Interface as Cultural Artifact Part I: Modularity

Over the last several months, I’ve been working with analog modular synthesizers, doing some archival work and digital emulation on the ARP 2500 (which I will talk about more specifically in another post). As I began thinking about the social and political happenings of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when this machine came into being, I was struck by the correlations I saw in the logics of modular interfaces and systemic social and political behaviors of the time.