This post is about free play. Technologically mediated aesthetic sublimation -- is it substantively different than onanistic satisfaction of rogue libidinous desires? Desiring machines, desiring the machine to make desire. Carles reduces the irreducible, posits the equivalence between musicmaking by means of synthesizers that mimic the organic sounds of authentic acoustic instruments, and the simulacrums of simplistic computer games and masturbation: Rather than make art with fetishized machines, Carles wonders, "should I buy a vintage Windows 3.1 computer, play Ski Free all day, ‘jerk off’ to JPGs of nude women on floppy discs, and then ‘off myself’?" All of these are inverted, insular distractions that offer an illusory control of time, signified primarily by how time is mapped onto space via the spatialization of musical measures in the music-recording software Carles details. Of course, as Carles shows, this indulgence in distractions, this fantasy of spatialized time, leads inevitable to the ultimate distraction, the ultimate expression of mastery: suicide.
The effort to justify "creativity" enabled by means of contemporary entertainment technology leads inevitably to the contemplation of nothingness, of self-effacement. The perfect technology for creativity would make the user himself irrelevant and superfluous. A useless appendage further hampered by its needs for material sustenance, which Carles aptly metaphorizes in this mock soliloquy through the vittles of popular chain-restaurant Chili's: "‘Carles. U had a good life. Let’s have 1 last meal at Chili’s’ then end my natural life in the parking lot of a local Chili’s, and ascend into electro heaven, where every1 has access to every ‘bad ass’ instrument and computer program ever created?" Once we have given ourselves over to music mediated by machines, then only there, in heaven, where the technology is always perfected in advance, can we experience the free play of creativity.
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