ghosts are not seen but heard by Luis Lecea

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Ghosts are not seen but heard by Luis Lecea Romera

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

P.6

PREFACE

P.10

A SUSTAINED FALL

P.12

UNSILENCE

P.18

THE QUEER AND THE EERIE

P.22

THE POSTHUMOUS AURAL

P.28

AN ORDERLY NOISE

P.34

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P.38

COLOPHON

P.40

A friend wrote down some words shortly before he died: “Poetry is backards logic. You can’t write poetry unless you have knowledge of, or taste for, this ‘backwards’ way of finding truth”. Another person said sound is eternal, it has no beginning.

Fanny Howe, Night Philosophy

introduction

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This thesis is written in two parts of three and two chapters respectively. The first part introduces the concept of decay and provides the conceptual framework that fundaments its treatment as a topic of research. The second part is a practice report that connects two sound artworks developed in parallel to these inquiries. Firstly, decay is examined as a state of matter and a process that describes trajectories from life to death, identifying hovering points in this fall. These suspended instances are approached through the concept of undeath, looking at how it has been treated in theory and fiction as a continuum that unsettles ideas of presence and absence, and problematises humanness as a prerequisite for agency. Secondly, decay is regarded as an attribute of sound whose qualities of experience provide tools to approach the agency of what visual media cannot clarify. Vibration has the potential to help us not only understand, but feel, the complexities of undeath by creating zones of transmission between the realms of the non/human and the non/living. Thirdly, the process of decay is discussed as a mode of queering notions of the non/human and the non/living, inscribing Mark Fisher’s proposition of the eerie as a queer mode of aesthetic experience of that whose agency escapes notions of aliveness, deadness, or humanness. This concludes with an as7

INTRODUCTION

sertion on the potential of aural perception to reorient our sensibility in how we address intersecting structures of global necropowers and extractivist capitalism. The last chapters distil the treated concepts in the context of two sound pieces developed around two situations of decay: the human corpse in The Posthumous aural, and nuclear waste in An orderly noise.

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As language and sound each are means of conveyance in their own right, the reader is invited to follow these reports while listening to the linked sound files. Guide to use a QR-Code Open the camera app on your smartphone and bring it close to the QR-Code on the page. After a short moment a link will appear on top of your screen. Open it, listen, and, when possible, wear headphones.

preface

G H O S TS A R E N O T S E E N B U T H E A R D

There is a scene in David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr which merits particular attention and whose intensity I still recall: the sequence in Club Silencio. A woman emerges from behind the red curtains to deliver an emotionally devastating version in Spanish of Roy Orbison’s “Crying”. Two and a half minutes into the performance, Rebekah del Río collapses on stage and falls dead to the floor. Surprisingly, the singing goes on. Her still body is dragged out of stage by two men. It is immediately revealed that it was a playback. But for those seconds I cannot help but be shaken. Something drives me to treat the performance as if it were authentic. As Del Río’s voice keeps on going, I am confronted with the idea of something that lives on even after it has died.

CHAPTER I

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Text

Decay is a state and a process, a noun and a verb. It is decrepitude, instability, and, ultimately, extinction. When confronted with the decaying, oftentimes what we experience is only a snap picture of an ongoing course. Its beginning, end, and pace toward disappearance are not fully apprehensible merely from a still image. As a silent ruinous structure or a still body on dark waters, to determine whether something is decayed or decaying might be somewhat obscure. From the perspective of materially, we can observe decay as a downward succession in time of unstable equilibriums. A body is in unstable equilibrium when a disturbing force is applied and its centre of gravity is displaced, making it move away from its original position. Decay is a constant fall, and its acting disturbing force brings matter to hanging states; from fading life toward unavoidable death. When this trajectory works as a continuum and therefore prevents the possibility of differentiating one from the other, an area of uncertainty opens up. This are is perhaps the most fundamental opposition of all, between the poles of a highly metaphysical – that of presence and absence. Along the fall from being and ceasing to be, moments of suspension can sometimes occur. I would like to refer here to a term that fiction offers for these states of hovering animation and that will 13

