바이오음악, “지구를 위한 위대한 노래”: 리차드 파워즈의 『오르페오』에서 읽는 탈인간중심주의 미학

Abstract

This essay examines how Richard Powers’s novel Orfeo proposes a postanthropocentric aesthetics in presenting a literally living music as a new art form. Its protagonist Peter Els, whose life trajectory is the very history of modern classical music, has long mulled over the nature of music and its expandability. As recognizing music as the art of codes, he comes to believe that music can communicate with all beings on Earth, which are composed of chemical codes, beyond human ears. With the understanding of the communicative relationships between bioscience and informatics, Els encodes human music into the nature through a bio medium, Serratia marcescens. The new art form of living music has genius in Kant’s terms to the extent that it suggests new aesthetic conditions and values, not being able to be copied by others. Orfeo suggests derivativity and transformativity, which are the generative attributes of bacteria, as the new aesthetic conditions and values for the postanthropocentric world, replacing originality and authenticity sought for by traditional anthropocentric aesthetics. Such postanthropocentric aesthetics helps envision what evolutionary direction both human beings and Earth are going toward.