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<p><div class="centred"><div class="TITLE">Making Mycorrhizal Noise</div>
<div class="SUBTITLE">Hypermedia, Digitality, and Interpreting the Parafictional Universes of the Noisebringers
//Dr. Dougal 'Henry' McPherson
Dr. Maria Sappho
Dr. Brice Catherin//</div>
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<</type>><p><div class="centred"><<timed 1s t8n>>Dearest $name,<</timed>></div>
<<timed 2s t8n>>I am Herbax Kerflanigan, space-pirate, mother, and composer. I have been called here at the behest of Editorial Team to conjure observations pertaining to the performance of the Archive (also known as The “Book”, The Common Autohistoriogenesis, or //Mycorrhizal Noise//). Although the book quite readily performs itself, I too will perform here as a vehicle for thinking, to guide all those present within this space through the sympoietic literary world (Hayot, 2016) of //Mychorrizal Noise// and its author-figure-characters, The Noisebringers. //Mychorrizal Noise// itself can be viewed online, as an e-publication, <<link "by following this link">><<script>>window.open('https://indd.adobe.com/view/785bd43d-99d7-4e83-a426-682d601a6848')<</script>><</link>>. It can also be accessed via the navigation bar, at the foot of each page of this document.
<b>THE GUIDES</b>
To assist in this act of digital conjure, I invoke the aid of four tricksters – four methodological, mythological, mychorrizal guides. The Nun of Kappho, Cooper the Pomeranian, Tente (the Mushroom that the Crocodile Ate), and the goddess Hur, are figures situated in the vibrant spaces between fictive, lived, and possible realities (between words, and between worlds). Each one of these characters offers their perspective on the literary, social, political, performative, and epistemological entanglements of collaborative world-making in the generation and performance of Mycorrhizal Noise's literary world. Tente guides us with an Afrofeminist perspective, exploring the idea of creating a benevolent and fruitful dialogue between Global North and Global Majority. Cooper teaches us about not being perfect, performing as a fluid character who can be anthropomorphic, a fable animal (fabulous?), a mythological creature, and an ectoplasm used for prosopopoeia purposes. The Nun of Kappho speaks to the power and affective qualities of lore in the education of culture and community, imagining and actualising different social histories and futures. Hur offers wisdom concerning boudedness (of language, of art-forms, of knowledge practices), the tendency towards boundary-drawing, and expresses desires towards polymorphic practices of queer-feminist myth-making in contemporary literature.
The epistemic friction - the rubbing together of what is clear, what is known, and what is possible - induced by the coming into being of these Guides offers an opportunity to consider the philosophical and axiological (aesthetic and ethical) affordances of collaboratively generated improvised parafictional literature, and its re-articulation in transmedia digital performance. Transmedia digital performance of collaboratively generated improvised parafictional literature (the Noisebringers' favourite pastime) is a genre of playful thinking and making which this document itself embodies. Here, in this digital space, via the media of the Guides, //Mycorrhizal Noise// performs (very seriously) its structures, its ethical propositions, its ways of community-making, and its approach to art-activism. All of this is to say that the Guides will show the way, and the knowledge(s) and ideas which emerge through the coming together of different media may spark new possibilities, new ways of being part of this world (and others).
<b>WAYS OF READING (AND THINKING)</b>
I speak to you consentingly, and freely, but not without guard; for I know that my modes of conjure and my toying with language work efficaciously for some, yet only passingly (or badly) for others. It may be that you are feeling uncertain - what is it that I am doing? What is it that I am reading? This uncertainty is considered fertile ground for creativity and knowledge-making. As the improviser Nancy Stark-Smith told us: "Where you are when you don’t know where you are is one of the most precious spots offered by improvisation. It is a place from which more directions are possible than anywhere else." (Stark-Smith, 1987)
It is known that word play is most certainly world play. In playing with worlds, it can be discovered that words are “a primary site in which the matter of the world takes shape and is affectively informed […]” (Chen, 2018). What words we use, why, and when, are of the utmost importance. In playing with and toying with words, I hope to show that connections may be drawn, obscured, traced, and rewired, through the workings of poetry, metaphor, and collaborative art-making. The //why// of which words, how, and when to use them, I will leave to the guides to illuminate from their own perspectives. However, as an affirmation of and invitation for a technique (for reading-with, for listening-with, for thinking-with this article), and as an act of homemaking (for this way of being is my home), I invite reflection upon the now ancient adage that:
<div class="quote">it matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. (Haraway, 2016, 12)</div>
<b>THE AUTHORS</b>
In this reality, the Noisebringers can be understood as an ensemble of three artist-academics whose work involves the production of art and artefacts in transmedia, hybrid-digital improvisational collaboration. They work across formats in the generation of work which extends textuality through parafictional lenses - between fiction and reality - most of the time in collaboration with guests and affiliates. Their work frequently seeks to upset real-world systems of logic and colonially propelled logocentricity, to render them unstable, as a form of art-activism. Their practice playfully resists fixity and invites transformation, mutability, and mischief (on the part of creators, participants, viewers, listeners, and characters). This is explored through the creation of artistic material which is unidentifiable as strictly fictional (or not), strictly self-referential (or not), strictly continuity-based (or not). The Noisebringers bring noise - not only as something 'unwanted', but as disruption of static environments and ideas - pushing always into, and out of, flux.
