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List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Recoding the Field
2. Constructing Nature
3. Stretching Site
4. Following the Flow
Conclusion: Pressing Record & Pressing Play—On Suspicious Listening & Affirmative Ethics
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Mark Peter Wright is a Reader in Critical Sound Practice at the University of the Arts, London where he is also a member of CRiSAP (Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice). His practice intersects sound arts, ecology, and experimental pedagogy across exhibition, performance, and publishing.
Summary
Listening After Nature examines the constructions and erasures that haunt field recording practice and discourse. Analyzing archival and contemporary soundworks through a combination of post-colonial, ecological and sound studies scholarship, Mark Peter Wright recodes the Field; troubles conceptions of Nature; expands site-specificity; and unearths hidden technocultures. What exists beyond the signal? How is agency performed and negotiated between humans and nonhumans? What exactly is a field recording and what are its pedagogical potentials?
These questions are operated by a methodology of listening that incorporates the spaces of audition, as well as Wright’s own practice-based reflections. In doing so, Listening After Nature posits a range of novel interventions. One example is the “Noisy-Nonself,” a conceptual figuration with which to comprehend the presence of reticent recordists. “Contact Zones and Elsewhere Fields” offers another unique contribution by reimagining the relationship between the field and studio. In the final chapter, Wright explores the microphone by tracing its critical and creative connections to natural resource extraction and contemporary practice.
Listening After Nature auditions water and waste, infrastructures and animals, technologies and recordists, data and stars. It grapples with the thresholds of sensory perception and anchors itself to the question: what am I not hearing? In doing so, it challenges Western universalisms that code the field whilst offering vibrant practice-based possibilities.
Foreword
A critical account of environmental sound arts practice in relation to contemporary ecological debates.
Additional text
I have been waiting for this book. Listening After Nature is a much-needed corrective to the practice and theory of field recording. Mark Peter Wright offers a critical reflexive account that troubles many of the field’s assumptions, such as the sonic absence of the recorder, the search for sounds of nature without human presence and the transparency of the microphone. Emphasizing the impossibility of sustaining such an approach in a time “after nature,” the book holds open the question of “what is a field recording,” asking what is not heard as much as what is and providing playful and serious possibilities for "listening-with” practices adequate to a time of climate change and mass extinction.
