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In 1966, an experiment was carried out to see if classical conditioning could be used to condition a boot fetish.

Three male students were selected who responded with some degree of erection when shown slides of sexually provocative women. A picture of a pair of black knee-length female boots, which did not evoke such a response, was then shown to each subject immediately before the pin-ups. This procedure was repeated eighteen times during each of several sessions. According to the theory of conditioning, the neutral stimulus of the boots should in time become associated with the reward provided by the pin-ups. This is what happened, since after thirty or so pairings, each of the subjects began to respond with erections to the boots”. (Cashmore, Mullan, 1983, p. 53)

This technique, coupled with experimodern music procedures may allow us a way to gain back our sexual agency and take back control of our desire. We can behaviourally condition ourselves to become aroused by any object or idea. When combined with the type of random procedures pioneered by Cage, we can create a sexuality whose randomness catapults us out of the predictable, and forms a radically reconfigured psychosexual nexus for the basis of our art, preventing the incoming ontological crisis of indeterminacy and improvisation.³⁰

This gaining hold of our sexuality is much more than simply the creation of a new sexual practice, such as “iFondling”³¹, which is ultimately only the articulation of a technological fetishism and the technological abstraction of an existing practice of analogue fondling and sexting, not a paradigm shift in the construction of desire itself. Similarly “fountaining”³² or “hipping”³³, though extreme, are simply the age-old mixture of sex, pain and violence.³⁴

Although the set-theoretical, combinatoric and aleatoric techniques that produced much of the experimodern music of the twentieth century have now reached a point of exhaustion (audible in the deepsighs and apathetic smatterings of polite hand flagellation following performances of most new works), they may be of use in combating the encroachment of Big Data on human agency. Even as we design more sophisticated models for our music, 20^th Century Music's retirement is into our lives.

The manipulation of our behaviour that will occur as the amount of data about us increases, and themodels for it become more sophisticated, could be countered by using randomness and formalism to provide anomalies in the data, skewing the data, and thus, the models. But, more importantly, this is a randomness and formalism that we choose to introduce.

An imperviousness to the encroachment of Big Data can come from the addition of randomness and formalism on two levels: Firstly, the introduction of anomalies into the data at the point of collection to skew it and prevent our behaviour from being quantified. Secondly, the introduction of randomness and formalism into life at the level of living itself. Through the application of these types of techniques from experimodern music, we provide a framework of structure and controlled randomness that insulates us from possible manipulations of our behaviour, as we have already constrained it under a system of our design. This is the composition of life – an idea far more profound than another fucking solo piano piece.