<div class="quote">The form in their works is never unified (or monothematic), there may or may not be a "main thread", and there are always "layers" that appear, disappear and cohabit as the works go [on]. The fact that these layers may sometimes be totally unrelated gives a naturalistic aspect to the work life, and indeed is never "consistent". Consequently, the Noisebringers look to address many topics, forms and practices in one single work, creating frictions and unforeseeable connections. (Weiss et al., 2023)</div>
The richness in the Noisebringers’ parafictional approach is both artistic and epistemological. It aligns closely with Basarab Nicolescu’s formulation of the Transdisciplinary, outlined by McPherson improv-o-logically as an approach to thinking and making “which seeks ‘enhanced awareness’ through the acknowledgement and adoption of multiplicity as a state of being and thinking” (McPherson, 2023, 21). Nicolescu describes the transdisciplinary as involving “the recognition of the existence of different levels of reality governed by different types of logic” (Nicolescu, 2002, Appendix 1). In their creation of art-works which traverse numerous diverse forms of interrelating media, all of which are inter-referential and at times even inter-constitutive, the Noisebringers carefully explore the potential of unfolding, self-generative fictions to inform and instruct understanding of our polymorphous world and its inner worlds. They pursue this as a multi-appendaged response to an era of catastrophically diminished socio-eco-planetary responsibilities. In the face of cataclysmic destruction, the Noisebringers advocate abundance, or to put it another way - "please make more Noise". Any similarity to persons, beings, entities, societies, disciplines, or agencies living or dead within their work, then, is entirely non-coincidental and most certainly some of the point.
<b>IMPROVISED WORLDS</b>
<div class="quote">In as much as they may be fictional, fictional worlds and universes exert agency through their relation to the real, and by that capacity have the power to inform and address structures and issues presenting in our “real” world through commentary and articulation, and through the changing of behaviours. […] Fictional identities and events are mutable improvisational objects which both inform and exert their agency in relation to other improvisational objects through the action of the improvisers. They inter-inform and inter-change each other in processes of creative mutual evolution and continuous narrative reworking. (McPherson and Sappho Donohue, 2021)</div>
Mycorrhizal Noise – the subject of my archival research, and the literature which is performed, which performs, in this digital document – is a book which, like the Noisebringers themselves, takes many forms. Primarily it is a collection of the historical documents of over 3000 years of the ensemble's history. It is an account of the beginning of time, a chronicle of political intrigue, an exercise in collaborative worlding, and a repository of ideas. It holds texts, images, poetry, love letters, and numerous arguments. It was generated - as is all of the Noisebringers work - within an ethic of improvisation, rooted in the ensemble's experience of performance practices which foreground processes of spontaneous, generative activity. In the creation of Mycorrhizal Noise, all material added by the co-authors was retained; nothing was deleted, only ever added to, in an aggregative process of collaborative world-building. This article, I am told, was created in much the same fashion. McPherson describes this aspect of improvisational processes in the following reflection on practice, drawing upon Hayot's expanded definition of 'diegesis' (Hayot, 2016, 44); diegesis can be thought of as all the stuff that belongs to and represents a 'world'.
