Perspectives with Emiliano Pennisi
Please tell us about yourself.
I’m Emiliano Pennisi (artistically active as Avenir). I was originally trained as a graphic designer, then moved into design and programming, later exploring sound as a self-taught practice focused on synthesis and prototyping instruments and compositional processes.
How do you perceive the post-digital world?
The digital has become a material like any other. I no longer perceive it as something separate, but as an extension of the natural. It’s everywhere, but rarely visible. It acts quietly, shaping behaviours, spaces, and even the way we listen.
The post-digital world is one where the boundary between what is produced by the machine and what simply happens no longer exists.
It’s a state of constant hybridisation, where everything carries a trace of error, waste, or digital memory still circulating beneath the surface.
I relate to Kim Cascone’s idea of the “aesthetics of failure,” where glitch, interference, and malfunction reveal the true nature of the digital not as perfection, but as a vulnerable and organic matter.
In your current research project, Envion, you use sonic materials from the Freesound database. Could you tell us about the project and how algorithmic sound practices engage with the broader ecology of code, databases, and planetary computation?
Envion is an open ecosystem where sound, code, and networked memory coexist. It gathers audio fragments from online archives such as Internet Archive, treating them as living matter residues of a collective digital environment that is constantly transforming.
At first, my goal was purely practical: to write queries, small textual instructions that allow code to search a database and return specific types of sounds. But this process turned out to be quite different on Internet Archive compared to, for example, Freesound.
Freesound is entirely dedicated to sound. Each file is carefully classified with tags, categories, and durations, so when you search for “metal impact,” you get a series of well-documented metallic hits recorded by users who actually work with sound.
Internet Archive, on the other hand, is a planetary archive of everything: sermons, radio programs, home tapes, music, lectures, and random recordings.
Its descriptions are textual and often inconsistent, which means that queries tend to produce chaotic, incorrect, and unpredictable results.
A term like “click” might return a sermon or an interview simply because the word appears in the metadata. At first, I tried to clean these queries to make them more selective, but over time, I realized that this imprecision was actually valuable.
It was as if the database itself was responding in its own language, revealing its internal logic, its cultural and semantic layers. That’s when the technical mechanism became a poetic one: sampling without knowing.
Letting the network reply in its own way, with all its errors, noise, and contradictions. From that point on, I began to see databases not as storage systems but as temporal organisms, full of memories and residues that keep circulating. Each sound is a small imprint of digital life, a fragment of what could be called planetary computation, the network as a living body that records and regenerates itself.
In Envion, algorithmic practice becomes an ecological act: the code doesn’t dominate the sound but interacts with it; the database is not a resource but an interlocutor. It’s a way to return to listening to the network itself.
How does generativity challenge the idea of a “finished” composition? What kind of agency does an algorithm exercise within the act of composition?
Generativity challenges the notion of a closed composition by introducing a rhizomatic logic, as Deleuze and Guattari would say: a structure without hierarchy, where every point can connect to any other, forming unpredictable trajectories.
The composition no longer unfolds linearly but behaves like a living system, capable of reacting, mutating, and reorganizing itself. Roland Kayn, through his idea of cybernetic music, had already intuited this decades ago: music as an emergent phenomenon of complex interactions, something that cannot be fully controlled but only set in motion.
In this context, the composer becomes less an architect and more a facilitator, someone who prepares the conditions for the system to find its own equilibrium. Many musicians, when they truly approach generative logic, find themselves disoriented. They realize that it’s not about programming a result, but about witnessing a phenomenon. It’s similar to the double-slit experiment in quantum physics, where the act of observation changes the behavior of what is being observed. In generative music, listening itself alters the system’s behavior, as if the sound were aware of being perceived.
The algorithm, then, is not a tool but an environment that carries its own form of agency, its own capacity for deviation and decision. It generates a field of possibilities where composition is never concluded, but continuously forms and dissolves within a web of relations. Generativity, in the end, is the shift from form to event, from control to relation.
A way of composing that embraces risk, error, and unpredictability as essential parts of the language.
How might algorithmic sound art resist, destabilize, or reimagine the extractive logic of digital capitalism?
Algorithmic sound art can resist digital capitalism precisely by refusing optimization. Instead of extracting value from data, it listens.
In my work, I try to approach code and databases not as tools for production but as ecosystems that can be disturbed, slowed down, or misused. This gesture alone goes against the capitalist rhythm of efficiency and accumulation.
Digital capitalism turns every trace, every click, recording, or interaction, into something quantifiable and monetizable. Algorithmic sound practice can subvert this dynamic by transforming those same traces into non-productive events, where value is not economic but perceptual: attention, error, transformation.
In the case of Envion, Envion does not extract; it listens. It does not exploit data but transforms it into unexpected and inefficient sonic events. The archive becomes a living acoustic organism that moves against the logic of production and profit.
It’s an aesthetics of attention and asymmetry, where value lies in the process and the gesture rather than the result.
In systems like Envion, sound emerges from the friction between human gesture, algorithmic logic, and the noise of the network. It’s an art that doesn’t extract but returns energy to the system, through unpredictability, opacity, and slowness.
In this sense, algorithmic sound art reclaims one of the few forms of resistance still possible within digital infrastructures: the ability to waste time beautifully, to create processes without clear function, letting computation behave in ways that are sensuous, unstable, and alive.
Related Works
Brain Recordings was born during my early experiments with Envion, when the system was still an unstable environment for collecting and transforming sound. I used its first query and slicing functions to extract random fragments from digital archives, letting the code choose and deform the material. From that unpredictability, the structure of the album emerged more discovered than composed.
Envion Official Playlist
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLITukQh1_l61lP6GMfa1Hz4Db7_wrTTT&si=_gd2xUUHIGoRPkoA
Official Website
https://www.peamarte.it/ave-main/avenir.html