This project emerged, and emerges, from a deep searching for what it means to be human, what makes a self, what drives difference, and what arranges connection. My aim has been to push back against currents of categorization and classification that have restricted the terms and conditions upon which humans live, limiting the full range of emotion available to the living as conscious bodies moving toward and with purpose, direction, contradiction, confusion, conflict; against systems that violently make claims for the physical and virtual terrains upon which we, those who have made homes in and with love, seek to share a common breath; against the propellant death machine of proprietary demands over the other, the alien, the strange, against armed forces barreling toward oblivion for any and all with nuclear span and precision; against the unimaginable collective, psychic pain, and possibilities, of being tethered to the core to one another, while our freedoms are under siege; against all destructive activities that aim toward earthly domination; against the rule of extractive industry and capital as singular contracts for planetary life. All the raw data of what makes our bodies and minds have become grounds for new markets, singular arguments for the supremacy of linear time and conceptions of reality that favor certain bodies and minds over others. I am working toward sensory liberation, toward interspecies harmony, toward interconnectedness of being.

I am writing from within a digital interface, behind LCD displays, inside technocultural histories that have placed me on stolen land as an amalgam of no particular tradition, inside an ethnoreligious identity of maternal inheritance whose centers of military power have obliterated the very conception of spiritual practice, betraying the very meaning of bearing a soul or obeying a doctrine of faith. I write as an alienated citizen at the center of an empire that refuses its origins and mocks its future. I am writing inside lineages of science, progress, and modernism that came to a consensus, from the Enlightenment through industrialization and its aftershocks into the present day, that the boundaries between ourselves and others are hard-wired, innate, and unyielding. My digital upbringing has given me a certain if unspecific fluency in the language of cyberspace, of communication networks and parasocial attraction, of saying a whole lot without speaking a single world, of anonymous confessions with strangers leaving no paper trail, of memory without a coherent archive beyond a hard drive, storage space, and files as far as the disk can hold.

I want to write myself out of it, into a new narrative, beyond the idea of the future being an inevitable premise, beyond the sense that we are living just to reach what was always going to be, even if I sometimes find it difficult to stick to these principles in my daily life. I do get the sense that I am making deposits to and taking withdrawals from an account with a fixed terminus. But I write and create to find a way out of it, beyond the maze of transactional relation, as existential a proposition as it may seem at times.

Not much is clear in the disorientation of rampant imperialism and rising fascism, but what appear to me, what give me the burning need to chart a new map of knowing, are those glitches in the matrix that expose the cracks and fissures within our world’s organizing principles: the accepted divides between natural and artificial, human and nonhuman, nature and culture, and other binaries that make a mess of the fleshy stuff of existence as our structures of knowledge attempt to meet the challenges of planetary destruction and as pockets of earth-minded individuals embrace the generative possibilities of art and science. One of the more sinister effects of profit-driven empirical arms of technoscience has been a growing wedge between the natural, tangible, haptic, deliciously chaotic world outside the glass, plaster, plastic, hard-edged materials that protect and encase my interiority behind the screen, in front of the frame, or inside the walls of private property; divisions between the orders of nature and the realities made material by humans; the pursuit of knowledge serviced for consumption and greed. I’m not immune to the pleading and promises of longevity and eternal consciousness; I, too, am afraid to die.

I write to make sense of this: time, body, history, fear, life. What led me out from myself after destabilization and loss, into the gross matter outside, was uncovering a dazzling story of earthly origins and falling under the spell of microbial ecologies, mycelial realms, and lichenized lineages. That origin story, I learned, may not be restricted to natural selection and competition, nor fully explained by taxonomy, but in fact may have more to do with ancient symbioses and amazing feats of unicellular transformation into a plurality of partnerships aimed toward reciprocity between all the vibrant matter of space and time. The end result was everything.

There is a certain comfort in this new narrative that creates a semblance of wholeness out of a mess of parts, questioning both individuality and collectivity, while acknowledging the heterogeneity of our organic derivation, of refusing biological determinism, which aligns with the embodied flexibility and performativity that we know to be integral in the expression of gender and queer identity. But it can also have a destabilizing effect—destabilizing not as a negative or a condition requiring correction, but something that asks for careful consideration and a reckoning with what to make of the boundedness of the body, the human body, any body, as its limits come into question. What does this mean for the thing I know of as myself, for the relations cultivated within and without? Is this a new freedom, an unlearning of rigidity, a defensive mechanism, a consent to uncertainty, an embrace of becoming?

