Teresa Rampazzi & Post Humanism

What an inspiring week in L’Aquila!

I am so happy to have been part of CIM (Colloquio di Informatica Musicale), which 10 days ago (October 13–16, 2026) celebrated a major milestone: its 50th anniversary! This year’s inspiring theme, Sounding Posthuman, provided the perfect framework to introduce a new direction in my long-standing research on Teresa Rampazzi.

It was an honor to present my paper, “Writing Teresa Rampazzi. Between Historiography (1998–2026) and Post-Human Rereading”, as well as to chair a session and moderate the roundtable for our MEDEG (Musica Elettronica Donne e Genere) group.

Beyond the Bourgeois Instrument: The Posthuman Pioneer

My presentation brought together nearly three decades of archival research, source criticism, and oral history (from 1998 to 2026) to re-evaluate Rampazzi’s artistic trajectory through the lens of posthumanist theory (drawing on Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway).

When Rampazzi abandoned the piano at age fifty—the quintessential anthropocentric device of Western bourgeois humanism—she turned to analog generators, magnetic tape, and eventually computer systems like the Interactive Computer Music System (ICMS). By doing so, she dismantled the myth of the solitary romantic genius. Instead, she embraced a collective, distributed, and cyborg creativity within the Nuove Proposte Sonore (NPS) group and her collaborations with scientists and engineers at the University of Padua’s Centro di Sonologia Computazionale (CSC). Long before posthumanism was formally theorized in philosophy, Rampazzi’s practice anticipated the decentralization of the human subject, treating technology not as a mere tool, but as a cognitive prosthesis and a co-creative partner.