Zoë, Sonic Relationality and Posthuman Urban Sound Art

Posthuman theory questions traditional concepts of the human subject by challenging each of us to adopt a planetary consciousness. It achieves this by breaking down dualisms that separate body and mind, and society from nature. It instead preferences a monist understanding of the real as a tireless “self-organising force of living matter”. This force is described as the vitality of matter, or zoë. Sonic practices have much to offer this emerging consciousness, in particular the concept of sonic relationality, which considers how listening interconnects bodies within a vibratory field of soundings. Three sonic interventions, realised thorough a recursive process of creative practice research, illustrate the connection between posthuman notions of zoë and emergent theories of sonic relationality. They are: Noise Transformation, which sought to reveal the aesthetic potential of traffic noise; Fielding, which explores the potential of sound art to inform new approaches to urban greening programs; and, Touchstone, which collapsed a sonic community into a performative digital sculpture marked by the Earth’s rotation. Each of these interventions reveals methods by which sound art installation practices and soundscape design are able to create new relations between bodies, by augmenting the vitality inherent to everyday materialities.