Högskolan i Skövde

In Composing New Audio Worlds: transcription and transgression, Lissa Holloway-Attaway and Jamie Fawcus examine how in Insect Media, Jussi Parikka frames his discussion of ‘media as insect’ as a way to foreground media as more-than-technology and more-than-mediation. Insect media do not exist as a site between the natural world and the constructed, built, or human world. They are in/out of both at once.

In their paper, which Holloway-Attaway and Fawcus have submitted in the form of an audio walk, they explore/perform what it means to inhabit, discover, and become such an insect body, an effective mediator transcribing experience from a place of distributed non-human identity. Their focus is to explore alternative modes for engaging with critical theoretical models such as posthumanism, new materialism, non-humanism, and experimental electroacoustic music composition. These perspectives resist stable, cognitive subject identities for processing the world and its natural orders and rhythms, and create new conceptual spaces for composition and creation. The embodied design-states they imagine are formulated through generation of distributed agencies/embodiments, fragmentation (literary and sonic), affective acoustic space-making, and psychoacoustic manipulation.

Their audio content includes narrative voice but also incorporates psychoacoustic phenomena such as auditory brainwave entrainment, binaural beats, and the fragmentation/granulation of sound materials that decentralise and deconstruct the sounding world. They work to create resonant and reflective acoustic space, meant to be engaged by a single listener using headphones in solitude while in motion. Their aim is to ‘discuss’ the theoretical material focused on embodied non-human sites for mediation, while also helping to create emergent and resonant sound-space that re-orients the listener to experience the world in novel ways. They also hope to find new ways to consider academic engagement with complex theoretical models via creative, performative practice. How, they ask, can we be more-than when we compose and create? And how can the ear offer unique affordances to support novel engagement?