CH.I A SUSTAINED FALL

be discussed across these pages: undeath. Undeath should not be understood as a state contrary to death, but rather as the particular position of those floating points in which the trajectory of the descent from life to death seems to flatten – an “anorganic state of animation1” . The prefix “un” does not here designate an opposite. Undeath, and hence unlife, ought to be thought “not as opposed to life –or death– but as designating a continuum which includes, but moves beyond, the so-called living2”. Undead existences have been featured in the belief systems of numerous cultures. Common Western conceptions of such beings are often represented in mythologies and contemporary fictions as unalive corporeal forms of the human. To understand this prevalence of corporeality it is useful to analyse the human dead body as a culture-specific construct. With the emergence and spread of Abrahamic religions across West Asia, Northern Africa, and Europe, the belief in the resurrection of the dead – or anastasis – became increasingly prevalent over time. Unlike in Dharmic religions, Abrahamic spirituality does not aim at the immortality of the soul through the separation of the spirit from the body. On the 1 Fisher, M. (1999). Flatline constructs: gothic materialism and cybernetic theory-fiction. New York, New York: Exmilitary Press, 44. 2 Ibid.

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contrary, it gravitates around an eternal figure of the corporeal. Western insistence on corporeality as the deposit of essence can be contrasted with an opposing Eastern drive to incorporeality. Byung Chul-Han begins his essay on absence3 with a quote from the Chinese proverb of Lao Zi (6th Century BC): “a good walker leaves no footprints”. Westerners’ obsession with persistence, i.e. with the essence, embodied in philosophers such as Heidegger4 and Derrida, meets a counterpoint with philosophers from the East such as Lao Zi or Zhuang Zi, who show us that emptiness and absence are aspiring of the ultimate form of essence. In the context of the nature of undead entities, this translates on a prevalence of the ghostly and the immaterial over the substantial in East and South East Asian imaginaries of the non-living. These zones adrift between human life and death immediately recall those which the corporeal – the Haitian zombie, but also the European vampire and Kabbalistic golem–, along with incorporeal – the

3 Han, B.-C. (2007). Abwesen: zur Kultur und Philosophie des Fernen Osten. Berlin: Merve. 4 Heidegger writes in Being and Time : “The ‘essence’ of human-being lies in its existence.” (“Das ‘Wesen’ des Daseins liegt in seiner Existenz”, Sein und Zeit, p. 42.)

CH.I A SUSTAINED FALL

Chinese hungry ghost or the Tibetan tulpa 5 – occupy across, but also beyond, folklores and contemporary literatures. It will be argued here that the continuum of undeath includes, but also exceeds, these and other examples of unliving forms of the human, echoing Mark Fisher’s proposition in the late 90s of what he calls a gothic flatline: A plane where it is no longer possible to differentiate the animate from the inanimate and where to have agency is not necessarily to be alive.6

Undeath does not conform to just understanding liveliness through the bodily in states of suspended decay, it also problematises humanness as a prerequisite: it extends the question of agency to the inanimate and the immaterial. In doing so, it brings 5 In David Lynch’s Twin Peaks tulpas manifest as conjured duplicates of individuals, manufactured from a seed and organic material from the template, and are capable of retain memories from their templates. I here refer to the specific mode of an incorporeal ‘thoughtform’ that resembles objects or people, and may become ensouled by nature spirits or by the dead. The term ‘thoughtform’ is here used as proposed in: Evans-Wentz, W. T. (2000) The Tibetan Book of the Dead: Or The After-Death Experiences on the Bardo Plane, according to Lāma Kazi Dawa-Samdup’s English Rendering. New York: Oxford University Press. 6 Fisher, M. (1999). Flatline constructs: gothic materialism and cybernetic theory-fiction. New York, New York: Exmilitary Press, 2.

G H O S TS A R E N O T S E E N B U T H E A R D

us closer to ways that we ourselves are caught up in the rhythms, affects and intensities of non-human forces.

