ABSTRACT
“Laugh Piece” establishes a plane in which art and commerce are perfectly consistent with one another in their dissolution of the boundary between production and consumption, labour and creativity through assembling a “desire machine”, in the terms of Deleuze and Guattari. Yoko Ono’s instructions in “Voice Piece for Soprano”, the recorded message, provides the point of agency for an operatic cacophany of men and women screaming, a demented parakeet and a distorted drum machine; it is an assemblage of human, animal, and machine elements whose screams echo and reverberate in a musical disharmony throughout the worldwide web. Multiple screams echo in the clamour for being in the network as voice undergoes an incorporeal transformation into data, archive, and information flow. The general incorporeal transformation of the subject into a data profile across the range of social, commercial, bureaucratic, and financial networks supports the fantasy of the total aestheticisation, codification, and control of identity and desire.
