Geosonics: Bodies, Instruments, Interfaces
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GEOSONICS: BODIES, INSTRUMENTS, INTERFACES JOSHUA DITTRICH A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAM IN COMMUNICATION & CULTURE YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO JUNE 2020 © JOSHUA DITTRICH, 2020 ABSTRACT This dissertation examines, from a media-cultural and sound studies perspective, how we make the earth audible; and how we conceive of listening as an embodied experience and a technocultural act in relation to an audible (or at least audifiable) planet. In the introduction I approach sound, mediation, and materiality through the concept of transduction, which refers to the material and metaphorical conversion of sound in and across cultural, technical and geological environments. I develop an alternative set of phenomenological and media-critical terms (e.g., enearthment, enlistenment and infrastruction) to describe the co-constitution of human embodiment and geology in media infrastructures. The first and second chapters focus on techniques of audio seismology and audio stretching (respectively) to understand how scientists, technicians and artists convert earth-scale vibrations into human-scale aesthetic artifacts. The third chapter (on cyborg art) and fourth chapter (on the aesthetics of sleep) emphasize how human embodiments are complexly embedded in technological and planetary infrastructures. Each chapter probes the aesthetic, political and ecological assumptions that frame the transductive processes I analyze. The dissertation develops original concepts and analyses relevant to current, theoretically informed work in critical media studies, sound studies, and environmental media studies. The overall aim of the dissertation is to use sound and listening to unsettle how we think of materiality at human and geological scales; and to argue for the centrality of transduction as a critical tool for rethinking the complex relationships between earth, media, and experience in the 21st century. ii This dissertation is dedicated to: Daniel & Martin iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply grateful to my supervisory committee for their continued support, thoughtful advice and exemplary collegiality throughout the research and writing process: David Cecchetto (supervisor), Janine Marchessault and Steve Bailey. My oral exam benefitted from the extraordinarily attentive reading, astute insights and generous suggestions of two outside examiners: Mack Hagood (Miami University) and Marx Couroux at York. I also wish to recognize professors whose courses helped me especially in the early stages of formulating this project: Jody Berland at York, and Greg Elmer and Aleksandra Kaminska at Ryerson. Finally, Stanka Radović made countless invaluable contributions to this project at all stages. This text would not exist without her! iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract................................................................................................................................ii Dedication...........................................................................................................................iii Acknowledgments..............................................................................................................iv Table of Contents.................................................................................................................v Introduction: Geosonics.......................................................................................................1 Chapter One: The Sound Beneath Our Feet: Earthquakes and Ear Quakes......................29 Chapter Two: A Planet Made of Beethoven: Audio-Stretching, Transductive Listening and 24/7 Aesthetics............................................................................................................59 Chapter Three: Now You See It. : Hearing Colours in the Cyborg Soundscape.........84 Chapter Four: Sound Asleep: Sleeping, Listening and the Politics of Nonconscious Experience........................................................................................................................122 Endnotes...........................................................................................................................144 Bibliography....................................................................................................................154 v “A dormant earthquake spread into the fluttering stillness [. .].” --Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty” (1972) “My spine felt like a seismograph.” --Vanessa Veselka, Zazen (2011) Introduction: Geosonics Part I: Audible Earths The aim of this dissertation is to examine, from a media-cultural and sound studies perspective, how we make the earth audible; and how we conceive of listening as an embodied experience and a technocultural act in relation to an audible (or at least audifiable) planet. Despite the promise of the title, the earth is not the protagonist of this inquiry and in fact barely makes an appearance in the following pages. Before our discussion inevitably shifts to questions of sound, materiality, media, and historically bound configurations of aesthetic experience, technical infrastructures and human imagination, let us consider two artworks where the earth might be said, rightly or not, to have its say. Doug Aitken’s Sonic Pavilion (2009) is an architectural and sound installation at Inhotim, a large cultural foundation and nature preserve (founded by a mining magnate), situated in the Brazilian rainforest. The installation consists of a hole, one foot in diameter and 700 feet deep, drilled into the earth and lined with concrete. Microphones and accelerometers are suspended at various depths inside the hole, and the sounds they pick up are mixed and piped into speakers arranged throughout a spacious glass pavilion at the surface, with the hole at its centre. Visitors can look through the pavilion’s curiously frosted glass windows (which are designed to blur the periphery and render clearly visible only what is directly in front of the viewer’s gaze), and listen to what 1 Aitken’s website describes as “the sound of the earth turning and the tectonic plates shifting.”1 The pavilion is also an open-air structure, and the reverberations of the deep- earth sound merge with the lush sounds of the surrounding environment (bird calls, wind in the trees, rainfall, etc.) and the aestheticizing panoramic views to “create a living artwork.” Through the sounds of the Pavilion we can experience the inorganicity of soil and rock alongside the teeming vitality of the flora and fauna it sustains. It is a kind of ultimate ambient music, not just of the background, but the underground, too: a terrestrial and telluric soundscape. But are we really hearing the sound of the earth’s rotation? It is true that accelerometers measure minute changes in gravity and can thus detect planetary rotation. But there are accelerometers in your smartphone, tablet or wearable device that can be programmed to do the same thing without the hassle of subterranean installation. And the sound of plate tectonics? A 700-foot concrete tube is surely a wondrous conductor of sounds and vibrations of all kinds. But seismic activity, strictly speaking, describes the internal movement of energy through rock. The air inside the column where the microphones are mounted is exterior to seismic movement. Seismic vibrations also propagate at frequencies well below the lower threshold of human hearing. So the question of how exactly the microphones use air to transmit the inaudible, elastic vibrations of rock is silenced (albeit pleasantly) in the musical ambience of the “living artwork.” Despite its conceptual naiveté and the technical wrinkles that accompany it, I like to think of Sonic Pavilion as an ironic comment on the mining industry, a kind of reverse extraction in which deep-earth boring techniques are used to re-deposit the valuable 2 metals contained in microphones and electronics into the earth (in much the same way that a mining magnate might redirect his capital to preserve nature, promote the arts, and so on). However, the seductive immediacy of a microphonic connection to nature and the earth has a surprisingly illustrious history in 20th century avant-garde music and the arts, most prominently in the work and writings of John Cage. Cage’s “Future of Music: Credo” (1937) calls for “means for amplifying small sounds” as fundamental to new music.2 By 1962, microphones had become the technical basis underlying Cage’s famous 0’00” composition (which I discuss in Chapter 2), in which sounds of everyday actions are amplified by contact microphones to demonstrate that “everything we do is music, or can become musical through the use of microphones.”3 Cage even theorized listening to the molecular vibrations of everyday objects, like an ashtray, which, if placed in an anechoic chamber and suitably miked, could reveal “the meaning of nature through the music of objects.”4 Cage’s aesthetic aim was to direct attention away from human- centered actions (like composing music) to the aleatory happenings and indeterminate processes that fill everyday and non-human worlds with musical meaningfulness. Yet as Douglas Kahn has argued, the expansion of the object of attention does not necessarily entail a change in attention itself: “Cage explicitly sought to subvert tactics based in human-centeredness, yet all he did was shift the center from one of utterance to audition” (1999: 197). Cagean listeners may no longer