Dissonant Doppelganger: Performing the Post-Natural Through Modulated Foley Techniques

Abstract

This mixed media contribution investigates the multiple modes of inscription possible within a practice-based investigation of the Sonic Anthropocene. Drawing upon critical contexts from Geology, Geography and Anthropology, and the relations between writing, bodies and earthly matters, the authors suggest a re-writing occurs in mediated acts such as field recording (phonography). Microphonic translations from the field not only re-inscribe sites, plural; they reveal sound's itinerant nature to be full of duplicitous and fictive potential. Operating such possibility through the practice of Foley, the post production art of material based sound effects, the authors pivot discussions around their soundwork Decoys (2018) and its attempt to address the urgency of anthropogenic change through a latticing of source and signal, site and studio, subject and observer, human and more-than-human.

Listening “Care-Fully”: Acoustemologies of Hope in the Face of Human-Made Environmental Degradation

“…This approach is strongly based on my experiences with ancestral law and culture that continue to spell out diverse ways in which the wellbeing of the land is intertwined with the wellbeing of its people, and vice versa. 3 What came to interest me in the course of the research discussed here was how such entanglement with the land is "thickened" not only through story or architecture, but also through sound, dance and other aesthetic means (Wright and Carlyle 2021). Or, to sum it up in a poignant question, what is the acoustemology of living country in the Kimberley?…”