Bodies and digital discontinuities: Posthumanism, fractals, and popular music in the digital age

This article focuses on popular music by mapping out a shift in recent popular culture that has incorporated both the technologies and the discontinuities of our contemporary digital reality. While musicians from Sun Ra to Daft Punk have been interested in sf themes, I concentrate here on four musicians who move beyond thematic content or performative stance, and adapt their creative processes, the resulting outputs, and their overall aesthetic programs to accomodate changing relations between the body and creativity that are marked by contemporary technology. Amon Tobin, Björk, Beck, and Kutiman are all thoroughly enmeshed in the sf effects and aesthetics that pervade Western popular culture, acknowledging the inextricable penetration of technology, even in its most sophisticated forms, into the commonplace and the aesthetic. I claim that fractal geometry can provide a system of analysis through which current cultural, aesthetic, and political productions can be better understood. In turning to the fractal-literally, thematically, technically, and/or metaphorically-these musicians map out the geometry of a natural world in which the technological has become organic and is welcomed as a productive source of beauty in our posthuman and distinctly sciencefictional era.