The present here and now: a poetic-political reading of the insertion of compositions by musician Hermeto Pascoal in the blockchain world.

Abstract

In August 2021, musician and multi-instrumentalist Hermeto Pascoal auctioned off the contents of some of his compositions made during the pandemic. It was enough to enter the site phonogram.me to participate in several auctions where you could buy not only scores, but also rights of use of the artist’s compositions. The technology that intermediated this possibility was the blockchain, a tool characterized by operating decentralized, anonymous and publicly. The use of technology is part of the so-called Web3, understood as a new functioning of the internet, in which not only content is read (Web 1.0), it is read and or written (Web 2.0: Youtube, Spotify, Instagram, Facebook, among others) but also creates value and the possibility of ownership without third parties (Web 3.0) (Q. Yang et al. 2023). The first two would be considered forms of information on the internet and the last one as a form of value creation on the internet. In this new technological tool, the researcher tried to acquire one of the scores, (understood in the world of Web 3 as NFT, non-fungibles tokens): he won an auction and received a message waiting for the respective sending of the file. But recently the platform came out of the air indicating that it was in a process of improvement. The investigator tried for several months to contact the technical team without any result. Based on this ethnographic experience, it is interesting to explore the implications of phonographic recording, diffusion and consumption in the world of Web 3.0; also understanding it as a new technological form of sound distribution and consumption, different from platforms like Youtube, Instagram etc. What can this ethnographic case tell us about the new contemporary political-poetic arrangements? To try to answer this question first I will briefly describe these technologies (Web 3.0 and blockchain), I will then present the case of the phonogram.me platform and the works of Hermeto Pascoal and finally propose a possible reading of the policies and sound poetics in the world of web 3.0 from the concepts of aura, technical reproducibility and origin in Walter Benjamin.