In the previous section I explored Pauline Oliveros’ sound practice and deep listening as a philosophy for creation, aligning in my sonic approach with trends in ecology toward the arts of noticing and attunement. “One moment” explores the quantum potential of sound and listening to expand temporal registers in the interest of multispecies harmony. As an intervention on species classification systems and as a method for exploring more-than-human environments artistically, I am especially interested in centering or meaningfully involving those forms of life that humans cannot sense overtly, like microbes.

In attending to the life worlds of such creatures and considering how their ontological indeterminacy intersects with human principles of social organization—showing the limits of human models for understanding the nonhuman other—I have identified the atomic and subatomic worlds of quantum physics to be a curious companion in an effort to understand microorganisms. I aim to trace principles of quantum theory with an expanded sensory awareness toward the indeterminate and unknowable. Microbes particularly interest me as organisms for this exploration because they are more than our companions on earth, accompanying humans across evolutionary change and adaptation; they are also co-creators of a planetary reality which overlaps with both human and nonhuman affairs and scales of space and time.

In this section, I continue to engage with the core ideas of Oliveros through the lens of quantum theory, inspired by her 1999 essay “Quantum Listening,” which was published as a pocket-sized volume by Silver Press in 2024. Deep listening is the necessary foundation from which experiments with quantum listening can proceed. In the overlapping layers of sound and visuals that characterize the polyphonic approach I’ve taken, I also see a way in which the quantum possibilities of sensory engagement have permeated my field experiments and artistic sensibility from the beginning, perhaps without recognizing it at first. I seek to find commonalities between quantum listening and the work of feminist physicist Karen Barad, whose philosophical treatment of quantum theory and scientific practice has been an important contribution to the field of feminist technoscience. Developed by theorists like Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing, I situate the ideas and methods of my project in this interdisciplinary tradition.

Throughout the preceding writings, I have referred to the multiscalar properties of microbial ecologies: how their existence in space and time clashes with that of the human, having preceded our presence on the planet by a long stretch and permeated the boundaries of our bodies and environments on an invisible, cellular level. Our sense of ourselves and sociopolitical frameworks are so intimately bound up with—indeed, cannot be conceived without—their existence, and yet they operate in ways and on timeframes that might be confusing or opaque to us. In this way, microbes both define and exceed the human. From the microontologies of Nigel Clark and Myra Hird (part 2) to Maya Hey’s attunement to microbes at a Japanese sake brewery (part 3), scholars in the 21st century are demonstrating the ways in which microorganisms bend and stretch the temporal dimensions by which human structures operate. Microbial relationality operates on schedules far different from those of the human; these life forms, in their endurance across time, ubiquity across the earth, and survivability in extreme conditions, subvert the very notion of time-bounded or spatially-defined living that characterizes the way human cultures have taken shape on this planet.

Pauline Oliveros’ approach to quantum listening is inclusive on multiple scales of existence. This practice opens a critical pathway for deepening forms of relationality between the human and more-than-human and making connection with the other as an extension of the self. In “[staying] open to the world of possibilities for interplay in the quantum field with self and other – community – society – the world – the universe and beyond,” Oliveros seeks to channel more than one reality at once, to listen “in as many ways as possible simultaneously – changing and being changed by the listening.”¹

Oliveros’ attention to quantum mechanics proceeds from her primary interest in the aural sphere of existence. She refers to the Hubble telescope as a groundbreaking technology for revealing galaxies far, far away and contemplates the mind- and world-altering potential of being able to hear what is out there. What new domains of knowledge, of feeling might this open up? “With the electron microscope we can see atomic structures, but we could also listen to the micro-world, hearing a strange universe unfolded by Quantum Mechanics.”² In the course of attending to the subatomic and devising experimental forms of tuning into what these worlds might tell us, the quantum listener cultivates a meta form of listening to listening itself: a nesting doll of heightened sensory awareness that expands the self as the universe expands itself, both generating new levels of perception and altering what the senses can conceive or allow themselves to perceive.