CHAPTER II

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G H O S TS A R E N O T S E E N B U T H E A R D

Decay is a process and a state of the material, and it is also a quality of the aural. Sound is conventionally qualified through what is called an envelope. This is a linear representation of intensity through time, consisting on three phases or parameters: attack; sustain; decay7. Attack defines the transient changes, preceded by silence, that occur before the sound reaches its steady-state intensity; sustain is the steady state of a sound at its maximum intensity; and decay is the manner in which it ceases, indicating the time that a sound takes to die out, the rate at which it fades into silence. We can signal decay when the actant force behind its generation and sustain ceases to exert as such. For this amount of time, past beyond its moment of formation, sound exists as reflections – reverberations – in a shadowy transition, gradually disappearing from the audible spectrum to the point of complete extinction of any audible trace. Again, a fall from presence to absence. Especially when its source is unknown or veiled, sound has an otherworldly character. Consider a horror film in which a strange sound is heard in the dark, or a sound you hear late at night without 7 In the context of electronically synthesized sound, as opposed to acoustic sound, decay often refers to a drop in intensity that may occur between the attack phase and the sustain phase. In such cases the time it takes for the sound to fade to silence is called the release.

CH.II UNSILENCE

knowing where it came from. You cannot be certain, but there’s a chance, a sensation, that this is something that should not exist, at least not right there, not right now. Sound has the power to haunt us by blurring the lines between what we consider to be inner and outside states –sounds effortlessly move between these two states and are beyond our control. The nature of sound can be thought in terms of the spectral, of that which acts without physically existing. In Sinister Resonance, musician, writer and curator David Troop writes of sound: The relative lack of form creates perplexing relationships between the properties of states: inside and outside, material and immaterial.”8.

Again, this brings up questions about agency: What kind of agent is this, exactly? Is there even an agent? The concept of undeath has been described and framed by visual references, not that often by the sonic. Isabella van Elferen, in Gothic Music9, discusses how sound is used in gothic film and other media to signal something threatening, just 8 Troop, D. (2012). Sinister resonance: the mediumship of the listener. London: Continuum, 36. 9 Elferen, I. (2012). Gothic music: The Sounds of the Uncanny. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 51.

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beyond vision. Ghosts, for example, are seldom directly visualised but are often heard. Image and text help us in the understanding of the complexities of undeath, but sound has the capacity to enable us to experience it. Through aural perceptions we can feel what it is like to be in the interzones between, and beyond, standard notions of being and nonbeing. What I propose, then, is an invitation to cross a threshold, to walk through the portal of the foreign and the strange, where eerie frequencies unsettle the binary constructs of presence and non-presence, audibility and non-audibility, and life and death. Diving into these aural environments offers the opportunity to not only understand, but to feel, some of the imperceptible logics of contemporary society. An attunement to the disquiet dimensions of the vibrational systems passing through us.

CHAPTER III

the queer and the eerie

G H O S TS A R E N O T S E E N B U T H E A R D

Drawing a flattening trajectory, decaying states open a space between binary propositions, such as presence and non-presence, audibility and nonaudibility, life and death. Decay can be seen as a formulation for strange-making, for defamiliarizing – as a process of queering. Although my understandings of queerness are continually fluctuating, through considerations of my own body and my artistic practice, I refer to queerness in this instance through the words of Gayathri Gopinath: The term queer references not only nonnormative sexual practices, desires, affiliations and gender embodiments, but also the alternative ways of seeing (and sensing) space, scale, and temporality.10

As an adverb and a verb, attributing queer processes of going beyond and unsettling –subverting, exceeding– fixed forms and given norms. Biology and ecology, according to Timothy Morton, undermine conceptions of authenticity. He claims that life is a “mesh of interrelations”11 that blurs tradi10 Gopinath, G. (2018). Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora. Duke UP, 20 11 Morton, T. (2010). “Guest Column: Queer Ecology”. PMLA, 125(2), 273-82.

CH.III THE QUEER AND THE EERIE

tional scientific distinctions such as species, living and non-living, human and nonhuman, and even between an organism and its surroundings. Queer ecology, according to Morton, stresses a way of living that transcends dualisms and distinct borders. If we translate Morton’s notion into the continuum of undeath, we may tackle from structures of modern Western ontologies of death to Christian and Cartesian dualisms’ conceptualizations of the lifedeath threshold. Thus, as regards to tensions in dualisms that presence and absence, decay can be read as queer process, and undeath, as a queering state. In this direction, a particular destabilisation of the non/living binary can be traced to Achile Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics. For Mbembe, necropolitics have existed in various forms of imperialism since the 15th Century, bolstered by neoliberal and extractive capitalism and its lethal “war machines”12. Necropolitics encapsulates a sovereign’s ultimate ability to determine who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not. In other words, an individual or a community that is unable to set their own limits due to social or political interference is considered not to be truly alive because they have lost control of their 12 Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics. Durham, UK: Duke University Press, 83.