<div class="quote">In the liveness of improvising, once I do something, it cannot be withdrawn. My activity within [the] frame of live, spontaneous performance, is rendered immediately as a parameter of diegesis. [...] through my or my colleagues’ ‘doing’, activity is asserted functionally in two ways – as something that is both possible in and now part of this improvisation. It is presented as a realm of performativity – an expressive and aesthetic parameter – which is viable, and which also sets up potential (and sometimes precedent) for activity that follows [...] Axiologically, our performing activity constitutes the method by which the diegetic specifics of this improvisational world emerge – how its expressive and aesthetical parameters are generated, how its specific mechanisms of interaction, its rules, its patterns, are apprehended. (McPherson, 2023, 203)</div>
<div class="quote">Storytelling, myth making, lore [...], these are words which have historically asserted social lessons, things best held in tale [...]. The digital realm shows that fiction itself is not a concept of ‘make believe’ but rather a tangible new plane of reality that can be accessed and contributed to via a diverse set of creative practices. (Sappho Donohue, 2022) </div>
Mycorrhizal Noise is also a kind of performed academic response to its own questions, themes, and narratives. It contains ‘real world’ academics’ contributions and critiques. Each section of the book, focusing on a different element of the Noisebringers lore, is introduced by an academic commentary by real doctors from (mostly) real universities. This layering of meta-reference and reflexive fictioning is central to the Noisebringers' approach to, and advocation for, collaborative working and worlding practices.
<div class="quote">We recall, now, some point where it was said that what the Noisebringers really are creating is abundance; an abundance of possibilities in layers of textuality and fictionality, which come together to subvert expectations while also performing a kind of aggregative linking to each other hypertextually, creating contexts for pondering and subsequent doing. (Unknown, 2242)</div>
<b>PERFORMANCE</b>
The world-stories of the Noisebringers and their associates are made by storying-worlds, their literature made literal and their performers literate in their story-performing. Chewing on these words is enjoyable, but it's also a serious endeavour. What words can we use to describe the worlds we want? What worlds do we want to be illustrated with our words? What words actualise worlds of possiblity? And what words challenge the world as it is, proposing new avenues for creativity and expressivity? Posthumanist and feminist theories have told us that words make worlds, that words matter, that matter matters, and that worlds make worlds. The Noisebringers practice seeks to world new worlds through performing, improvising, and collaborating.
The Noisebringers ensemble ventures into making performance-as-literature, generating an archive of historical, geographical, philosophical, folkloric, canonical, contested, and metaphorical documents. They also enter into making literature-as-performance in the articulation of imaginary worlds via multimedia co-fictioning, -imaging, -sounding, -voicing, -commentating. As the mythologies of the Noisebringers grow, the characters they inhabit, the stories and politics they embody, feed into a collectively carried, remembered, and altered narrative which parallels and sits inside our own world. The tendrils of these tales/tails are best expressed in words of cohabitation: multi-modal, cross-species, transcontinental, inter-idiom, in-between. Dr Sappho informs me:
<div class="quote">It should be considered that whether a ‘true’ account or not, the ways in which creative ‘lore’ traverses creative scenes is a product in itself of the community practice for collective mythologies. That is, myth lives in the creative experiment and politics both in the ways in which information is shared and documented, but also due to the unique process of improvised practices which draw up things that have been of reference: things that have been brought into the community sphere. This is the ‘loop’ (Russell, 2020) where there is no divide between the real and non-real. In fact, myth itself is possibly better considered a point of reference, which in its ‘becoming’ is always up for ‘play’. (Sappho Donohue, 2022, 108)</div>
The Noisebringers were/are/will be weaving cultural discourse and politics teleologically and playfully into characters, places, and aesthetics which are semi-mimetic – a mirror of the real and also not, while trying to be neither – all within an ethic of improvisational making where knowledge (and performance) exists in troubled, insubstantial, and interstitial space (Stengers, 2018). The politic of this endeavour is to inhabit, exhibit, and invite abundance in the face of the condemnable scarcity of the Capitalocene and Anthropocene - these eras in which we live which are so conditioned by capital industry and human exceptionalism. It is to enter into ways of making and thinking which are bodily limitless, and – above all – to show care and love for the stories which shape and are shaped by our complex, mysterious, generative world(s).
