Micologies

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Whether recording the sound of environments or voices, the microphone is a key actor for sound arts practice and research. It is part of an assembly of media and senses that participate and interpret place. Yet for all their integral performance in the construction of knowledge, microphones are rarely heard in the recordings they capture or referred to in textual accounts. They are surreptitious actors that slip by unnoticed; absent yet utterly present. This presentation will reconfigure the role of recording technology within sound arts/studies via an investigative aesthetic approach (Weizman and Fuller, 2021). I will present an ‘autopsy’ of a specific microphone that aims to deconstruct and follow its elemental and political flows. It is vital to consider these medianatures (Parikka, 2012) in the chain of sonic thinking and doing; from microphones, cables, recording devices, SD cards, and batteries; to copper, neodymium, PVC, rubber, silicon, silver, gold, palladium, aluminum, zinc, manganese, and potassium. These are just some of the natural resources that facilitate digital investigations. What are the consequences of such entanglements? What are we not hearing when we grip the plastic casing of a microphone? What footprint is going unheard?

Lecturer