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own body. This creates zones of existence for the living dead, or those who no longer have sovereignty over their own bodies –such as modern-day slaves, human cannon fodder, and so on. As a research field, a queer ecology of death suggests new modes of thinking about agency of the non/human and non/living in relation to how we experience these modes. Here I’d like to refer to Mark Fisher’s proposition of the eerie as “something present where there should be nothing, or nothing present where there should be nothing”13. There’s a sense in which the eerie prompts us to reconsider not only presumptions about human agency, intentionality, and control, but also invites us into a darker, more disturbing reflection on the strange agency of the inanimate and impersonal materiality of the world around us and within us. This essential idea displays the eerie as a trace of impenetrable agency from without, or some unnerving non-subjective drive from within that pushes our behaviours inexplicably. It will be here argued the eerie is queer mode of aesthetic experience. Sonic sensibility can reorient our visibility on invisible forces that govern us, and whose agency escapes notions of aliveness, deadness or humanness. A force like capital does not exist in any 13 Fisher, M. (2016). The Weird And The Eerie. Repeater Books, 61.

CH.III THE QUEER AND THE EERIE

substantial sense, yet it is capable of producing practically any kind of effect14 . In its ghostly nature, capital wields in its modes of production more influence than any apparently substantial entity. Resonances, oscillations, pulses and reverberations are by-products of many contemporary modes of consumption and reproduction. Sound as the medium to experience of the eerie helps us understand the agency of what visual media cannot clarify. As categories melt, and entities crossbreed, weaving textures between undeath and unsilence has the potential to be of key methodological importance in approaching intersecting structures of global nechropolitics, emerging out of extractivist capitalism.

14 Fisher, M. (2016). Idem. 64

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CHAPTER IV

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I have become strangely fascinated with the market responses to the afterlife and the necropolitical and spatial consequences of its accelerating commodification. During last year I occupied much of my time looking at the politics of spatial provision for the dead in The Netherlands, and the different ways our bodies are handled after they are defunct. The findings astonished me. An interesting shift is emerging together with these new models of profit that are being developed under an unprecedented premise: the commodification of death is no longer based on the allocation of bodies but rather on how to prevent them from occupying space. The consolidation of this new private sector in the economy of death relies on governmental approval of new legal and moral frameworks that facilitates their agendas. Both their economic and social viability depend on public administrations approving their patented procedures of molecularisation of the body, as a condition of necessity for death to be assimilated, even digested, into the circuits of productivity. This act of disappearance relies on the possibility of a profitable disposal of corpses through its conversion into new material de- and re-compositions. The human body interrupts down its decay retaining presence in new states of circulating, unliving and commodified entities. 29

CH.IV THE POSTHUMOUS AURAL

These post-mortem goods dwell in the flatline of undeath, and imply that for late capitalism to be alive is to be productive and vice versa. A dissolution of human corporeity into industrial formulations: fertilizing effluents15, composting soil16, diamonds17 and tattoo ink, to name a few. The latter sparked a special interest in me. As a ritualistic form of body modification, tattooing has long been a feature in many ceremonial practices around death. Researching on Irezumi (োोႅ, lit. “inserting ink”), the Japanese word for tattooing, I stumbled upon the figure of Fukishi 15 Originally developed as a method to process animal carcasses into plant food, human body disposal by alkaline hydrolysis has gained prominence over recent years. Litters of a dark-tone effluent constitute the main residue. Its potential as a fertiliser is already being marketed under commercial names. https://www.beatreecremation. com/tree-tea-fertilizer (accessed 19/02/21) 16 The idea of human composting remains as one of the most controversial techniques of body disposal, and the latest to be brought into debate. On her 2016 TED Talk3, Katrina Spade, CEO and founder of Recompose, firmly advocates for the vision of her company: a series of facilities spread across the city where bodies pile up and undergo a controlled process of decomposition in contact with air and bacteria. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=PRsopS7yTG8 (accessed 14/01/22) 17 A notorious example can be found in Jill Madig’s film The Proposal (2018), in which she offers the Swiss furniture company Vitra a diamond crafted out of the ashes of Mexican architect Luis Barragán in exchange for his professional archive, bought in 1995 by owner as a wedding present his fianceé at the time, Federica Zanco. The body of the architect in return for the body of work.

