Reenactments : Engaging with Historical Audio/Visual Instruments

This dissertation investigates methods and strategies for reenacting historical sound and image synthesis instruments. A reenactment is neither a physical reconstruction nor a digital emulation, although it may involve aspects of both approaches. Rather, a reenactment explores the agencies of the persons, things, places, practices and ideas which gave rise to a specific audio/visual technology, and to the expressive possibilities which its users discovered in it. The reenactment then seeks congruences between these historical conditions and expressions, and those of our own time. In practice, the reenactment of an audio/visual instrument works through its historical conditions using modern technological means to address contemporary concerns. The results of this process could take the form of an analog instrument, a digital instrument, a hybrid device combining technologies of both, or even as an instrument of the future which does not exist yet. Regardless of its final form, the reenactment itself is an ongoing action rather than a fixed object, to be completed by persons through the practice of playing.