Michael Winter

Michael Winter is a composer and sound artist whose work ranges from music created for digital and acoustic instruments to installations and kinetic sculptures. Each piece typically explores one simple process and often reflects various related interests of his, such as phenomenology, mathematics, epistemology, and algorithmic information theory. In 2008, Michael co-founded the Los Angeles-based arts organization called the wulf., which is now recognized as the hub of a burgeoning experimental arts scene dedicated to the exploration of the radical. From 2018 to 2019, he was an artist-in-residence at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. Michael also has extensive experience in the Digital Humanities. He was a research programmer and the domain expert in music for Wolfram Alpha and a lead research programmer for the Brain Operation Database (BODB) developed by the University of Southern California Brain Project. In March 2022, Michael joined the Research Group Practices of Validation in the Biomedical Sciences as a specialist for the Digital Humanities project “Commoning Biomedicine: Networking Decentralised Collections of Oral Histories”.

Michael has lectured and published extensively on algorithmic and computer-generated music; the connections between music, mathematics, communication theory, and epistemology; art and alternative communities and economies; and musicological investigations about the work of hismentors and contemporaries. His recent philosophical treatise “Meta+Phenomenology: Primer towards a Phenomenology Formally Based on Algorithmic Information Theory and Metabiology” was published in Unravelling Complexity, a book on complexity, philosophy, mathematics, and information theory in honor of the work of renowned mathematician Gregory Chaitin. He is currently extending this phenomenology with Brazilian mathematician Felipe Abrahão. By studying experience and subjectivity through algorithmic information theory, they are proving mathematical conjectures that uncover foundational aspects and limits of the emergence of complexity, consensus, echo chamber effect, niche construction, innovation triggering, and the constitution of status quo. The results can be used to understand how Big Data and the algorithmization of social, political, and economical relationships function within the context of the current and future digitally intermediated society.