Rather than looking to the farthest reaches of the solar system to listen for something otherworldly, I believe in turning to the underground to attune to life forms such as microbes that confound species boundaries and, in some ways, exude alien qualities, lacking the form and exceeding the functions by which humans understand existence.

By practicing Quantum Listening in Oliveros’ conception, unexpected spaces for surprise and imagination may be revealed, allowing the listener to cross “the edges of perception into the mystery of the universe predicted by Quantum Field Theory.”³ Oliveros relates the force fields of QFT—which extends quantum mechanics’ description of atomic and subatomic particles to the fields within which they interact—to the field of sound shaped similarly by invisible, forceful potential; an interplay between the listener and an all-encompassing terrain of sonic input.

Curiously, for Oliveros the field of sound that is brought into being via quantum listening exhibits “a unified logic and form as if it were a composed piece of music,” which may run somewhat counter to the polyphonic approach I’ve employed, inspired by Anna Tsing’s notion of the assemblage that exhibits different but overlapping rhythms (lifeways).⁴ On the other hand, Oliveros’ approach is a creative interpretation of Tsing’s call to make use of imagination and description in “[looking] for what has been ignored because it never fit the time line of progress,” referring to new or overlooked temporal rhythms that cannot be captured by capitalist paradigms of advancement, to the “multiple time-making projects” both within a species and in ecological communities—assemblages—“as organisms enlist each other and coordinate in making landscapes.”⁵ I believe there is a rich connection between polyphony and quantum listening that my recordings and audiovisual works reflect, or diffract (more on diffraction later).

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I started this project with the ideas of deep and quantum listening as both tools and a framework for structuring an engagement with microbial ecologies, aligning with theory and practice surrounding the creation of knowledge and scientific practice. Without the use of a microscope, how are we to know microbes and bacteria as not just existing, but as participants and co-creators of reality? How are we to construct a microbial relation that pays close attention to the ways in which we understand the human in connection to the nonhuman? I wanted to create a body of work that did not reinforce similar efforts combining theory and practice or art and philosophy to make claims as to the intentions, behaviors, and perceived feelings of nonhuman species and their environments. I developed my research methodology and recording practice from that foundation. “Theory is perceiving structure – analyzing and explaining structure so that testing and experiments (practice) can be done,” writes Oliveros.⁶ “Theory directs practice and creates culture to practice practice.”⁷ I aimed my experiments in this direction, toward the smallest particles of living creatures which created the conditions for human existence and continue to regulate life on our planet.

At a certain point while following the paths of deep and quantum listening, I found myself turning to the image, the visual and optical, as a means of creating an immersive experience of the underground. My arrangements of audio recorded from the hydrophone and Pocket Scion in Ableton led to further experimentation with TouchDesigner to generate a set of companion pieces that would respond to the vitality of the underground soundscape, proving its agentic capacity by experientially rendering the space and time of the vibrational encounters produced by my instruments. If the visual components reacted to the sounds I recorded, this would make it all the more apparent just how lively the microbial underground is. But I acknowledge that my use of visualizing technologies may reinforce the epistemological framework of sight as the primary tool by which to recognize, explain, and represent physical phenomena in the natural world and in scientific disciplines. To explore the quantum entanglements that I see as deepening a multispecies engagement with urban environments, and to understand my use of visual effects in combination with sound, I find it may help to turn to Karen Barad’s writing on the wave-particle duality of light, and diffraction as a theoretical tool.

