Provoking, disturbing, hacking: Avant-garde strategies and media archaeology in the works of Goodiepal

Among the artists on the contemporary Danish scene of computer music and sound art the musician and composer Goodiepal (Gæoudjiparl van den Dobbelsteen or Parl Kristian Bjørn Vester) is by no comparison the most controversial and provocative. This statement is applicable whether we meet him as musician and performer or meets him as teacher, lecturer, or mediator of thoughts on computer music. Goodiepal advocates a new computer music of the future – Radical Computer Music, which is not dependent on existing or soon to be software and technologies, but which is executed e.g. by working with handwritten scores not readable for existing computer technology. Hereby Radical Computer Music encourages utopia and dialogue with artificial and alternative intelligences. The project has been presented and discussed through Goodiepal’s teaching at the Academy of Music, Aarhus, in various lecture-performances and in his construction and deconstruction of mechanical instruments and computer hardware.
In the paper Goodiepal’s various acts will be identified and discussed in comparison to previous avant-garde movements. I will here refer to the Fluxus-movement’s work with scores (which the artist refers to himself), and to previous discussions within the field of electro acoustic music, in which technology, future and utopia also have been countlessly addressed.
Inspired by one of Goodiepal’s former students Morten Riis, who is now devoting his artistic work to the theoretical field of media archaeology, I will finally raise the questions:
- Is Goodiepal’s work and ideas to be seen as a repetition of various avant-gardes or
- can Goodiepal’s work (without the artist addressing it explicitly) also be unfolded within a discourse of media archaeology?
- And if so – how does this relate to previous avant-garde experiments and discussions?