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Signal Without Origin: On Listening, Mediation, and the Collapse of the Natural

Sound has long occupied an ambiguous position in media theory. It is at once material and ephemeral, measurable and elusive, resistant to capture yet constantly recorded. Unlike the image, sound rarely stabilizes into a discrete object. It unfolds, decays, overlaps. To listen is therefore never to encounter a thing, but to enter a process already in motion.

In contemporary media environments, this instability becomes a structural condition rather than a limitation. The proliferation of sensors, microphones, and computational listening systems has detached sound from both source and intention. What we increasingly encounter are signals without origins: acoustic events severed from their causes, recomposed through chains of technical mediation. Field recordings circulate as data; environments are rendered as spectra; presence becomes an effect of signal processing rather than physical proximity.

This shift complicates inherited distinctions between nature and technology. The “natural soundscape,” once imagined as an external, pre-medial domain, is now inseparable from the apparatus that captures it. Wind recorded through a condenser microphone is already filtered, framed, discretized. Additive synthesis makes this explicit by reconstructing sound from its components, refusing the illusion of wholeness. Nature, in this context, does not disappear—it is decomposed, analyzed, and reassembled as structure.

Listening, then, is no longer a passive reception but an active negotiation with layers of mediation. Media theorists have noted that technologies of sound do not merely transmit information; they produce new regimes of perception. What can be heard, and how it is heard, is conditioned by technical standards, formats, and infrastructures. The ear is trained by codecs as much as by culture.

Identity enters this field obliquely. Voices stripped of semantic clarity persist as timbre, rhythm, and noise. In automated listening systems—speech recognition, biometric surveillance, algorithmic moderation—identity is no longer tied to meaning but to pattern. The subject becomes a bundle of frequencies, a statistical profile extracted from acoustic residue. What remains is not expression but trace.

Within this context, artistic practices that work with sound are less concerned with representation than with exposure. They foreground mediation rather than conceal it, treating noise, distortion, and failure as epistemic tools. Glitches, dropouts, and spectral smearing are not aesthetic accidents but moments where the system reveals itself—where listening becomes reflexive.

To work with sound today is therefore to work with limits: the limits of perception, of documentation, of authorship. It is to accept that no signal arrives untouched, that every recording is already an interpretation, and that listening itself is a historically and technically situated act. What emerges from this acceptance is not clarity, but texture—dense, unstable, and resistant to closure.

In the end, sound does not offer access to an unmediated real. Instead, it maps the conditions under which reality becomes audible at all. To listen carefully is not to recover an origin, but to trace the infrastructures that make hearing possible—and to recognize, within their noise, the contours of a world continuously rewritten by its own signals.

Becoming Interface: Cyborgs After the Human

The cyborg no longer belongs to the future. It has slipped quietly into the present, not as a spectacular fusion of flesh and machine, but as an ordinary condition of mediation. Sensors, prosthetics, algorithms, and networks are no longer external tools; they are environments in which subjectivity is continuously produced. The cyborg is not a figure—it is a situation.

Early cybernetic imaginaries framed the cyborg as enhancement: a body improved, optimized, extended beyond biological limits. Contemporary realities suggest something more ambiguous. Integration does not simply add capacity; it redistributes agency. Decision-making migrates into systems, perception is filtered through interfaces, and action becomes the outcome of negotiations between organic intention and machinic constraint. The human is not upgraded so much as reconfigured.

This reconfiguration destabilizes the boundary between inside and outside. Devices once worn are now embedded; software once consulted now anticipates. Recommendation engines, biometric authentication, and automated sensing systems operate beneath the threshold of conscious awareness. The cyborg condition is defined less by visible augmentation than by latency—the temporal gap between stimulus and response, increasingly managed by non-human processes.

Media theory has long emphasized that technologies shape perception. In the cyborg context, this shaping becomes recursive. Systems designed to read bodies—tracking movement, voice, affect—also train bodies to be legible. Gestures adapt to sensors; speech adapts to recognition models; behavior aligns with metrics. The body learns to perform itself for machines, while machines learn to model bodies statistically. Identity emerges at this interface, neither fully embodied nor fully abstract.

Nature, traditionally positioned as the cyborg’s opposite, is similarly re-coded. Environmental sensors, satellite imaging, and predictive models transform ecosystems into streams of data. Climate, weather, and terrain are not encountered directly but through dashboards and simulations. The cyborg does not leave nature behind; it absorbs nature into informational systems, rendering it actionable, optimizable, and governable.

Sound offers a particularly revealing site for this transformation. Voices are parsed for emotion, authenticity, and risk. Acoustic signatures function as biometric keys. Listening becomes automated, continuous, and asymmetrical. In this context, the cyborg is not merely the speaker with a microphone, but the listener embedded in infrastructure—an ear extended into code, listening without hearing.

Artistic practices engaging with cyborg themes often resist the rhetoric of seamless integration. Instead, they foreground friction: glitches, feedback loops, misreadings. These moments expose the contingency of hybrid systems and the violence implicit in standardization. To be misrecognized by a machine is to encounter the limits of machinic knowledge—and, by extension, the instability of one’s own mediated identity.

The cyborg, then, should not be understood as a final state or coherent subject. It is a provisional alignment, constantly recalibrated by updates, patches, and failures. Its politics are unresolved. While cyborg systems promise efficiency and control, they also generate opacity and dependency. Agency is distributed, but responsibility remains unevenly assigned.

To think with the cyborg today is to abandon fantasies of autonomy and purity. It is to accept that subjectivity is assembled across biological, technical, and institutional layers. The question is no longer whether we become cyborgs, but how these assemblages are designed, who controls their parameters, and what forms of life they permit—or exclude.

In this sense, the cyborg is not a myth of transcendence, but a diagnostic tool. It reveals the conditions under which the human persists, mutates, or dissolves within systems that increasingly think, listen, and act alongside us.