Instrumental Morphology
- Type
- Personal Projects
Instrumental Morphology is a transdisciplinary research project at the intersection of biology and music, using instrument design as a method of inquiry. The project approaches living systems as generative rather than mechanistic: their patterns and behaviors hold insights that resist reduction and can be expressed through sound. Across a series of novel instruments, each drawn from a different subfield of biology, biological mechanisms become the basis for sound and composition, with behaviors read as patterns and processes as structures. The work moves between scientific research, conceptual translation, and physical fabrication, treating iteration and uncertainty as central rather than incidental. The research and its documentation form an open-source guide to transdisciplinary practice, offered as an example for students, artists, designers, and scientists.
01Cybernetic Factory
My redraw of Stafford Beer's Cybernetic Factory (1959): a company and its environment modelled as black boxes, held stable by a homeostatic loop, alongside notes from Andrew Pickering's Beyond Design.
Reading notes. Hover a quote to trace its links
“The essence of technology is a process of enframing; science is a means of achieving it.”
Heidegger
“We dominate nature through knowledge, at the same time enframe ourselves.”
Heidegger, via Pickering
“A form of science and engineering which does not seek to dominate nature through knowledge.”
British cybernetics
“A nonmodern paradigm, against the modern one Heidegger despised.”
Pickering
“Beyond Design: cybernetics, biological computers and hylozoism”
Andrew Pickering
“A hylozoist ontology of matter, mind and spirit.”
Hylozoism
“Experiments with biological computing.”
Pickering, on Beer
“Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.”
Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, 1948
“A cockroach-controlled robot, titled with Wiener's subtitle.”
Garnet Hertz