<div class="centred">[[And so I, and you, oh dearest one, must turn to the guides…->guides]]</div><</timed>></p><<goto "Read Mycorrhizal Noise">>https://indd.adobe.com/view/785bd43d-99d7-4e83-a426-682d601a6848<</link>>
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<<link "Read Mycorrhizal Noise (e-publication)">><<script>>window.open('https://indd.adobe.com/view/785bd43d-99d7-4e83-a426-682d601a6848')<</script>><</link>><<if passage() is "TitlePage">><<else>><div class="centred"><<set $year to random(1340, 2248)>><<if passage() is "Hur">><div class="TITLE">Hur</div><</if>><<if passage() is "Cooper">><div class="TITLE">Cooper</div><</if>><<if passage() is "Nun of Kappho">><div class="TITLE">Nun of Kappho</div><</if>><<if passage() is "Tente">><div class="TITLE">Tente</div><</if>>The year is $year
$name is <<= either("travelling on a dangerous journey", "exploring the wilderness", "cultivating bees", "jaded and confused", "sauntering through G***", "about to discover something unsettling", "baffled at every turn", "generally unsure", "soon to be rich (in knowledge)", "strong in spirit", "overcome by fear", "benevolent and sincere", "jostling for space in the crowd", "diverging from the path", "brilliant and shining like a jewel", "obviously lying", "sitting down for a little while", "turning back again", "looking for that special someone", "lying beneath the willow tree", "crushed by the weight of ennui", "emboldened by strange sounds emanating from the depths of their heart", "entertaining new possibilities", "re-evaluating life choices", "crying softly like a baby seal", "mewing maliciously", "retraining", "jumping over the gateless gate", "joining forces with the enemy", "blissfully unaware of what is to come", "still finding the way forward", "jingling like a court jester", "on the verge of understanding it all", "slipping away from the truth", "learning about what is real and what is not real", "forgetting everything", "exploring shoelace manufacturing", "darting about like a mayfly", "sick to death of all of this", "underwhelmed by most things", "silly (at the bottom of it all)", "turning around three times before bowing to the camera", "splitting hairs", "rescuing animals from the fire", "spitting over the bridge", "abolishing all sense of reason", "advocating violence", "expediant!", "becoming first-class (cash on return)", "scintillating", "absolutely knackered", "pure magic", "steamin'", "bovine in character and temperament", "illicit in 37 countries", "providing a crash course in how not to live", "overbearing", "plodding through life at a reasonable pace", "only just working it out", "catching every breath (in a jar)", "meditating on silence", "blowing bubbles at the bourgeoisie", "becoming part of the problem", "convinced there's more to this", "imitating foresight", "backing slowly away", "brimming with confidence", "lost", "filling up at the petrol station", "tearing each eye away individually", "obsessed with us", "really taking time to ponder on everything here", "possibly a shrew", "caked in mud (but happy about it)", "just getting over training wheels", "filing taxes on Monday", "unravelling like a loose jersey", "taking the freeway", "blessing the rains", "fighting to stay awake", "touched (gently) by something unnamable", "deeply moved", "uncovering profound truths", "nothing but a silhouette of a person", "employing foreshadowing with great dexterity", "indulging in pathos", "an indictment on humanity", "serving hot tea", "swaying in the breeze", "calm but ready", "anticipating something dreadful", "swirling around like a beautiful plastic bag", "off to the shops", "getting impatient", "dreaming restlessly", "travelling to Mt. Mushroom", "learning to learn", "bringing everything to the table", "apologetic without reason", "often too early", "prescient (but not quite enough)", "thoroughly enjoying this", "blacking out intermittently but it's nothing to worry about", "soon to be wed!", "about to turn over a new leaf", "shackled to the realm of the real", "dissolving like fine sugar", "cast into the mists of time", "a broken soul", "overly protective of logic", "about to snap", "listening attentively", "closing up", "just happy to be here", "not here for a long time, but here for a good time") >></div>
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<p><div class="centred">Who will you be guided by?
