Profile
Politics of the Machines Board Members
G Douglas Barrett
General Board Member
G Douglas Barrett works on media and technology as a researcher and occasional practitioner. His research examines how contemporary art and postwar experimental music address social and philosophical problems. It considers the critique of political economy, societal impacts of science and technology, and structures of race, gender, and sexuality through critical and interpretive methods from the humanities. Barrett’s work is situated in media theory, musicology, and sound studies, and engages with critical theory and art history.
Barrett is the author of two books: Experimenting the Human: Art, Music, and the Contemporary Posthuman (University of Chicago Press, 2023) and After Sound: Toward a Critical Music (Bloomsbury, 2016). His research has appeared in international peer-reviewed journals such as Cultural Critique, Discourse, Postmodern Culture, Mosaic, Twentieth-Century Music, Contemporary Music Review, and Technoetic Arts. He regularly presents his work at conferences hosted by the American Musicological Society (AMS), the College Art Association (CAA), the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP), and AI Music Studies (AIMS).
Barrett is co-founder and co-leader (with Boryana Rossa) of Posthumanities: Arts and Sciences, a focus group in Syracuse University’s BioInspired Institute that supports collaborations across the arts, humanities, and sciences. He was a recent faculty fellow in Syracuse’s Autonomous Systems Policy Institute (ASPI), and he co-organizes the Sound and Media Working Group of the Central New York Humanities Corridor funded by the Mellon Foundation. His work has been supported by grants from Franklin Furnace (New York), Akademie Schloss Solitude (Germany), and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Barrett is currently an Assistant Professor in the TV, Radio, and Film department at Syracuse University.
Alongside his scholarly work, Barrett’s artistic and curatorial projects reframe historical artworks in relation to contemporary systems of media, technology, and power. These include a 2026 collaboration with Ximena Alarcón and Julian Day, The Year My Voice Broke—Teletraining, which realized historical experimental music works using multiple “tele-” technologies, including telephony, radio telescopes, and telepathy. His recent commission for the Tokyo Gen'On Ensemble, I am Sitting in a Zoo (on Zoom) (2022), adapted a work by the late composer Alvin Lucier to compare digital culture to animal captivity. Such projects have been discussed in publications such as Artforum, The Wire, Postmodern Culture, MusikTexte, and Guernica.
Personal Website
gdouglasbarrett.com