GendyTrouble: bridging Xenakis's GenDyn with queer theory

Annie Goh

Introduction

GendyTrouble is the latest iteration of a larger ongoing project. This segment manifests as a multi-channel computer-music performance. The project's core concept revolves around a symbolic collision between two seemingly disparate worlds: Greek-French composer Iannis Xenakis's sound-generation technique "Génération Dynamique Stochastique" (often called GenDyn or GenDy) and Judith Butler's foundational queer theory text Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990).

As a thought experiment, GendyTrouble asks what could be achieved by merging the mathematical-generative power of computers with an emancipatory gender-politics. The project critically stands on the shoulders of previous cyberfeminists, aiming both to create and to hear what a sonic cyberfeminism might sound like. It is intended as a provocation rather than an answer.

1. SuperColliding Xenakis and Butler

The brief supercollision of this unlikely pair focuses on extracting compatibility from their ideas through the common "gen-" prefix found in "génération" and "gender." Both Xenakis and Butler were—and are—major figures in their respective domains, yet GendyTrouble rejects any temptation to label Xenakis as the father and Butler as the mother of the project, which would be a lazy heteronormative metaphor. Instead, the stem "gen–," with its etymological roots in Latin and Greek—genus, genesis, generare, genos, gonos—bridges their distant territories. These roots evoke ideas of kind or class, birth, begetting, producing, and descent, all central to the matter at hand.

The work of Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001) epitomizes a focus on innovation within post-war avant-garde modernist music in Europe. Xenakis grew frustrated with the dead ends he saw among his contemporaries in electroacoustic music and elektronische Musik. His 1963 book Musique Formelles (translated as Formalized Music in 1971) lays out his musical ideas and formal techniques in great detail, especially his use of mathematical models and stochastic processes for creating sound. He openly disliked natural sounds and firmly rejected the Fourier Transform as the main paradigm for sound creation.

Freeing himself from aesthetic notions of "beautiful" or "ugly," Xenakis focused on formalism and the precise nature of computation, setting him apart from those who tried to imitate nature electronically. He advocated using digital computer technology to generate a sound that was "rich and strange." His profound dissatisfaction with avant-garde music at the time positioned his use of "gen–" as "génération" within a modernist drive to produce new sounds and explore uncharted territory.

Judith Butler's Gender Trouble transformed understandings of gender and sexuality both within and beyond academic circles. As a philosopher, Butler was not concerned with "creating newness" in the same manner as Xenakis, nor are their methods easily compared. Yet Gender Trouble achieved wide-reaching impact and success because of the intellectual innovations it brought to feminist discourse. A central argument is the problematization of the heterosexual woman as a universal subject of feminism, a notion embedded in much prior feminist theory. Butler demonstrates how gender as a category is continually produced and maintained by patriarchal systems, calling for its subversion.

Philosophers—especially women—are rarely described as "geniuses" (another word beginning with "gen–"). Nonetheless, we can take Butler's claim that "sex itself is a gendered category" as the core of her philosophical innovation. Butler asserts that no pre-discursive "natural" sex exists upon which the "culture" of gender is constructed. There is no true "being" of sex or gender, yet the idea of woman has become naturalized. By pointing to the internal inconsistencies of dualisms such as sex/gender and nature/culture, Butler shows that these binaries ultimately reinforce the hegemonic power they claim to resist. The philosophical task, therefore, is to reframe the question of gender in a way that acknowledges how power structures (of gender, race, sexuality, class, ability, and so on) have made the sex duality appear inevitable.

Both Xenakis and Butler have detractors and critics, but each is notable for the profound radicality in the aspects of their work discussed here. GendyTrouble bridges the gap between generative art/music and gender studies, zooming in on one core concept for each figure.

1.1 Xenakis: GenDy/GenDyn

"Génération Dynamique Stochastique" is described in Formalized Music as a technique for generating sound using dynamic stochastic processes to determine waveform points. Xenakis's "New Proposals in Microsonic Structure" explains that each waveform iteration consists of linearly interpolated points forming polygonal shapes. The resulting sound is artificial, noisy, "brute, raw, unprocessed," and exists only within the digital realm—it cannot be produced by natural acoustic excitation.

Xenakis used "GenDyn" as the abbreviation for "Génération Dynamique Stochastique," though the piece that explicitly references this program was titled Gendy3 (realized in 1991). GendyTrouble's choice of "GenDy" over "GenDyn" partly references Xenakis's resulting work rather than the algorithm itself, but more importantly, it refers to the piece's realization in the program SuperCollider, where Nicholas Collins implemented the technique in three variants: Gendy1, Gendy2, and Gendy3.

GenDyn processes operate at the microsonic level, working with sound particles lasting milliseconds at the threshold of human auditory perception. This principle is emblematic of Xenakis's "music out of nothing" approach. He described compositions using GenDyn principles as "created out of the void" and "comparable to the big bang."

"Génération Dynamique Stochastique" is translated into English as "Dynamic Stochastic Synthesis," yet "synthesis" does not fully capture the radical nature of Xenakis's vision. The technique's significance and its use of "génération" are bound to newness in two distinct ways. First, the sound is novel to listeners as an erratic and unnatural phenomenon. Second, the structure itself constantly reasserts its own newness: each waveform iteration continues to vary as it repeats. Because the generative process continuously deforms the waveform, it is inherently unstable.

