Collapse: Using Laptops Exactly as Intended
Written on March 23rd , 2026 by Brandon Woo SnyderPart of my dissertation research at UC Irvine’s Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology
This paper proposes collapse as a framework for understanding the laptop as a musical instrument. It is a term that encompasses the physical laptop itself, including but not limited to specific software instruments or tools built and operated within the laptop (e.g. like a Max MSP patch). This proposal challenges a conception of musical instruments as inert tools that, through disciplined practice, become transparent expressive extensions of the body. Rather, ‘collapse’ starts from a theory that technical objects for mediation (i.e. tools; like hammers, violins, or laptops) exert, alongside their users, subjectivities and ideologies imbued by their relationships with human and nonhuman beings. Collapse describes what these subjectivities and ideologies are for laptops, and ultimately aims to be creatively generative for artists building a musical performance practice for the laptop.
Structured as three essays, I argue that laptops perform collapse, both by design and by consequence. This is the case of laptops both as musical instruments and as general multipurpose instruments. By design, I mean that, like a folding chair or a collapsible Christmas tree, a laptop is built to ‘usefully’ expand and collapse across certain domains. In addition to being collapsible across a spatial domain (i.e. like folding the laptop shut), laptops collapse along domains of time, production labor, mediums, and more. An example of this can be seen in how laptops, using apps like Gmail, Instagram, Zoom, and Netflix, mediate multiple digital realities across a singular physical space. This is a collapse across mediums (physical and digital). The laptop’s affordance as a portable work device is an example of collapse across space, as the ability to work becomes equally possible from the office and from home. Time, as a resource to spend, is collapsible with the laptop, as we may schedule-send our emails, be reminded by Facebook of what we did this day 5 years ago, text our boss outside of work hours, all within the same minute. Collapsible tools, like laptops, do not only consolidate, but also extend. Digitally, our ability to represent ourselves in an endless number of online avatars and social profiles is enabled through a collapse of identity into an email address, Google account, Facebook login, or Apple ID, which increasingly become a primary way many users manage their passwords and credentials. Laptops in this way are collapsing and expanding our identity along the domain of internet accounts and profiles.
Yet, by these same affordances, laptops also succumb to a structural collapse (like a building collapsing under its own weight). The collapse by design begets a collapse by consequence; one that is an inevitable outcome of use. The laptop’s 24/7 access to news, digital services, and people; this somehow leaves us with feeling less connected and with less mental clarity. The laptop’s portability and capacity for multitasking leaves us seemingly with less time than ever before in our busy schedules. The laptop as a tool to endlessly expand our digital footprint through social profiles, online communities, posts, tweets, and reels; this leaves our mental support structures in a state of triage, frantically trying to buoy an ever-growing weight of digital information. This kind of collapse has been characterized in many ways, including decaying mental health1, techno-feudalism2, and a retreat away from computers altogether3. However, a moral critique of digital tools is not the main thrust of this paper. Through the lens of using the laptop as a musical instrument, I propose that collapse, in all these senses of the word, is an outcome of using the laptop exactly as it is intended. And that the framework of collapse serves useful for the aesthetic and technical concerns around building a musical performance practice for the laptop.
Each of my three essays will describe a way artists with laptops perform collapse: live sampling, instrument building, and digital mediation. These three types will be discussed as enacting collapse both by design and by consequence. And for each type I will use a piece of my own music, Spectator Sport, a multimedia music theater work, as a case study for how musical performance can be an intersection point for the design-side and consequence-side of collapse.
Firstly, in Spectator Sport a live-sampling mechanic serves as the central musical gesture of the piece. I explain how this gesture is coded into the fundamental layers of real-time audio software (a collapse along the time domain, by design), and how this same digital architecture appears socially, as the economics of online content creation foment a performance of live sampling on a community-wide scale (a collapse of time, by consequence). Secondly, the laptop in Spectator Sport is an instrument not only for music performance, but also for music marketing, music event production, and music post-production. Types of labor and the roles associated with them are collapsed into a single individual via the laptop (a collapse of roles, both by design of the laptop and consequence of creator economies). Finally, I conclude with a reflection on collapse in the context of musical performance practice.
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Jennifer Abbasi. “Surgeon General Sounds the Alarm on Social Media Use and Youth Mental Health Crisis.” JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association (CHICAGO) 330, no. 1 (2023): 11–12. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2023.10262. ↩
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Yanis Varoufakis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Melville House, 2024. ↩
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Ross Douthat and Victoria Chamberlin, “Opinion | ‘This Is the War Against Human Nature,’” Opinion, The New York Times, November 14, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/14/opinion/paul-kingsnorth-humanity-technology.html. ↩