to steer their development towards an open-source conception of subjectivity. We should all have access to the codes, technologies, models, and complexities that shape our lives. By embracing noise rather than shying away from it, this adaptive open-source subject could pave the way for a future transcending capitalist realism and its end of history, forging a new form of communism fit for the 21st century."
Seize the Means of Complexity is the recomposition of some materials Mattin used in his interactive performances over the last year: a mass of musical fragments that crystallise as a call for mobilisation. As the title of the album advises, or rather states: to not be crushed by the symptoms that social media produces on us, we must seize the opportunity opened up by the internet in its widest complexity. How can we collectivize the psychosomatic consequences produced by the Meganets? How can we reverse-engineer social media?
The record, commissioned for Xong collection, contains recordings from TikTok and Instagram (hits, pop songs, advertising and voice), that can be heard as a chorus of fragments from the multitude addressing psychic destabilization and the horizon of paranoia and alienation. This plunderphonia of sounds transmitted by the global media opens the possibility of addressing what it means to be human beyond the liberal individual. Seize the Means of Complexity is a proposition, a sonic stage for something to happen.
Limited edition of 150 copies.
Mattin (Martin Artiach, born 1977 in Bilbao) is a sound artist working with noise and improvisation. His work seeks to address the social and economic structures of experimental sonic artistic production through live performance, recordings and writing. Using a conceptual approach, he aims to question the nature and parameters of improvisation, specifically the relationship between the idea of ”freedom”and constant innovation that it traditionally implies, and the established conventions of improvisation as a genre. Mattin considers improvisation not only as an interaction between performers and instruments, but as a situation involving all the elements that constitute a concert situation, including the audience and the social and architectural space. He tries to expose the stereotypical relation between active performer and passive audience, producing a sense of strangeness and alienation that disturbs this relationship. He is currently doing a PhD at the University of the Basque Country under the supervision of Ray Brassier and Josu Rekalde. He has edited with Anthony Iles the book Noise & Capitalism and in 2012 CAC Brétigny and Tuamaturgia published Uconsitituted Praxis, a book collecting Mattin's writing plus interviews and reviews from performances that he has been part of. Both books are available online.
