"I" is another and another (looped)

This paper is written through a practice-based research project titled I, the Thing in the Margins. Its context centers upon the historic self-silence of sound recordists within the histories and tropes of Nature and Wildlife documentary practice: be it for artistic or scientific purposes, recordist-authors are continually erased in the name of ‘non-impact’. How can this historical non-presence be critically re-imagined? What speculative identity might emerge if we were to bend the ear backwards, towards the hiss of self-silence? What would the consequences be in terms of power, agency and subjectivity within human and non-human, mediated encounters?

The paper responds to such questioning by presenting a chimeric medianature (Parikka, 2011): a becoming microphonic cyptoid character, part shadow, part absurd doppelgänger; a bipedal assemblage of another I. It is a haunting of the self, it is the self. It is the noise in the signal, a parasitic oscillation reanimated in brute anonymity. We can never be sure if it is dead or alive, sentient or not? Human? Animal? Technological? Through this thing-persona I will show how a legacy of self-erasure may be deemed both a promise and
threat. I will examine the asymmetrical relations of power dormant within the process of human and nonhuman mediation, and propose that beyond ‘capturing’ the so-called signal (subject) there is a continual acquisition of other skins, formed out of the self and embroiled in a monstrous feedback loop of entanglement.
Key words: animal studies, eco criticism, costume, horror, monsters, sound, technology.