The Network as Niche

Abstract

As telematic music emerges as a medium distinct from that of live performance, broadcast or recorded music, we are in a privileged position to experience it in its naive form. This article investigates where these distinctions reside and starts by considering the ways in which telematic music systems mediate the music made with them. It then turns to Anthony Chemero’s rendering of William Gibson’s theory of affordances, imagining Online Orchestra as an ‘environment’, or musical habitat. Rather than focusing on spurious notions of the fixed properties of the media that comprise this environment, attention is given to the relations between the various mediating forms within the system, whether they be performers, audiences or technical media.