KC: I picked up a copy of "PostDigital Membrane" at the Tate in London last week and wanted to make contact with you...also I recently wrote an article for Computer Music Journal that might interest you...you can download it from: http://mitpress.mit.edu/journals/COMJ/CMJ24_4Cascone.pdf
I also curated the CD that accompanies the journal...Cheers!

RP: I like your paper, thanks for pointing me to it. I'm very interested in the kind of work your are doing. I used to work with the DJ outfit Coldcut (Ninja Tune) and Hexstatic doing a lot of stuff with audiovisual experimentation and computer generated sequencing as well as interactive art installations. You can see some things at the stem-arts site below.

KC: I will check it out

RP: It's also interesting you use the phrase "Post-digital" and I entirely agree that some sort of new aesthetic sensibility is imminent that is not simpy retrogressive, revivalist or merely demonstrating technology, although quite what it will be I don't know.

KC: Yes but on the other hand most of the people working in the microsound/glitch scene have no idea of the historical thread of electronic music and have managed to create a closed system of circulating signs...this creates an entropic decay and places each cultural cycle in a finite envelope...there needs to be more building on prior knowledge and general discourse among the current crop of electronic music composers...resistance to this keeps the proximity of microsound/post-digital music culture chained to the production and consumption cycles of pop culture...not always a good way to breed new artforms...

RP: One of the arguments made in our book is that we should avoid "futurism', or the constant denial of the present in favour of some technological utopia to come. Many cultural areas seem to have been gripped by a kind of futurism over the past decade or so, not least music. it would be interesting to know more about what you take the term postdigital to mean

KC: I agree that there is a utopian futurism that seems to put blinders on people...I think that the future has replaced the past in terms of building new work...everyone wants to have an edge on coming trends and styles so they unknowingly re-invent the past...for example: the current state of microsound is mired in all the deadends of the minimalism movement of the 60/70's...most the composers working in this area don't even know that these aesthetic problems have been explored and solved over and over and over again ad nauseum ...present: information density, overloaded media, convergence, multiplicities, Deleuzian century (per Foucalt) etc...not too much happening artistically with information density...this is an area that interests me greatly...post-digital: the use of digital tools to critique digital media (audio, film, image, game, etc)//channeling information from lower levels of digital information (code, UI, application, PC, etc) up to the final product ("the medium is no longer the message, the tool has become the message" -- my quote used in some article I wrote)...I am currently writing an essay on all this for a book coming out via Mille Plateaux...I'll send you a draft when it is ready for prime time...just started reading Abraham Moles "Information Theory and Esthetic Perception"...very useful