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