1.2 Butler: Gender Performativity

Gender Trouble introduced the concept of "performativity" to advance the understanding of gender as constituted by the "stylized repetition of acts." This emphasis aimed to show how the gendered subject repeats and reiterates the norms ascribed to it in mundane, everyday ways, thereby naturalizing the idea of gender identity as a fixed substance.

Once the constructed nature of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a "free-floating artifice." Butler's remarks reveal her goal of troubling the gender binary: "there is no reason to assume that genders ought also to remain as two." For Butler, performativity is not merely a constraint; it is also a site of resistance and a resource for creating subversion. As much as it is embedded in everyday actions, performativity can be understood as a technique with the power to destabilize entrenched gender norms. The "gen–" of "gender" in Butler's thought can be emphasized for its role as a productive process: through the repetition of acts, gender inherently re-generates each time it is performed.

2.0 NEW-GEN*-NOW

Paul Preciado expands upon Teresa de Lauretis's idea of "technologies of gender" operating within visual and textual signs, broadening it to include biotechnology within a contemporary "pharmacopornographic" regime of drugs, sex, pornography, and synthetic hormones. For Preciado, "in ontopolitical terms, there are only technogenders."

Like the cyberfeminists of the 1990s, Preciado rejects the nature-culture binary and advocates the re-appropriation of technologies that produce subjectivity, turning them into tools for political agency and empowerment. He does so literally in his own biotechnological hacking. In the realm of pure artificiality, gender performativity unleashes the multiple possibilities for gender transformation. "Let a hundred sexes bloom!" the Xenofeminist Manifesto recently proclaimed, echoing the Maoist slogan about flowers as the fruit of communism.

What Preciado establishes on a microbiological level, GendyTrouble attempts on the microphysical and microsonic levels. The stem "gen–" in both GenDy and "gender performativity" signifies the potential for sustained ontological rupture—a generative power that varies with each repetition and each performance. This disturbing and constant multiplicity is what GendyTrouble draws its energy from.

3.0 Microsonic TechnoGenders

Amid a broader contemporary crisis in gendered productive and reproductive labor, Xenakis's obsession with creating "music out of nothing" and his insistence on newness could be criticized as endorsing a problematic pattern in the history of creativity and patriarchy. Terre Thaemlitz calls this "the uterus envy of male creators to give birth." However, we should not overlook the explicit desire in the word "generate" (from genesis: birth, origin, creation) that Xenakis's work cries out for—viewing it instead as an opportunity. The radical affinity with artificiality and generativity, along with its destabilizing potential and permanent flux, allows us to ask whether Xenakis's work, for all its formalism, simultaneously calls for a queering of that formalism with the force of generative power.

GendyTrouble crossbreeds GenDy with gender performativity to release the potential of multiple gender configurations. The constant instability of the stochastic processes in GenDy is exactly what the work aims for. Strangeness and artificiality are its greatest assets. Gender performativity's move to dislodge the repetitive acts—those used to enforce rigid categories—normally operate at a human level. Yet by pushing down to the microsonic level, below the boundary of human perception, this project sees itself fighting a perhaps invisible, but not inaudible, battle.

4.0 Current episodes of GendyTrouble

1. GEN(D)ERATE A NEW

"Queer is itself a lively mutating organism, a desiring radical openness, an edgy protean differentiating multiplicity, an agential dis/continuity, an enfolded reiteratively materializing promiscuously inventive spatiotemporality. What if queerness were understood to reside not in the breach of nature/culture, per se, but in the very nature of spacetimemattering?" What Karen Barad's philosophy does on the atomic level, this piece attempts on a (micro)sonic scale.

"GEN(D)ERATE A NEW" treats GenDy (implemented in SuperCollider) as its primary sound source, understanding it as a method of queered formalism. By fusing instances of generativity—through patterns containing random numbers—with improvisation, the episode aims to sonically perform the instability it values.

2. MICROFEMININE SONIC WARFARE

The figure of the female automaton has appeared and reappeared across histories of technology. From the disturbing misogyny of the nineteenth-century science fiction tale "The Future Eve" by Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam to contemporary lifelike robot realizations of fembots or gynoids, this trope can be heard in often more subtle ways in sound, such as in the history of sound synthesis. That the subject for a synthesized singing voice John Chowning demonstrated in his highly valuable work was a female soprano is not considered coincidental in this context. "MICROFEMININE SONIC WARFARE" re-appropriates this trope, playing with the appearance and dissolution of sounds that resemble voices moving into and out of synthetic realms.

3. THE BATTLE OF CYBERSEXES

Using chance functions to dramatize Twitter battles between Men's Rights Activists and Feminist Activists, this piece stages a virtual confrontation between these two acrimonious groups. Computer voices speak genuine Twitter messages from well-known figures—at times the words are spliced unrecognizably down to their granular components, and at other times allowed to speak their semantic meaning with clarity. Spatialized across the auditorium as two competing teams, words flit around the audience in male, female, and ambiguously gendered voices. Each team carries equal weight, leaving the random choices of the algorithm to decide in favor of one side over the other.

4. MEDITATION ON REPRODUCTIVE LABOUR

Drawing on Terre Thaemlitz's critique of biopolitical ideologies in Japan—including a 2007 statement by Japan's health minister Hakuo Yanagisawa describing women as "birthing machines"—this episode samples Thaemlitz's track "Secrecy Wave Manifesto." The sample of a woman's scream during childbirth forms the entire basis of the piece, abstracted through a technique of partial analysis and re-synthesis. In this meditation on reproductive labor, the scream is no longer directly audible, but its visceral power remains as a spectral presence.