I worry that discussions of technology, particularly laptops or personal phones, have distilled to lean closer and closer to an analysis of online infrastructure, than anything direct relevant to the machines that enable interfacing with it. Yes there is a lot of talk around Data Centre’s and the broader concerns around large scale technological infrastructure but the smaller elements seem to have gotten a little lost, past a general feeling of phones bad, because social media bad, because internet bad. This isn’t wholely the case, Dani Ploeger’s look at the infrastructure of E-Waste¹, Xiaowei Wang’s coverage of Shenzhai technology² and other hardware focused narratives have emerged, but it seems to me that these occur often abstracted from one another³. The laptop is either physical or spiritual (ie. A method to access other worlds) but less often both. What would it mean for your digital companion, friend and enabler, to also have physical components and for those components to have morally deplorable origin points in the supply chain.

Groups such as SLOrk or PLOrk popularised the concept through questions of what the laptop can enable for performance, curating performances of works using sensors⁴ (famously old golf game controllers) as their interface with custom sound making software. As pointed out to me by a student recently, this can be seen as de-centring the laptop. Making it into a gimmick, which is quickly forgotten by the audience, in favour of the visual of just another electronic DIY instrument. That is to say, it’s not directly in conversation with what it means to make sounds with a laptop.

For a long while, I didn’t understand the draw of DJ’s, particularly those using a laptop as their method of performance. Standing gently bobbing, illuminated by their screen light, working as a glorified iTunes playlist, nothing seemed less inspiring of adoration. But I’ve calmed on this, mostly through the ways in which club music tends to restructure spaces, making the DJ a facilitator and the audience the performance. This critique is useful though in how it applies to a performance centring the laptop, how do you make a computer performance interesting? Visuals are one method. Shelly Knotts’⁵ performances circa-2017 exemplified the best of live coding for me. Displaying her terminal, there is a playfulness with which she goes about assembling her tracks, in full view of her audience, occasionally commenting with little humour-us asides, giving the performance a warm and personal texture. Putting emphasis on performance as a dialogue between audience and performer.

My answer, or more experiment with what makes interesting laptop performance draws on this. With a lot of my practice being in social art, a form of art making that centre’s human dynamics and relationships at its core, making performance participatory is a no-brainer, however this does pose challenges. How do you make interesting work that is accessible to everyone in its performance. Something that encourages and rewards curiosity, while doesn’t prove boring or one note for those that have more experience with either sound or coding? Also what are the politics of accessible art in relation to these questions? What purpose can they serve in an industry in which flashy custom software and technology is the desired focal point?

Here I want to draw on the study of anthropology, particularly on the etymology and philosophy of community building. When people think of community, they often default to identitarian definitions of community. An in-grouping, made around common ground within a group, eg. the trans community, the queer community, coding community, etc. It’s often an easy in-road to community building, find a common point and rally around it. However, this definition emphasises community as a ‘safe space’ for the people in it, one free from overt conflict or frictions. Those who know me particularly well will know that, while I see this form of communities purpose, I am skeptical of such arrangements. Likely from growing up within an identitarian grouping, my father having been in the military, everyone had something in common and that was fascism (while discussing this with my partner, she makes the important point that this is indeed the etymological definition of fascism, the bringing together of sticks). But beyond that I find these spaces somewhat boring, the lack of conflict feels unproductive and unsocialist to me. Adapting Paulo Friere’s thoughts on socialism⁶, true socialism exists within conflict, otherwise authentic desire is repressed. So I wanted to build the laptop orchestra around the broadest possible grouping of community, you don’t need to have any experience with coding or music to particulate, you could (and hopefully will) just stumble upon a rehearsal in the wild and take part. The only commonality is a vague interest in the events occuring. To paraphrase anthropologist Tim Ingold⁷ I hope to create “an unbounded collectivity formed of difference, where everybody can participate precisely because they have experience to share, because its not they are not the same as the other persons”. A community of productive conflicts, brought out within performance.⁸

For this type of accessibility, the laptop is kind of perfect⁹, its a fairly ubiquitous tool that a lot of people have access to, more so than a traditional instrument, and also channels some of the things I’m interested in when it comes to sound. I got my start making generative soundscape works using custom software - often working with dancers. I wasn’t particularly interested in traditional composition and even less so in mainstream music production techniques, but what did interest me was sounds relationship to time and determinacy, what does it mean to make music that never repeats itself? Or what does it mean for music to have no clear beginning or ending? So my work now is a kind of extension of those questions but moving away from digital forms and instead wanting to reflect generative forms of sound making but within collective structures, making indeterminacy out the conflicts of creativity and desire within a group setting. This is where I draw a direct relationship to the Scratch Orchestra¹⁰, in its attempt to make accessible and generative compositions for groups.

It’s also easier than ever to be forever listening, in fact it’s encouraged, Liz Pelly draws attention to this in her book Mood Machine examining the way Spotify funnels you into endless playlists to accompany almost any activity. A lot of this draws from the “Lo-Fi Beats To Study To” trend of the mid 2010’s, ambient muzak that has no real beginning or ending but also very little texture. It’s often divorced from a relationship with time, something I would arguably say is key to sound as a medium. It is forever in some form of conversation with time. Fine art and photography, while having some relation to time, are forever an expression of the past, whereas sound is strictly in its present. Therefore playing with that present, the tension of an anticipated or unexpected ending, drawing the boundary line of when a work begins, become interesting dialogues with the medium itself. However, this gets muddled in society ruled by the forever expanding playlist, that simply finds more to play to you once you have already listened to everything it contained. I’m rambling but I guess the point I wish to make is that there is a difference between asking questions around time and obfuscating a relationship to time, I am more interested in the former than the latter.

A lot peoples imagery around computers lingers on the image of a solo user, interacting with their computer in isolation (be that social isolation or physical isolation). This is common as they are devices built for a one user, with limited capacity in traditional use for multiple interactions simultaneously from different participants. At a push LAN parties break this portrait, but even then, they still often focus on each participant having their own individual device for participation. Pulling out of this image to settle on the social relationships surrounding it feels important.

There is a million answers to why a laptop orchestra particularly, but these are just some of them.

18.03.2026 - why a laptop orchestra

kat