Rekret, Paul 2024. Environmental Field Recording, the Immediacy of Nature and the Silence of Mediation. Cultural Studies Association Annual Meeting 2024. Chicago 30 May - 01 Jun 2024
| Title | Environmental Field Recording, the Immediacy of Nature and the Silence of Mediation |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rekret, Paul |
| Type | Conference paper |
| Abstract | Articulations of listening and sound in an ontological register are frequently deployed in support of a dispersal of the sovereign subject. On this view, attending to the non-conscious, pre-subjective dimensions of sound is to access a realm of affect anterior to rational and abstract cognition. While such ideas have circulated widely over the past decade or more, they have been especially prevalent amongst environmental field recording practitioners and critics. Artist Peter Cusack invokes listening as a “relational frame”, Andrea Polli describes it as an “immersive” act that “provokes emotional reaction”, Chris Watson says listening brings forth “sublime stillness” and Leah Barclay asserts it engenders “embodied connections with the environment.” To claim the environmental field recording operates at the level of affect in this way is to hold out for it a capacity to cultivate ‘entanglement’ with complex ecological infrastructures. But the relation of immediacy to non-human nature evoked here is contingent on a whole series of mediations disregarded by such an approach: technological, economic and political. This paper will attend to the relationship between the cultural form of the environmental field recording and the political economy of the recording industry, developments in mobile microphone technologies, and intellectual property regimes in order to offer a critique of idealised presentations of the immediacy of nature as a response to ecological crisis. |
| Year | 2024 |
| Conference | Cultural Studies Association Annual Meeting 2024 |
| Accepted author manuscript | File Access Level Open (open metadata and files) |