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Mashaichi, a Japanese physician working in the first half of the last century, dedicated his life to researching tattoo ink and its effects on human cells. He became the founder of a tattoo association that sought to preserve the skins of dead bodies who have extensive tattoos18. It is possible now to send human ashes per post and received them back in the shape of a tattoo ink bottle of a desired shade of colour 19. I understood this as destibilisation of Kristeva’s thoughts onf the dead body: The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us. 20

The transfiguration of decayed human matter into a ritualistic prop shifts the corpse from the abject to the eerie. The act of reinstating a dead body onto a 18 Hardy D. E. (1988). “Life & Death Tattoos”, Volume 4, Issue 1 of Tattootime, Honolulu, Hawaii. 19 A service offered by British company Cremationink: https://cremationink.com (accessed 16/02/22) 20 Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror, Columbia University Press. 4

CH.IV THE POSTHUMOUS AURAL

living one renders tattooists as contemporary mediums in the post-capitalist economy of death. With these findings I reached out to Aitana, a talented tattoo artist and dear friend. In our conversation about living bodies reinsterting a dead body into another living body, they pointed out at the long silences and lack of verbal communication between the artist and the person being tattooed. In the course of the session, the mechanical percussive repetition of the needle was the only sound filling up the space during this intimate ritual. This made me think of sound as a signal of care; the tattoo artist would stop when the sound of the needle has gone for too long, even if the tattooed person does not complain aloud about the pain. This vibration functions a sort of ventriloquist mourning. Voice is displacing from body to body. Our discussions crystallised in a collaboration. The Posthumous Aural is a sound piece performed by two bodies. It begins with a choreographed extraction and burning of nails and hair on a ceremonial glass. The resulting ashes are mixed with ink in a second glass. After this, the two bodies sit down on different sides of four consecutive aluminium plates, aligned perpendicularly to the audience. One body uses the ash-infused ink to draw on the plates with a tattoo machine. The other body uses a controller to sculpt the vibrations of 32

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the plates into a soundscape. The performance ends with a choreographed walk to the back, kneeling and facing the audience. Aitana and I momentarily embody the role of the plañidera, a recurrent figure in Spanish death culture. It is one of the aims of this piece to approach the study of a figure that was crucial throughout history, though surprisingly seldom mentioned in dominant narratives about death practices, the figure of women who were called to mourn at funerals. The word comes from wailing, or what is the same, moaning, sobbing or crying. At the same time, this word comes from the Latin plangere, to cry, to lick, to strike as a sign of pain. It is one of the oldest funerary practices, in which the weeper, though not related with the deceased, becomes a kind of tragic actress, a ventriloquist21. The Posthumous Aural occupies a conjectural space of grief through the vibrancies of non/living matter, signalled by the absence of language. A disembodied mourning of vibrating undead matter, a sonic act of inquiry on the material and cultural performances of the dead body-object. A ventriloquist ritual of undead vibrating matter, a decommodification of death through music. 21 Connor, S. (2000). Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 25.

CHAPTER V

Wd ehZ[hbo noise

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Nuclear waste is certainly one of the eeriest entities I’ve ever come close to. In October 2021 I took part in a week-long artistic lab amongst together with researchers and scientists, and whose starting point was a field trip to De Kaloot, a strip of shoreline close to the small town of Borssele. Located in the most southern strip of land of the Zeeland peninsula. The facilities that contain the only functioning nuclear reactor in The Netherlands stand on a small beach outcrop section of reclaimed land. The convergence of the architecture of the nuclear power plan build on an artificial landscape. In the manufacturing of this post-productive landscape, notions of natural and artificial collapse. The energy produced by the fission of atoms in Borsselle’s reactor is the same energy consumed by the machines that control the decay of nuclear waste, close and short-circuiting is own life cycle. Nuclear waste is deadly matter and in constant decay. It somehow reads as one of the most outstanding and strangest by-products of modern extractivist economies. Radioactivity is the amount of energy liberated with the progressive and steady weakening and ultimate breakage of the bonds that hold the atomic structure together. In proximity to its range, the human body dramatically accelerates its decay. I started to consider nuclear waste as an 35