Diffraction is a physical phenomenon which Barad has employed variously across their extensive body of work on quantum physics and theories on the nature of knowing (epistemology) and on the nature of being (ontology) from the Enlightenment through the 21st century. They use diffraction and diffraction experiments to illustrate key insights and contradictions surrounding the limits of knowledge systems that center observation and representations of space which assume “the existence of individual objects with determinate properties” and boundaries “that are independent of our experimental investigations of them.”⁸ Such assumptions are a core foundation of the classical physics of Isaac Newton and the logic/philosophy of René Descartes, which perceive distinct, measurable ‘cuts’ between categories of being and knowing, such as mind-body and object-subject. In the 20th century, quantum physicists like Niels Bohr—working in the time of atomic breakthroughs for weapons of mass destruction during the Second World War—deconstructed these epistemological and ontological frameworks. One of the crucial points of debate that characterized the departure of quantum from classical physics is the question of whether light is a wave or a particle.

In the 19th century physicists were certain that light was a wave. When atomic and subatomic physics emerged in the 20th century, its core principles questioned “how any consistent understanding of the nature of light would be possible,” with experiments on “small quantities of light and matter” alternately revealing light to have both particle- and wave-like features.⁹ Bohr confronted this paradox by searching for a logical explanation for the reproducibility of experiments that showed particle-like behavior using one apparatus and wavelike behavior using another, conceding that these results emerged from “the fact that wave and particle behaviors are exhibited under complementary—that is, mutually exclusive—circumstances.”

What this means, contrary to the assumptions of classical physics of an a priori existence of properties and boundaries between objects that persists despite and no matter the circumstances of their observation, that “the nature of the observed phenomenon changes with corresponding changes in the apparatus,” and consequently, “the interaction between the objects of investigation and what [Bohr] calls ‘the agencies of observation’ is not determinable and therefore cannot be ‘subtracted out’ to leave a representation of the world as it exists independently of human beings.”¹⁰ “No inherent/Cartesian subject-object distinction exists,” Barad emphasizes.¹¹ This also leads Bohr to call into question the objective referent of measurement. He concludes that “the referent is not an observation-independent object but a phenomenon,” recalling the circulating reference of Latour.¹² In Latour’s case, the referent is the product of a series of transformations that, in contradictory fashion, both ruptures and retains some level of internal constancy from the field to the laboratory to the published scientific report. That irrefutability of contradiction is a core aspect of the wave-particle duality paradox, in which the measurement of an observable phenomenon exhibits a fundamental instability that precludes and transcends its determinate representation and description as either/or wave/particle.

The referent exhibits an emergent quality of instability and indeterminacy; its properties and boundaries are not inherent to its position in space or independent of its observation by the scientist or philosopher; the cuts between categories are enacted agentially, by humans performing feats of science via language and image—reference—within the limits of their bodies of knowledge. The cut is enacted by the apparatus of experimentation, rendering the boundary between agencies of observation and the phenomenon, or the object of measurement, indeterminate, not fixed, and thus not adequately explained by the Cartesian subject-object dichotomy. In Bohr’s estimation, the revised physical framework aims instead at a sense of “quantum wholeness” that does not assume any unambiguous or definitive distinction between the mode of measurement and the phenomenon measured.¹³

In Bohr’s philosophy-physics, as Barad terms it, he places a particular emphasis on the apparatus or instrument by which physical phenomena is observed to argue for the instability of assumed boundaries between the object-referent and mode of observation. Barad notes that in this way, “Bohr situates practice within theory,” declaring the separations between “method, measurement, description, interpretation, epistemology, and ontology” to be false divisions predicated on a foundation of science that assumes independence of phenomena external to their observation; thus, “the conceptual and physical dimensions of measurement process” are enmeshed, part of a quantum whole, toward a new ontoepistemology of science—threading together the nature of being and knowing.¹⁴ Quantum physics emerges from the inability to reconcile the constraints of human knowledge systems that have constructed space, time, and matter as coherent wholes unto themselves, given the unpredictability, randomness, and discontinuity that emerge invariably from physical phenomena, exhibited so aptly by the wave-light duality paradox.

