An audio-visual meditation. Created in 2020.
This isn’t so much a piece of music as an audio-visual philosophical meditation on the possibility that we may be existing inside a simulation.
In 2003 philosopher Nick Bostrom published a paper in The Philosophical Quarterly in which he argued that we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. Several esteemed scientists and philosophers agreed that it was at least a very real probability. In a 2021 article in Scientific American Fouad Khan goes further to claim that it is ‘confirmed’. Khan suggests that any simulation would have some kind of artifact that betrayed the limits of the hardware on which the simulation was running, which would be experienced by subjects within the simulation, and which would not be explicable by any ‘laws of nature’ programmed into the model. The speed of light, Khan suggests, is exactly the kind of artifact that we would expect to find – which he takes to be proof.
This is a just a piece of art so obviously makes no attempt to contribute to that philosophical debate. Rather, it reflects on the possibility and what it might mean for our experience of our existence, and the value of that ‘lived’ experience.
The music and audio-collage aspects were composed and recorded in June 2020. The computer graphics and video footage were created/assembled in July, and set to music in the manner of a music-video (i.e. the pictures were set to music rather than music being set to picture as in a film score).
You are viewing a collection of musical pieces.
Click the name of the piece to play it. Click a playing piece to pause it.
When a piece finishes, the next piece in the list will automatically play.