Re-hearing environmental sound arts asymmetrical relations.

This paper draws upon the self-reflexive anthropological turn of the 1970’s as parallel critique throughout. I will argue environmental sound art has largely ignored the politics of observer-subject relations and instead engaged place and sound through divisive legacies of conservation and composition. Employing Mary Louise Pratt’s (1992, p.6) term ‘contact zone’, I will re-imagine “the field” as a highly charged, contested and collaborative arena where relations of power and mediation are the primary focus for a radical aesthetic practice. Alongside Pratt I will incorporate writing from others including James Clifford, Irit Rogoff and Timothy Morton. These references will be interwoven through examples of my own practice-based research: a formally diverse body of work that seeks to actively disrupt, critique and re-imagine the ontological foundations of field recording by foregrounding issues relating to ethics, agency and mediation. I will propose a way of re-hearing the landscape critically through a participatory, contested and performative practice; one in which I am an entangled field of study within the landscape, sound and its non-human agents.