Bohr’s method of practicing the theory of science bears its mark on the processual unfolding of Oliveros’ pathway from theory to practice to ‘practice practice.’ Bohr’s notion of complementarity also incorporates an indeterminacy principle that posits a fundamental inability to differentiate, in physical terms, between phenomena and its description. For my purposes, this means that when I am in the field observing, recording the underground, and rendering a representation of it via sound and image, I am actively—agentially—bringing the world of observation into being by those very acts, not revealing a world that independently exists. I argue that these key debates in quantum physics are directly relevant to any observation and representational expression of microbial ecologies, which subvert definitive explanation in frameworks of modern science and knowledge systems derived from the human.

As a discipline built expressly on the visual process of morphology and visualizing technologies like the microscope, taxonomy is fundamentally a representationalist discipline. It assumes that observation and experimentation reveal presupposed entities that remain stable and consistent across scales of being, rather than bringing them into existence by making ‘cuts’ between those scales. I believe microbes, in their transgression of neatly defined boundaries and their promiscuous multispecies entanglements, reveal the cracks in taxonomic classification systems. Subsequently, an argument is to be made for these systems to aim toward a kind of Bohrian quantum wholeness by reckoning with the object as phenomenon and the intertwined nature of the conceptual and the physical by means of measurement and observation.

Returning to the physical phenomenon of diffraction, I wish to relate its patterns and chain reactions, which reveal the agential cuts between categories of observable behavior and the mode of their observation, to the use of optical effects in this project toward the production of a quantum whole. Barad uses the brittlestar, an invertebrate relative of the starfish, with “a skeletal system that also functions as a visual system” as an example of an enigmatic, boundary-subverting form of organic life, similar to the way in which microbes and bacteria urge a reexamination of the assumed divisions between human and nonhuman:¹⁵

Brittlestars are living, breathing, mutating liminal diffraction gratings—they live at the edge of being diffraction gratings. Negotiating complex sets of changing relations concerning bodily boundaries, brittlestars are evolutionarily attuned to processes of differentiation. They simply cannot afford to ignore potential diffraction effects. Diffraction effects limit the ability of a lens (or system of lenses) to resolve an image. The greater the diffraction effects, the less determinate the boundaries of an image are, that is, the more the resolution is compromised. This is a fundamental physical limit (not merely a practical one). Brittlestars have evolved… in just such a way that their microlenses are optimized to maximize visual acuity (for the discernment of predators, hiding places, and other important phenomena) in a creative tension, a trade-off, between the resolution of detail and diffraction effects. How that tension is negotiated clearly matters: the possibilities for survival are at stake in the brittlestar’s ability to differentiate bodily boundaries. Diffraction is not about any difference but about which differences matter. The brittlestar lives agential separability, the possibilities for differentiation without individuation.¹⁶

Barad connects the behavior of the brittlestar to “the entangled practices of knowing and being” in that their intertwined visual and corporeal existence dissolves the inherently assumed separations of Western/Cartesian thinking behind key concepts: mind/body and subject/object, for instance.¹⁷ Brittlestars also call into question the assumption of humans as knowers of the world via their distinct, separable senses. The brittlestar responds to its world with a different set of abilities, a merging of the senses that continually processes, does not end where another begins; but it knows its world all the same. The same could be said of the underground soil ecosystem, as both a perpetually sensing organism and confluence of microorganisms that resists the categorical tendencies of Western knowledge systems built on binaries and clear boundaries between species.

Knowing, for Barad, “is not a mediated activity… Knowing is a direct material engagement… The entangled practices of knowing and being are material practices. The world is not merely an idea that exists in the human mind. To the contrary, ‘mind’ is a specific material configuration of the world, not necessarily coincident with a brain.”¹⁸ This last sentiment is consistent with the feminist materialist tradition of Barad’s work, in which “knowledge-making practices are material actions in the world, rather than just descriptions of it.”¹⁹ It is also directly applicable to the microbial referent of knowledge at stake in my study, which in its entanglements with human projects, evolution, and ongoing existence on earth transcends the boundaries of human/nonhuman—despite the perceived lack of a brain, and thus intelligent programming akin to what humans contain, on the part of microbes.

