dissolution, 2025

Background

Microbiopolitical tactic: Never think you know all of the species involved in a decision.  Corollary: Never think you speak for all of yourself.

Joseph Dumit (2008)

Searching for the sublime, and a desire to access a sonic deterritorialisation, are elements of the audio collage Dissolution which was created from layers of found audio samples and original recordings including the sound of a single bacterium, fungi, our sun, a blackhole and the hum of the universe. 

This piece reflects the ‘multiplicities of multiplicities’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) within the overarching theme and the generative futility of struggling to define a self that resists totalising explanations.

Seeking to understand what comprises self is to disappear into a rabbit hole of realisations, or perhaps it is more analogous to a crossing-over into a research space that takes the form of a möbius strip. The deeper one ventures into what may be perceived as an inward trajectory, down into the microscopic, onwards to the subatomic, will eventually result in a connection to the expansive macroscopic. Exploring theories relating to the hard problem of consciousness, a term coined by David Chalmers in 1995 (Weisberg, 2024), leads to string theory, panpsychism, or the quantum pleasure principle, all ideas that extend the imagination out into the cosmos.

An outward consideration of how non-human organisms, such as companion species (Haraway, 2008) and biotic ecosystems, influence a construction of a human self will eventually turn back inward to ‘our’ interspecies body with its bidirectional brain-gut-microbiome (Martin et al. 2018), mycobiome (Stetka, 2016) and virome (Gholamzad et al. 2024). 

Delving into the philosophical nature of our autonomous sense of being, leads to a self shaped by external socio-political forces, historical discourse and power structures as proposed by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler. These prominent figures in post-structuralist thought challenge the existence of a stable, consistently coherent centre, a notion of a metaphysical essence that has persisted from the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition into present day. 

In a lecture given in 1946, Jean-Paul Sartre declared that ‘Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself’. In a contemporary light, this perspective seems as illusionistic as the view of possessing a fixed, unified centre. Conceptually resonating with Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987), Mariana Ortega argues ‘that selves are ontologically singular but existentially plural…characterized by a singular multiplicitous self with various facets that are always in the process of becoming (Anderson, Willett and Meyers, 2021). Building on the phenomenological tradition, in their book In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self (2016), Ortega positions individuals between worlds, as opposed to being in a singular world, to emphasise intersectionality and subjectivity. Selfhood as a liminal state.

When Jean-François Lyotard sought to convey an understanding of the sublime, he referred to Immanuel Kant’s conclusion that it cannot be ‘presented’, that it is a 'feeling to allude to something that cannot be demonstrated’ (1984). This indeterminacy and the contradictory pleasure / pain nature of attempting to capture an intense event, to represent the unrepresentable, mirrors the elusivity of defining a self. 

References

Allen Institute (2025) The Sound of Neurons Firing. Available at: https://www.tiktok.com/@allen.institute/video/7362340342189886763 (Accessed: 02 May 2025).

Barss, P. (2023) The weird hum coming from the start of the Universe. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231003-the-primordial-hum-from-the-beginning-of-the-universe (Accessed: 01 May 2025).

Cees Dekker Lab (2021) TU Delft - The sound of a single E.coli bacterium on a graphene drum. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYWX16Orq4c (Accessed: 24 April 2025).

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (2018) Sounds of the Sun. Available at: https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/sounds-of-the-sun/ (Accessed: 24 April 2025).

Pink Floyd (2023) Fearless (Official Audio). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkgaMFjo_lI (Accessed: 29 April 2025).

Pixabay (2024) Church Bells St Stephen. Available at: https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/church-bells-st-stephen-63422/ (Accessed: 01 May 2025).

Pixabay (2024) Martial Arts U.S Army Training. Available at: https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/search/priest%20(army)/ (Accessed: 01 May 2025).

Pixabay (2024) School Kids Repeating Words. Available at: https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/search/teacher/ (Accessed: 01 May 2025).

Prime, M. A. Z. (2020) Bioelectrical sounds of fungi. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4Z1ZUuZDPg (Accessed: 06 May 2025).

Sartre, J.-P. (1946) Existentialism Is a Humanism. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm (Accessed: 10 May 2025).

Starr, M. (2024) Listen to The Eerie ‘Sound’ From A Black Hole, Captured by NASA. Available at: https://www.sciencealert.com/listen-to-the-eerie-sound-from-a-black-hole-captured-by-nasa (Accessed: 24 April 2025).