Featured recent works:

Machine Spectre for Chamber Orchestra & Electronics

"A haunting aural imagining of technological materiality, 'Machine Spectre' explores the hidden vibrancy of the materials that make up our digital world giving voice to their extraction, transformation, and obsolescence. whiteley conjures a cyborgian soundscape where tape recorders, Walkman electronics, and CD cases speak, reanimating the ghostly presence of outdated tech: ⌨️ Typing keyboards 📼 Tape players 💿 CD cases. Influenced by deep listening, speculative world-building, and post-internet aesthetics, Whiteley crafts a "spectral sonic body" that exists between memory and machine, dissolving the boundaries of human, material, and technological agency." – Michael Clayville

Machine Spectre for chamber orchestra and electronics meditates on the material vitality and fallibility of technological devices. The piece unfolds as a complex assemblage of myriad sonic histories, inter-material identities and fragmented interwoven selfhoods. Its poly-temporal musical body is made up of bits and pieces of technological sounds from the past, present and future as well as earthly sounds of acoustic instruments and human performers - hence, giving it a cyborgian identity. While the material nature of technology is often overlooked, computers, smartphones, etc. are made up of countless raw materials that are extracted from the earth; Plastic, is derived from cellulose, coal, and crude oil amongst numerous other things, and microprocessors are comprised of copper, cobalt, iron, and quartz, as well as dozens more elements. Machine Spectre imagines a musical cyborg where the spectre of these earthly organic materials are animate and autonomous. The “illegitimate offspring” of its technological origins, origins which it is “exceedingly unfaithful to” (Haraway), this cyborgian being is in a constant state of chaotic emergence, seeking to re-wild itself beyond anthropocentered conceptions and towards its earthly, material genesis.

Hyper-memory for Amplified Ensemble & Electronics

Performed by Ensemble Palimpsest

Hyper-memory is inspired by the warped perceptions of memory and time that occur in Hyperreal cyberspaces. The piece playfully and absurdly explores the ways in which digital memories move through the saturated and frenetic excess of the Internet and electronic devices. Hyper-memory sonically imagines a cybernetically mutated digital fragment of the past that has taken on a ghost-like life of its own. A digital memory — reducible to a file, a link, or a "you have a new memory" notification — can take on an uncanny quality, suggestive of an illusory autonomy; its continuous existence as a constantly-changing entity unfolds in a ceaseless state of re-contextualization. Hyper-memory repurposes sampled fragments of Ruth Lowe's 1940 I'll Never Smile Again, a song about memory, longing, and nostalgia. Here, the recording functions as a kernel of memory that moves through digital devices and virtual spheres, becoming decontextualized, warped, disfigured, chopped, stretched, and unraveled.

noocambriidæ for Video and 10-channel Audio

An installation / fixed multimedia composition in collaboration with Andrew Wharton

noocambriidæ presents a speculative vision of a second Cambrian explosion. One which takes place in virtual realms of digitally-merging, cyborg consciousness. The emerging entities are monstrous mixtures of the synthetic and the organic, cyborg biologies that shape-shift, metamorphize, and evolve. The Cambrian explosion, a period of rapid evolutionary diversification that occurred approximately 538 million years ago, represents one of the most significant events in the history of life on Earth, producing the ancestors of most modern animal phyla and transforming the biosphere from one dominated by simple multicellular organisms to one of complex, differentiated animal life. In the context of rapid emergence and diversification of autonomous digital entities coupled with the accelerating development of artificial intelligence, noocambriidæ imagines a Cambrian explosion taking place within the virtual realms of technologically entangled human thought; Synthetic/Organic, digital/biological, virtual/actual, noocambriidæ brings into being monstrous entities that are born out of the compost pile of the collective unconscious as it operates through cyberspace. The term ‘noosphere,’ commonly linked to Vladimir Vernadsky, Teilhard de Chardin and Edouard Le Roy refers to the third stage in the earth’s development, where the emergence of human cognition fundamentally alters the geosphere and biosphere of the earth. Thought has become a geological actor. noocambriidæ positions the noosphere not only as an emergent field, but a substrate where entities can come into being. noocambriidæ envisions what an explosion of posthuman creatures in this substrate might look and sound like—beings that have evolved within and in response to the cyborg ecosystems of the noosphere, constituted by both organic and digital materials. Through 3D animation and multichannel sound, noocambriidæ presents a nooscopic hallucination of this realm. A sensorial unfolding of neo-primordial potentials, envisioning the metamorphic processes and thresholds of intensity that construct more-than-human agency. This narrative of creatural becoming does not strive towards a destination, it dwells in a process of continuous mutation. Each moment of stability, each arrival, each form, dissolves into the next process. Each entity marked most not by its particularities, but by the surety of its transience.

INTRA for Cello, Electronics and Lights (Live)

Performed by Robbie Bui

INTRA explores the inner life of the cello, its intersubjective entanglement with performer, and an imagined shared unconscious between Cellist and Cello. What memories, thoughts and desires does the human-material, instrument-performer entanglement hold? The piece seeks to imagine the inner world of a shared human-object intersubjectivity, and animate the Cello as an autonomous “living” subject. INTRA explores agency, absence, and presence within human / more-than-human entanglements and performer / electronic interaction. Co-mingled with the instrument, both the human body and instrumental body share a complex collective unconscious, represented by the shape-shifting shadows cast behind the performer a la the Jungian shadow (a metaphor for the subconscious). INTRA moves between a sea of dreams, memories, thoughts & emotions within this shared psychological space between instrument and performer, meditating on the performative body, the performativity of the Cello as an artifact-object, and the trauma, ecstasy, and dramatism of musical performance and traditional classical pedagogies.