The self-reflection invited by our lively multispecies origins is one set of questions with which I contend, but beyond the anxious spiral it may produce in me, there are new possibilities for conceptualizing the organism and its systems of ordering and classification, and these are powerful constructs toward balancing the scales of future earthly cohabitation. No being lives without other beings. Relation is, in fact, the basic unit of being. Rather than defining ourselves and others via morphological features and differences, genetic inheritances and investments, reproductive capabilities, and the separations inherent in the work of taxonomy, we can choose another frame of reference within which to make sense of the chimeras and companions that carry, as we do, the impulse for continuing life: conatus through coexistence. What can this do for the perils and possibilities of our time? What parasitic structures might it collapse and what new paradigms for intimacy and interconnectedness might it enfold?

Part of what getting out of myself and into the dirt meant was finding a way to use my limbs, to engage the senses, and to find the unexpected. An encounter between elements which may not feature me as a primary character, but which involved me nonetheless and would always be mediated through me, and which might reveal some fragment of natural-cultural (de)composition, a processual assemblage, a lively heterogeneity that could break the rhythm of the homogenizing, monotonous, surveilling structures of my heavily mediated environment of feeds and news cycles. My aim has been to develop a framework for knowing and seeing the world differently. But with the underground and its microscopic activity, the ocular senses are inherently challenged. How do I find a way to engage with such vital matter when I can’t see it?

The impetus for this project emerges from the ostensible difficulty of engaging with the microscopic life forms that populate underground environments precisely because they evade sight—that crucial perceptive ability that affirms modern systems of knowledge and confirms our suspicions—beyond the use of a microscope. I’m intrigued by the way this sensory inability may preclude a full embrace of microbial ecologies not just as companion cultures in the origin of human—and all other—life, but as co-creators of a reality and way of knowing, and building, the world, from the very beginning and for the rest of time as we know it. Galvanized by Donna Haraway’s seminal 1988 essay, “Situated Knowledges,” I wanted to interrogate the nature of “visualizing technologies” that create violent hierarchies for ordering and surveilling peoples and places, and the array of apparatuses developed to enhance and reinforce militaristic overviews of the realms within which all organisms make their lives, intended “to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power.”¹ By getting to the underlayers of dark matter in the soil, I thought I might approach the core of something in the earth by centering the lifeways of countless overlooked worlds, reaffirming the vital life force and agentic capacity of the most marginal organisms of our shared planet.

I wanted to find an approach that helped me tease apart and weave back together the semblances of species, human, nature, self, and other, and for this I turned to sound. I am searching for ways to be, to become with, through sound, that auditory register that asks us not to see but to listen, that asks in certain moments for witness alone and at others for intention and awareness.

Pauline Oliveros framed deep listening as a conscious and healing act, an active and attentive engagement with sonic vibrations, as distinguished from the automatic nature of what we hear without the focus of will. Listening deeply creates opportunities for the arts of noticing, for passionate immersion in microbial and mycelial realms, for sensing and knowing the other as oneself.

Sound ignites multiple scales of being, absorbing, and becoming, it risks its own tuning out and rewards balance, patience, and presence. I am searching for the sound of the many, through polyphonic composition and experimentation, and that process affirms the lifeways of the underground, of the dark and unseen, without expectation or preconception of what might be there. I am searching for the many voices that speak, sometimes incoherently, or with no addressee that is human, or no addressee at all. I want to see what comes to the surface as it emerges, with and without some trepidation that it will be nothing, holding to a firmness that nothing is not a negation but an invitation; I am equally interested in what does not and what has not emerged, what has eluded me, what has been difficult to hear, or what has been abundantly clear, where the in-betweens lie, where gaps emerge between perception and reality, where one scale of knowing and trusting the senses tips into another less certain register of disquiet, when it grows louder, softer, or inconclusively elsewhere in the unexpected encounters provoked by listening.

1. Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, 1988, https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066, p. 581. ↩︎