<div class="bigtext">[[Nun of Kappho]]
[[Tente]]
[[Cooper]]
[[Hur]]
</div>
</div></p>----------
<<if passage() is "TitlePage">><div class="centred"><div class="smalltext">© The Noisebringers 2023</div></div><<else>><div class="centred">Navigation:
[[Return to the Beginning->TitlePage]] | [[Herbax's Introduction->Opening]] | [[Choose a Guide->guides]] | [[References]]</div>
<div class="centred"><div class="smalltext"><<link "Read Mycorrhizal Noise (e-publication)">><<script>>window.open('https://indd.adobe.com/view/785bd43d-99d7-4e83-a426-682d601a6848')<</script>><</link>>
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© The Noisebringers 2023</div></div><</if>><<set $hur=1>><p><iframe width="100%" height="480px" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wQEMpzBKU3M" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe></p><<set $nun=1>><p><iframe width="100%" height="480px" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GvPxz1lBtrk" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe></p><<set $cooper=1>><p><<timed 2s t8n>>My name is Cooper. I’m a Pomeranian dog. In the ‘real world’, I was born in December 2013 in Romania but moved to Cyprus as a puppy. I lived in the suburb of Nicosia until my death in April 2022 from a neurological disease. I was a male, but in my stories, I am both male and female. I appear in a short film by the Noisebringers, the self-explanatory //Synchronised dog napping competition// (Noisebringers, 2023) in which I performed (badly) with the late Perthro Şilla, a she-dog who had been an affiliate of the Noisebringers and assistant of Tente for a very long time. But mostly I was, and still am, a dog of words. I have written extensively on dogs’ conditions, wrapping sometimes disturbing biological and ethical information in crude humour. I have raised awareness on the suffering of some of your favourite pets, caused by the selective breeding conducted by you, the humans, and your greed. I have even co-written a text with ‘real world’ human doctor Jocelyn Plassais (Catherin, 2022) who is researching dog genetics at the university of Rennes (France). I am also interested in dog psychology and dog unconscious. In //Home after death// (Catherin, 2023), the first text I wrote after my actual death, I tried to describe to humans how dogs such as myself would fantasise the dog afterlife. (As to how it actually is, this remains confidential for obvious reasons.)
But I am not a consistent dog. Some days I wake up more or less anthropomorphic. In some episodes of my adventures in //Mycorrhizal Noise//, I serve as a fable dog, an animal representation of human archetypes. I have been an artist talking about my struggles, closely resembling one of the Noisebringers’. I have been Cooper Hardend, a loud barker but powerless nemesis of the Noisebringers, also shaped, most probably, after an existing human. I have been a more mythological creature at times, for example in Ochiai-juku (Japan) in 1844, where I fought alongside the Noisebringers and Tente. This was of course an occasion to twist Sun Tzu’s Art of war (2007) from a dog’s point of view, but also to offer another version of this famous battle mentioned separately by William and Tente in other texts of //Mycorrhizal Noise//. The multiple approach of the same event, made popular by Akira Kurosawa with his Rashomon (1950), is very important in the work of the Noisebringers. They do not believe in single authorship nor in authoritative versions. Other examples of their multiple approach include the texts Bristophe’s //right of reply//, that confront the views of an unknown author to Bristophe’s; and the series //Dai says//, in which Dai retells the same story a number of times over centuries, releasing sometimes contradictory information from one version to the next. The Noisebringers cherish this multiplicity of views and contradictions.
I fell off my train of thought and digressed. That is because as a member of a small breed of dogs, I have serious genetic issues that include the inability to be consistent. And indeed, I had started listing my roles in the Noisebringers multiverse, and digressed before I was done. The last one I shall mention is being an ectoplasm used for prosopopoeia purposes. Let me explain. In //Traditional// [Nikefolosi & Catherin, in print], Tente’s upcoming adventure, beloved character Mukukawanseko will die tragically. Towards the end of the book, her spirit will reappear before the heroes, but not in her own body, which she thinks would be too scary for them to see. Instead, she will use my Pomeranian body, that is to say my reassuring and fluffy presence, to pronounce her last words before her spirit has to leave for good. As a matter of fact, I am an ectoplasm used for prosopopoeia purposes right now. I am a dead dog writing from the grave about everything I represent and impersonate in the Noisebringersverse. I would claim I am prosopopoeia made flesh, but that would be technically wrong since I am words on a screen (or paper if this has been printed), and not flesh. But even this confusion is part of me. Unverified claims, mistakes, misuse of language: as much of a good boy as I try to be, I am not. I cannot, and I do not want to be perfect.
