Daphne Oram, Cyberneticist?

What is it about?

Drawing on archival work at the Daphne Oram Collection at Goldsmiths, University of London, this article uncovers sources and conditions that informed Oram’s relationship to cybernetic science and aesthetics. As Oram pursued a program of music research and invention in the 1960s–70s, cybernetics offered a vocabulary, methodology, and ontology that interfaced the worlds of computer art and scientific progress with those of spiritualism and higher sense perception. At the same time, Oram’s commitment to authorial control for the composer put her at odds with the interests in indeterminacy and self-generating systems predominant among artists publicly recognized as cybernetic. The uneasy fit between Oram’s work and music’s cybernetic canon points toward a “scientific-spiritual space” (Pickering, 2010) that existing historiographies of electronic music have not fully recognized, and shows there is far more than Oram as woman that needs to be written back into history.

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Photo by Steve Harvey on Unsplash

Photo by Steve Harvey on Unsplash