My argument here has been that with the tools that are defined by Foucault through the technologies of the self, the notion of the care of the self opens up a focus on the relations between the self and self, and the surrounding context. Relations that eventually render the actual self less important. What can be gathered from Tresch and Dolan is that the self’s relation to the self promotes the autonomy of some of these objects. Through the unwrapping of the various discourses of power—such as the ones between improvisation and freedom; self and other; and self and self—the particularities and aptitudes of the instrument discussed here, the Dataton 3000, are revealed. By way of a preliminary understanding of an ethics of instruments, these relations exist, matter and they need to be good and respectful. In this sense ethical relations appear important between all objects in the network that constitute the context of musical improvisation. Even if this does not extend all the way to an ethics of instruments, a deep understanding for these relations may contribute to a developed sense of ethics, an ethics of artistic practice in improvisation. The care for the self is the process that deconstructs the object/subject division necessary for the meaning of the relations to unfold (see Bergamin [2023] for a related discussion on this topic).

In the attempt to construct an artistic practice where the self as subject is unnecessary, there are a number of factors that have been discussed here. One is the objectifying forces of the hyper-capitalism that not even experimental musical practices manage to evade. Creating sustainable relations between the self, the practices of the self, and others is made difficult by the logics of the global market economy. Another is the influence of the instruments the practice is engaged with and the fact that these themselves may engage in a process of subjectification that plays an important role on the general ethics of the practice. Yet another is that the general ethics of the artistic practice as firmly rooted in the care for the self is constantly challenged by external forces that impact, if not the freedom, at least the way that freedom is understood. Nevertheless, through the practice of the care of the self I believe that a genuine and useful idea of an ethics of artistic practice with obsolete instruments may resist the influence of capitalism. By putting focus on the others in artistic practice, primarily in improvisation, the practice will be strong enough to render the self unnecessary beyond my initial thinking, and the instruments I play with participate actively in this restructuring of the self.

I have presented a theory behind my artistic practice with obsolete instruments. A subsequent study will focus on the practical results of this process and how this thinking more concretely affects the artistic results.

This work was partially supported by the Swedish Research Council (2019-03694) through the project ‘Historically informed design of sound synthesis: A multidisciplinary, structured approach to the digitisation and exploration of electronic music heritage’.

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