I seek to position the optical experimentations that coexist alongside the sonic here as a material embodiment of a kind of brittlestar ontoepistemology, of its confounding capacities as “a living, breathing, metamorphosing optical system,” by figuring the camera’s output as a structure for channeling a reproduction—not the definitive representation, but a mutating, shifting, and transcendent phenomenon—of space and matter at a particular moment in time at my recording sites. Perhaps the audiovisual work that accompanies this section, “Ridgewood Reservoir,” captures this more acutely than either of the preceding works, with its superimposed, discontinuous, diffractive images projected over and reaching into the cavernous opening of a graded depression of forest lining the edge of the reservoir. The recording from the hydrophone, buried into the soil of this depression, rumbles and tenses as it absorbs the vibrational activity of every footstep above it and the indeterminate volume of organic life and inorganic material within the microphone’s sonic reach.

The mirrored images of “Ridgewood Reservoir” also call to mind the symmetrical form of the (brittle)star and the shifting (or diffracting) indeterminacy of observable phenomena rendered by the apparatuses of microphone and camera. The diffractions of light are an artistic choice to render the mutational capacities of microbial ecologies, producing unpredictable effects and material relations via assemblages of flickering images. In relation to the human, microbes are a collective means of existence on the planet and a cumulative power towards pathogenic transmission, contradictory as this simultaneity may be; each condition signals a vast chasm of unknown probabilities and the limits of (human) knowledge.

“The physical phenomenon of reflection is a common metaphor for thinking,” writes Barad; “Donna Haraway proposes diffraction as an alternative to the well-worn metaphor of reflection. As Haraway suggests, diffraction can serve as a useful counterpoint to reflection: both are optical phenomena, but whereas reflection is about mirroring and sameness, diffraction attends to patterns of difference.”²⁰ These patterns of difference recall Tsing’s temporal rhythms beyond progress and the time-making projects that emerge across scales of species and landscape. At the crux of each audiovisual work, and perhaps especially “Ridgewood Reservoir,” is an attunement to the embodied nature of difference across scales of space, time, and matter of which microbes make me hyper-aware, not as a source of anxiety but rather of a kind of embryonic possibility, revealing the irreducibility of microbial ecologies to a fixed ontological status. My use of movement and flickering images as the sounds of the shaking underground ebb and flow attempt to ground that theory in a methodology of experimental practice toward a quantum, multispecies, urban framework of soil-human-microbial relation.

1. Oliveros, Pauline. Quantum Listening. Silver Press, 27 July 2024, pp. 1-2. ↩︎
2. Ibid, pp. 9-10. ↩︎
3. Ibid, p. 15. ↩︎
4. Ibid. ↩︎
5. Tsing, Anna. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 29 Sept. 2015, p. 21. ↩︎
6. Oliveros, Pauline. Quantum Listening. Silver Press, 27 July 2024, p. 18. ↩︎
7. Ibid. ↩︎
8. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, N.C.; London, Duke University Press, 2007, p. 106. ↩︎
9. Ibid, pp. 99-100. ↩︎
10. Ibid, p. 106 (emphasis in original), 31. ↩︎
11. Ibid, p. 114 (emphasis in original). ↩︎
12. Ibid, p. 120. ↩︎
13. Ibid, p. 118. ↩︎
14. Ibid, pp. 121, 196. ↩︎
15. Ibid, p. 369. ↩︎
16. Ibid, p. 377, emphasis in original. ↩︎
17. Ibid, p. 379. ↩︎
18. Ibid. ↩︎
19. Schrader, Astrid. “Microbes.” Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Gender: Animals, edited by Juno Salazar Parrenas, New York, NY, Macmillan US, 2018, p. 63. ↩︎
20. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, N.C.; London, Duke University Press, 2007, p. 29. ↩︎