About a month into 2021, a producer who had an inimitable impact on sound and expression (think speculative fiction but in sound) and in many ways influenced my own sonic pursuits passed away. While many of the projects I’ve explored so far in this program focused on communication and sensing through sound, as well as embodying space with sound, the death of SOPHIE reminded me of and re-calibrated my use of sound as medium, the closest form to ‘feeling’ the point of contact (might call it conversion) between analog and digital. In thinking about technological determinism and over-reliance and how often these tools — algorithms-iOT-machine learning — become oppressive, this switch (if it even is one, I’m inclined to believe it is a blur- a smudge? an idea inspired by this monorhythmic composition) explored through sound feels like a better conduit for sensing and offering empathy in a cyborgian/cybernetic/telematic landscape.

Prior to this program, I had such a basic understanding of the Internet, both its materiality and implications with the social and political contexts surrounding data. In my thesis, I hope to involve my understanding of networks and technological mediation through various experiments in sound and fm transmission. As touched upon, the concepts I’m interested in incorporating involve:

 

My three design ideas are all part of one, but set in different stages as part of a cycle (which I hope to complete). As indicated in a close-up of my concept map,

my first stage in experimentation involves a tactile understanding of networks (network consciousness) through electromagnetic detection. Inspired by calls for a speculative network, one that focuses on a primary sense, I feel like I need to get my hands dirty in some alternative network detection, and what better way to do that than through waves our human ears can’t detect? A prototype by end of stage one involves a ‘visible’ topology of a sudo-environment (geographically local or another kind of space defined by movement and sociality). From a conversation with Sarah Grant, it looks like I’ll use a combination of my EM microphone and an SDR receiver. Some goals of this stage include a more comprehensive dataset of ‘signals’, which could open up routes of modulation (metaphorical disruption), and distinction between noise and stripped signal.

In part two, which I’ll work on in tandem with part one, I am interested in establishing a more intimate conversation between data signals through fm transmission. Inspired by both SOPHIE’s thoughts on Transness and this project on the Transnational body, I’d like to re-imagine the boundaries of our bodies through the sonic translations of our data doubles, an extended body. For this, I will need to build an FM transmitter (hopefully easily done through a raspberry pi) to start sending different signals across, transmuting transmission to an idea of chaos and state of flux.

Finally, I hope to take the findings and experiments to a digital/analog interface, one that blurs the distinctions and discernible traces of either/or. “So synthetic it’s natural!” What does it mean to go  in reverse? We think of it going one way only, analog to digital, but what can an oscillation look like? A blend? This would involve a discovery in transcoding material, thinking through pipes like packets, zipfiles, cookies, and bits. A few projects that work to achieve something similar or convey a different type of mediation in our interfaces include this virtual thesis, form art, and data diaries.