This dissertation charts another path for Media Arts and Sciences (MAS) by generating institutional and creative research practices working against logics of integration and extraction. Drawing on activist, psychoanalyst, and philosopherFélix Guattari, I use institutional analysis to model how MAS came to inherit legacies of 1970s cyberlibertarianism and digital utopianism, which disavow politics in favor of technocratic interventions. I also identify the homogenizing and reactionary political and disciplinary consequences of MAS’s embrace of integrative modes of interdisciplinarity. Responding to integrative and technocratic MAS, I argue for reconsideration of politics in MAS through an approach to research, creation, and practice informed by Guattari’s concept of diagrammatics. Diagrammatics emphasizes the centrality of subjectivity in crises of mental, social, and environmental ecology. Through creative practice with computational media, art and technology, and social design, I work towards a practice-driven notion of diagrammatic media. I outline media diagrammatics as an intertwining of extensive engineering of concrete machines (artmaking, systems building, bookmaking, event making) and a speculative engineering of abstract machines (dreaming, conceptualizing, modeling, critiquing, analyzing, actualizing, virtualizing). In this sense, diagrammatics mediates mental and social individuations between a preindividual and an individuation. Diagrammatic media objects (e.g., a radiophonic aberrance in the electromagnetic field, a book, an autumn leaf) are lures for thinking-feeling embedded into a diagram. Diagrammatic media proposes we stop thinking in terms of computational media systems altogether and begin thinking about diagrammatic assemblages of concrete and abstract machines. A prototype of a tangible media-rich operating system called diagrammatic elucidates the complexities of the relationship between lateral thinking, moving, and feeling in learning and writing. I outline ways the prototype could be brought into a slow network that speculates on new modes of collaborative writing. Portacular Resonances, a radiophonic media installation, drives a Sci-Phi endeavor orbiting contemporary anxiety differently: as a clue for cosmic becoming spiraling out of the reactive affect of alienations and emotional capitalistic exploitation and into a potential collectivizing force. Finally, through the Guattarian concept of the machine, I ask how potential becomings are embedded through gathering events such as SloMoCo, a slow conference for artist researchers.

Beneath the epidermis, the human body contains a vibrant and complex ecology of interwoven rhythms such the heartbeat, the breath, the division of cells, and complex brain activity. By repurposing emergent medical technology into real-time gestural sound controllers of electronic musical instruments, experimental musicians in the 1960s and 1970s – including David Rosenboom – began to realize the expressive potential of these biological sounds. Composers experimented with breath and heartbeat. They also used electroencephalography (EEG) sensors, which register various types of brain waves. Instead of using the sound of brain waves in fixed-media pieces, many composers took diverse approaches to the challenge of presenting this in live performance. Their performance practices suggest different notions of embodiment, a relationship in this music which has not been discussed in detail.

Rosenboom reflects extensively on this performance practice. He supports his EEG research with theory about the practice of biofeedback. Rosenboom’s work with EEG sensors spans several decades and continue today, which has allowed him to make use of advancing sensing and computing technologies. For instance, in his 1976 On Being Invisible, the culmination of his work with EEG, he makes use of analyzed EEG data to drive a co-improvising musical system.

In this thesis, I parse different notions of embodiment in the performance of EEG music. Through a critical analysis of examples from the discourse surrounding EEG music in its early years, I show that cultural perception of EEG sonification points to imaginative speculations about the practice’s potentials; these fantasies have fascinating ramifications on the role of the body in this music’s performance. Juxtaposing these with Rosenboom, I contend that he cultivated an embodied performance practice of the EEG. To show how this might be manifest in performance, I consider two recordings of On Being Invisible.

As few musicologists have investigated this particular strain of musical experimentalism, I hope to contextualize biofeedback musicianship by offering an embodied reading of this milestone work for EEG.