In this essay I attempt to reexperience as much as rethink and rework approaches to sound, walking, and soundwalking. One way I have tried to do this is by developing an account of what I call ‘vertego’, a portmanteau of vertigo and ego, denoting the implicit and densely entangled relations of self and environment, and of listening and walking (held together, and pushed apart, by balance and gravity). Such intimate proximity is accompanied by various theories of the human ego (as if such theories were akin to different environments, topographical maturations and imaginations), which I here consider as a vessel that breaks even as it is being formed. Underlying this process, and in concert with my ongoing reading of the works of microbiologists Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, I try to move away from such polarised terms as cooperation and competition, working instead with a spectral vocabulary of ejection, emergence, and by-product, trying to get closer to a practise of listening that is akin to unlistening (or not locating), in which, in a manner similar to vertego, listening-selves fall apart. By necessity I have engaged with certain anatomical details, and in mind of such, I have written a brief introduction to the vestibular labyrinth of the human inner ear, which can be found in the weblink at the end of this essay, alongside a short glossary of terms. Anyone who is interested can also find a number of the notes, including those on the auditory labyrinth, that have quietly fed into the metapattern formed around the conjunction of a series of essays in which Throwing Stones at Nothing is part.
Farmer, Patrick
School of Arts
Year of publication: 2023Date of RADAR deposit: 2024-11-20