Again another text by Peter Wright gave me further reflection on my field recording practice for my portfolio project 2. Here are some quotes.
The term “Post-Natural” is currently situated within arts and humanities discourse and the pervasive debates surrounding the Anthropocene. This proposed new epoch underscores how humans have, and are, changing the geological make-up of Earth by way of fossil fuel extraction, war, slavery, technologies, and advanced capitalism.
So we are in a current post-human stage of our existence. Anthropocene really is in effect, we must consider how as humans actions have consequences and sound arts is one of the practices.
A Post-Natural filter aids this new approach by reinvigorating environmental sound art’s relationship to silence, technology and subjectivity. Furthermore, it offers new methods for listening, through publications and creative audio works; it provides questions to sonic materials and treats recordings as documents to be read through a listening approach that fuses cartographic research with imaginary speculations
So this post-natural filter we exist in, our technology and artistic endeavours really do help us understand our relationship with our environments in different ways.
In a time where human impact is radically altering the sedimentary signature of the earth, a Post-Natural approach asks if it plausible to claim “non-impact” anymore? Has the long-empathetic notion of non-invasive environmental recording become a redundant ideal that is as illusionary as so-called Nature itself? Can the recording of species and phenomena continue to be deemed inconsequential? How is technological agency performed and part of an ecological approach? Whom do “we” speak for in the sounding of environments? What is the impact of such questioning in the field and how do aesthetic modes of documentation and production respond?
So this is what really shakes me up, this archetype of a nature recordist, who says they have a non-impact way of recording. I think it’s interesting and what has taken me to be more free within my second project, I really have taken a step back from my nature recording passion.
The dominant aesthetic message is an unheard one, as recordists perpetually mute their own presence for the most “natural” or technically “cleanest” documentation of an environment or species. The recording “I” is associated with lo-fi acoustic detritus such as microphone handling, wind, and interference noise: all are aspects that must be silenced as part of the general signal-to-noise ratio. Whether for science or art, self-dissolution hovers over every instance the record button is about to be pressed.
Muting our presence is true, I have been taught this or perhaps thought this was the correct way of recording. It’s something that was imposed on me without reflecting on why, which now I have done, has allowed me to consider different ways of recording and using field recording equipment.
I take seriously the proxy proposition that sound is a social political agent and strive to treat the medium as material that matters, working against a culture of digital sound capture that falsely claims inconsequentiality as its implied default.
I agree, I think if we consider a recording as something that matters and can be used as a social-political agent, we would listen differently, but currently, we don’t even consider recording as creation, but as documentation. That recording even if you do nothing in post-production is not creation.