The Thing About Microphones

This paper presentation is a media archaeological investigation of the microphone. Its aim is to generate new speculations and figurations between humans, non-humans and technology, which may arrive out of the Anthropocene and its binary collapsing consequences. Specifically, I will interrogate and re-animate the microphone through its connective political, material and fictional ecologies. I will ask if microphones are agentive actors and if so, what the consequences might be? The paper’s central argument is that the microphone is not merely a tool of servitude employed by human hands. Nor is it just an apparatus that facilitates the audiophile’s pursuit of fidelity. Rather, the microphone is positioned as a “necromedia actant”: part of a networked history of power relations and ethical consequences that can be situated amongst more sinister contexts of surveillance, parasites and horror.

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