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 do not negotiate duality. Instead such ill-conceived binary spaces converge in embodied forms of bestial, non-human, interconnectedness within living/lived spaces. Insect media do not interpret, describe, or represent realities for us (that is us humans). For Parikka, insect media are “a contraction of forces of the world, specific resonating milieus: internal milieus with their resonation, external milieus affording their rhythms as part of that resonation.”
What does it mean then to inhabit, discover, and become such an insect media body? How might such intensive states of being be revealed in the act of encountering, resonating with, and moving through embodied spaces? How might one be both inside and outside bodies, subject and other? In an age where transmission and infection bring fear of the ‘foreign body ’and its impacts, and where human bodies inscribe their devastating impact on the geological and atmospheric forces of the earth, what can we learn from becoming with such non-human, inhumane, bodies? What are their fluid, multimodal methods of cross-disciplinary trans-mission and how might we receive them?
In our audio paper/audio walk, we explore what it is to inhabit these resonant spaces. Reflecting on theoretical models from posthuman, non-human, and more-than-human perspectives, we design a narrated audio experience that incorporates psychoacoustic phenomena such as auditory brainwave entrainment, binaural beats, and fragmentation/granulation of sound materials that de-centralize and deconstruct the sounding world. The boundaries between music, field recording, sound art and sound assembly are blurred and reinterpreted in the listening/explorative space. Spaces convolve, disperse and digitally re-order through patterns and rules evolving simultaneously through the sounding expanse, developed and mediated by the sounding, resonating space that emerges.