The Thing about Microphones or, Humanimentical Prototypes
The microphone comes to reflect something built out of the horrific: a chimeric indexer of border crossings that continually splits or spits outward, into and through its subjects. There is a latent horror therefore within the microphone, an instrument that hacks away at spatial and bodily borders (Wright, Leonardo Music Journal, 2016).
An ongoing investigation of the microphone and its necromediatic contexts of surveillance, parasites and horror. Through a combination of sculptural assemblage and published writing the work positions the microphone as an agential performer, one whose consequent representations (recordings) forge a pathway towards monstrous potentiality rather than any singular notion of the real.
Keywords: agency, horror, surveillance, non-human
First installed as part Strange Strangers, a solo exhibition at Platform A Gallery, 2015
Sounding Out the Anthropocene, Critical Media Lab, Basel, 2016 / Published article for Leonardo Music Journal, 2016
This paper presentation is a media archaeological investigation of the microphone. Its aim is to generate new speculations and figurations between humans, non-humans and technology, which may arrive out of the Anthropocene and its binary collapsing consequences. Specifically, I will interrogate and re-animate the microphone through its connective political, material and fictional ecologies. I will ask if microphones are agentive actors and if so, what the consequences might be?
The talk draws inspiration from Jussi Parikka’s Insect Media (2010) and more recently Douglas Kahn’s Earth Sound Signal (2013) and Jacob Smith’s Eco Sonic Media (2015). These texts shed light on the historic and material entanglement of non-human phenomena, animals and media. Amplifying such parallel contexts through my own practice-based research will hone the paper’s central argument that the microphone is not merely a tool of servitude employed by human hands. Nor is it just an apparatus that facilitates the audiophile’s pursuit of fidelity. Rather, the microphone is positioned as a “necromedia actant”: part of a networked history of power relations and ethical consequences that can be situated amongst more sinister contexts of surveillance, parasites and horror.
Bio
Dr. Mark Peter Wright is an artist, lecturer and researcher working across sound, video, assemblage and performance. His practice explores the relationship between humans, animals, environments and their associated technologies of capture: critically and playfully disturbing Nature documentary tropes and site-specific art legacies.