C H . V A N O R D E R LY N O I S E

extraordinary contemporary golem and the Kabbalistic tale of the rabbi who animates lifeless clay, giving form to the monstrous. The golem runs amok and threatens to destroy his creator22. In our field trip inside the waste containment buildings, artist Claire Matthews and I posed our contact microphones on different pieces of machinery. These were all the apparatuses (ventilators, radiators, dehumidifiers) whose purpose is to maintain the specific conditions of temperature, humidity and preassure in the chambers where nuclear waste decays for 100 years. We collected hums from the ghosts in these machines, and composed them into a binaural soundscape that reflected on the eeriness of nuclear architecture. The unsilent decay of nuclear waste resonates at 50Hz, the frequency of electrical power in industrial buildings. An Orderly Noise was an 8 channel spatial sound installation based these field recordings of electrical drones and their overtones.

22 Goodman, Steven. (2021) “IT”, in: Fullerton Whitman, K. et al (2021). Spectres III: Ghost in the Machine. Rennes, France: Shelter Press.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

AMACHER, M., CORSANO, C., FULLMAN, E., KUBISCH, C., LEE, O., MEURSAULT, P., NANCY, J-L., ROSENBOOM, D., SAUVAGE, T., THE CARETAKER, TOOP, D., ZANÉSI, C. (2020). Spectres. II: Resonances. Rennes, France: Shelter Press. COMAROFF, J. & ONG, K. (2013). Horror in architecture, Novato, California: ORO Editions. CONNOR, S. (2000) Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. EVANS-WENTZ, W. T. (2000). The Tibetan Book of the Dead: Or The After-Death Experiences on the Bardo Plane, according to Lāma Kazi DawaSamdup’s English Rendering. New York: Oxford University Press. FISHER, M. (1999). Flatline constructs: gothic materialism and cybernetic theory-fiction. New York, New York: Exmilitary Press. FISHER, M. (2016). The Weird And The Eerie. London: Repeater Books. FULLERTON WHITMAN, K., GILLET, E., GOODMAN, S., HECKER, F., HOFF, J., KAYN, R., LOVELACE, A., ROBIN MACKAY, ORCUTT, B., PUECH, M., RABELAIS, A., RAILTON, L., RISSET, J-C., ROUX, S., ZINOVIEFF, P. (2021). Spectres. III: Ghost in the Machine. Rennes, France: Shelter Press.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GOODMAN, S., HEYS, T. & IKONIADOU, E. (2019). Unsound: Undead. Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. GOPINATH, G. (2018). Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora. Duke UP. HAN, B.-C. (2007). Abwesen: zur Kultur und Philosophie des Fernen Osten. Berlin: Merve. HARITAWORN, J., KUNTSMAN, A., & POSOCCO, S. (2015). Queer Necropolitics. London: Routledge. LABELLE, B. (2010). Acoustic Territories. Sound Culture and Everyday Life. London: Continuum. MBEMBE, A. (2019). Necropolitics. Durham, UK: Duke University Press. MACCORMACK, P. (2020). The Ahuman Manifesto. Activism for the End of the Anthropocene. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic. MORTON, T. (2010). “Guest Column: Queer Ecology”. PMLA, 125(2), 273-82. RADOMSKA, M., MEHRABI, T. AND LYKKE, N. (2020). “Queer Death Studies: Death, Dying and Mourning from a Queerfeminist Perspective”. Australian Feminist Studies, 35(104), 81–100. SLOTERDIJK, P. (2011). Spheres. Volume 1, Bubbles: Microspherology. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext.

COLOPHON

MFA Thesis Sandberg Instituut Studio for Immediate Spaces Amsterdam, NL 2022 TEXT & SOUNDPIECES Luis Lecea Romera THESIS SUEPRVISORS Rebekka Kiesewetter Ludwig Engel Ethel Baraona PROOFREADING Claire Matthews SPECIAL THANKS TO Lucía Vives Natasha Linde Krebs Ella Mathys Pam Virada Pieter Verbeke