I’m not sure what my point is… As a Pomeranian, my ideas are not always so clear… That is due to a genetic condition, following centuries of breeding by selfish humans. It jeopardises both my physical and mental health. Did I mention that already? Anyway, maybe I am the modest veil of the author, that allows him to go to darker places, approach more brutal topics, such as death, depression, failure, and sadness. Oh! I remember! I wanted to elaborate on the idea of not being perfect. Not being perfect involves claiming stuff that would need more research. Animals in the Noisebringersverse do that sometimes. The chickens in //Zombie in Zambia// (in //Mycorrhizal Noise//) combine outrageous claims, moments of pure wisdom, and occasional kōans. As fable animals, we feel entitled to throw ideas and hypotheses and let the readers deal with those by themselves. Let me give you an example. In an article for the International Center for Globilization and Development, Andrés Solimano and Paula Solimano (2019) explain that the art sector at large in our capitalist society is controlled more and more by wealthy private collectors and sponsors. This, according to them, results in an elite and shrinking class of star artists who get all the support and attention, therefore imposing standards and expectations, while the segment of medium and small size institutions ‘that generate most of the employment in the art sector is shrinking as it faces difficulties to compete with the resources of the upper-segment.’ These same institutions, large, medium and small of the global north, observes George Lewis (2020), remain close to the artists of colour and other minorities even when they do fit the criteria of the institutions. And lastly, Chinua Achebe (1988:68) criticises the subjectivity of the criteria themselves, giving the examples of brilliant works such as Tutuola’s novels that are not considered proper by institutions. Solimano and Solimano speak mostly about visual arts; Lewis criticises music institutions and universities; Achebe speaks of universities both in the global north and in Africa. Yet, combining these three analyses, we understand the art world in all its practices and possible outlets faces at least three predicaments: financial control of art practices, preconceived ideas of who may or may not join the art community independently of the set criteria, and the unjustifiable institutional hegemony on said criteria. These are three possible ways of controlling, imposing, maintaining and justifying the scarcity of art. Of all the art that is made, of all the ideas that are thought, of all the stories that are told, only a fraction reaches any kind of audience. I, Cooper, bark that the abundance of the Noisebringers is a reaction to this scarcity. Any physical space such as a stage or a gallery, any digital space such as a website or a digital album, any piece of paper or pixel on a screen is to be shared. That is the only way to finally hear those we do not hear. The Noisebringers are not only sharing spaces: they are actively looking for hidden voices, encouraging them to share their stories and their ideas, sometimes accompanying them. Last year, Nikefolosi sent this message to one of the Noisebringers:
<div class="quote2">Who will have the right mix of non-intrusive curiosity, humour, patience and interest for the fantastical, myth-making space where I feel comfortable speaking and existing as one of [my] selves? (Nikefolosi, 2021) </div>
Before she had met the Noisebringers, her poetry, her wisdom, her proverbs, her stories, were either sleeping in old notebooks, or even just waiting in a corner of her brain to be picked up. Same goes for me. Who really listens to sorceresses, dogs, and mushrooms? Who really listens to, and shares our noise?<</timed>></p><<set $tente=1>><p><iframe width="100%" height="480px" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oth3jCg2PEI" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>Achebe, C. (1988). //Hopes and Impediments// [book]. Doubleday.
Banda-Aaku, E. (2011). //Patchwork// [book]. Penguin Global.
Barad, K. (2003). //Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter//. Signs, 28(3), 801–831.
Barad, K. (2007). //Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning//. [book] Duke University Press.
Belcher. S. P. (2005). //African myths of origin// [book]. Penguin Classics.
Cage, J. (1961). //Silence// : lectures and writings. In TA - TT - ([First edition]). Wesleyan University Press.
Catherin, B. (2022). //Tente IV, my hymen is free// [film]. https://youtu.be/yWqaqKOZixU.
Catherin, B. (2022). //Untitled Cooper story// [text] The Mass. https://indd.adobe.com/view/5d66a28f-4568-4b00-ac9d-915f101a3913
Catherin, B. (2023). //Home after death// [text] in The Mass. https://www.the-mass.com/
Catherin, B. (2023). //Chilli and bonbon in Chililabombwe// [audio albums]. https://bricecatherin.bandcamp.com/
Chen, M. Y. (2018). //Animacies//. In R. Braidotti & M. Hlavajova (Eds.), Posthuman glossary (pp. 32–34). [book chapter] Bloomsbury Academic.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2008). //Creativity, fulfilment, and flow//. TED: Ideas Worth Spreading.
