Arising from the audio-visual practices outlined, a number of relevant findings emerge in response to the overarching inquiry and individual research questions:
· Vocalising and the sung voice in particular can be employed as a tool to dig into and explore a complex set of feelings. Feelings happen in song that open up distinct pathways from the encounter itself. Though it feels like an innately human expression, the sung voice can also be a pathway to the more than human world – a sonic bridge across which a call and a longing can travel
· Guitar refrains, as a more melodic and recognisable set of sounds, can be productively mixed with more unsettled, unpredictable synthetic digital sounds that can be an opening of more than human energy in the mix
· In contrast, the digital sounds loosen the human grip, particularly in the imperfect, glitchy loop form that I employ, which is a restless and sometimes jumping/jarring energy in the sonic mix, constantly losing and finding itself again
· The more ‘grounded’ guitar and emotional tenor of the sung voice are unsettled by the glitchy, shaky digital sounds – synthetically made, formed of busy digital bits and chattering away in this ‘ecology of technology’. These sounds, as well as feeling towards a more than human perspective also have the capacity to open up the contained encounters to wider perspectives and feelings about multispecies co-existence
· Feelings are found and elements uncovered in this creative practice through searching for melodies, enacting live harmonies, activating mixes of sound and searching for dynamics between things in the mix. Though the latter parts of the creative process certainly involved a period of determining, fixing and refining how those mixes would be enacted, the finding out happened primarily in the earlier parts of the process in the discovery of the elements and the testing of the relationships between them – the ecology of technology that happens in an experimental mixing practice.
· In the image-making, the practice of creating the mixes live and in response to the audio opens up unpredictable elements and encounters between images to arise. The shaky, imperfect looping practice allows an uncertain human presence to be felt without being foregrounded in the mix, while the ‘unnatural’ capacities of the VJ software to colourise, treat and reveal layers of images open up the uncomfortable intersections of the built human-made city environment and the wild spaces and beings that exist in between those primary structures. In addition, feelings of precarity, claustrophobia and being trapped, transformation, flow and glitched, uncomfortable interruption are all at play through the image mixing
There is a lack of creative practice that embodies and activates ambivalent, complex feelings about nature in the city. Though bringing such feelings to the fore may not fit with the politics of conservation and protection of nature which are so vital in our current climate and biodiversity crises, it is important to acknowledge relationships between humans and more-than-humans as fraught and challenging. Doing so can reveal some of the inequalities and challenges of living together in human-centred and dominated spaces. In relation to this, Donna Haraway (2016) insists that we must ‘stay in the trouble’ of our present moment – this ‘thick’ and undoubtedly unsettling, violent and unjust present. This piece – the project and the encounters that prompted it – was never made to address the climate emergency. Somehow though, the affective reverberations from the small and local encounters with more than human species in the city spread and spool out through the practices of digital mixing into threads of feeling that reach into those wider spaces of multispecies thinking about our present moment. In particular, the following insights have emerged in the creative practice that feed into this broader discussion:
· Encounters with wild lives in the city amplify and sharpen the asymmetries of power in play between humans and more than humans, as human growth, spread, development, settlement and pollution of more than human spaces displaces and erases species
· There is a futility and paltriness to human emotion in the face of more than human energies and activities
· Concurrently, that emotion and ‘passionate interest’ in more than human others is a necessary if flawed reaching out to our companion species. We need to feel for them, even if that feeling is an uncomfortable, lousy, lacking thing
· ‘Species loneliness’ is heightened in the city, not because of a lack of more than human life, but because of the uncomfortable and truncated, sharp and strange ways in which we meet each other in these spaces
· There is simultaneously a joy in the flexibility and resilience of more than human life in the polluted and edgy spaces of the city. The cycle of growth, the continuation of occupation, the echoes of other times into these closely compressed urban temporalities opens up a deeper sense of time and of the earth’s cycles of growth and decay.
· Simultaneously, this joyful and resilient more than human spread resounds with the ghostly echo of the end of human life on earth and a non-human futurity
· Human wishes and wants are often in affective misalignment with more than human practices and needs. This is particularly evident in the spaces of the city, where human choices, passages and conveniences are prioritised