DeNora, T. (2019). ‘Forever piping songs forever new’: The musical teenager and musical inner teenager across the life course. In K. McFerran, P. Derrington, & S. Saarikallio (Eds.), //Handbook of Music, Adolescents, and Wellbeing// (p. 0). Oxford University Press.
Devereux, G. (1967). //From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences// [book]. De Gruyter.
Haraway, D. J. (2016). //Staying with the Trouble//. [book] Duke University Press.
Hayot, E. (2016). //On literary worlds//. [book]
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<p>Hello, $name.
The article you are about to read (and watch, and listen to) is a performative exploration of <<link "Mycorrhizal Noise">><<script>>window.open('https://indd.adobe.com/view/785bd43d-99d7-4e83-a426-682d601a6848')<</script>><</link>> - a work of collaboratively written, improvised parafiction created by a trio of artist-academics called The Noisebringers: Dr Brice Catherin ( https://www.bricecatherin.org ), Dr Maria Sappho ( https://www.mariasappho.com ), and Dr Henry McPherson ( https://www.henrymcpherson.org.uk ).
This article is a //performance// of Mycorrhizal Noise. It is digital document which both adopts (performs) and explores (articulates) key thematic and stylistic features of the book through play with text, audio, and video. It is an experiment in what it might mean, and what it might look like, to create a journal article which itself performs a piece of literature, which is both discursive and affective in its style and content.
The article has been written using a combination of academic and narrative text, and is voiced by characters from the Noisebringers' parafictional universe. In the introduction, Herbax Kerflanigan - an archivist from the far future - will guide you poetically through opening of the article and introduce four further characters, each of whom offers their philosophical and creative perspective on themes from the book.
Both the book and the article draw broadly on posthumanist, cyber- and eco-feminist philosophies in their approach to fiction and storytelling as a means to understand the world (our shared world), and to create worlds. The article is deliberately resistant to systematised logics and direct explication, and instead is in favour of using "registers of sense" which are more "affective" than they are "explanatory" (Roche and Longley, 2018). Our approach might be considered a playful reworking of Barad's provocation "How did language become more trustworthy than matter?" (Barad, 2003). We might ask instead: "how did one way of being become more trustworthy than many? How did the logical-textual-explanatory become more trustworthy than the sensuous, the corporeal, the affective, the artistic, the felt?"
The authors would like to point to the works of authors such as Barad above, Donna Haraway, Isabel Stengers, David Abram, Anna Tsing, and Douglas Hofstadter, which infuse this article and shape its scholarly and creative approach. We understand knowledge, bodies, environments, and artistic media as being tangled up in rich, messy, pluralistic, emergent, sensuous inter and "intra-actions" (Barad, 2007). We embrace the in-between spaces, the not-knowing, and the compulsion to exist as 'More Than One Thing' (McPherson, 2023). We follow Haraway's assertion that "it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with […] what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.” (Haraway, 2016, p. 12), and so in storying Mycorrhizal Noise, we have asked oursleves: what stories could we use to tell our truths? What worlds do we want, and what worlds do we have? How can our words reflect, and make, these worlds?
As a point of orientation, you are invited to consider the following themes of Mycorrizhal Noise, which form the stylistic and philosophical basis of the article:
• __Improvisation__ as a central creative methodology (this article, like Mycorrhizal Noise, has been written collaboratively and additively, with nothing subtracted once it has been 'performed'). Improvising is spontaneous, generative, responsive, reflexive creativity.
• __Playfulness__, in juxtaposing different registers of language and media, we hope to find new connections between ideas, disciplines, and concepts.
• __Parafiction__, in blurring the boundary between real and fictive worlds, we are seeking a way of articulating complex identities, and proposing new ways of thinking, being, and doing
• __Abundance__, as a political and artistic response to the overwhelming scarcity of the Capitalocene and Anthropocene; terms used to describe our current era, which place emphasis (respecitvely) on capitalist ideologies and human exceptionalism as root-causes of climate instability and global inequalities.
• __Mycorrhiza__, being a non-linear network of fungal threads, by which fungal organisms can connect and link other organisms (such as trees), along which knowledge and nutrients may be transferred.
<div class="centred">[[Continue->Opening]]</div></p>