Creating cyborg sounds

What does it mean to be a cyborg? According to the scholar Donna Haraway, “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction” [1]. This idea of hybrids and creatures of social reality was the inspiration for this performance lecture. I wanted to explore Haraway’s ideas through sound, to dissolve the boundaries between the human, the other-than-human, and technology, and explore cyborg and hybrid sound with plants, bodies, heartbeats, light, and sound. To create a liminal space for audiences to attune to unheard sounds and relationships.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IvgEq9dkr0

Performance lecture at U1, University of Oslo, 12.02.2026. Video & audio: drusnoise

As Bull & Cobussen write, “…through recording, processing, and listening to sounds or our sonic environments, new knowledge can be gained, new experiences are possible, unfamiliar worlds can be discovered – knowledge, experiences, and worlds that in themselves are not necessarily audible” [2]. So, what might we discover about cyborgs and relationships with the more-than-human through sound? One inspiration comes from Sanne Groth in a piece where they are reformulating Haraway’s writing about vision. We can ask “How to listen? where to listen from? what limits to listening? what to listen for? whom to listen with? who gets to have multiple voices? who gets muted? who listens with no perspective? who interprets the auditory field?” [3]

The first iteration of this performance lecture was at Studio Baustelle in Berlin, part of the CTM Vorspiel. The I had the chance for another round in Oslo at the U1 student pub on the University of Oslo campus. With a full house, we played with plants, light, radio, electromagnetic fields, heartbeats, contact mics, and transducers. Creating cyborg instruments and building up beats and rhythms clocked by human heartbeat [4], percussion from the EMF fields around power supplies, notes and melodies played by plants, ethereal poetic explanations of the fields around us [5], and tactile feedback loops through the table [6]. And throughout deepening and attuning our relationship with the more than human. Experiencing the sound bodily through the speakers. Hearing the silenced voices around us.

Setup for performance-lecture. Photo: drusnoise

References

[1] Haraway, D. (1991). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge), pp.149-181.

[2] Bull, M., & Cobussen, M. (Eds). (2021). The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies. Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 4-5

[3] Groth, S. K. (2022). Deep situated listening among hearing heads and affective bodies. In L. O Keeffe & I. Nogueira, The Body in Sound, Music and Performance (1st edn, pp. 51–64). Focal Press. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003008217-7

Inspirations

[4] Heartbeats, anxiety, and clocking - Jeannette Petrik - interview on sustain.fm @jeannettepetrik

[5] Poetic explanations – text by drusnoise; performed by Erbse @ochjoa

[6] Tactile feedback – Andreas Kühne @andreaskuhne_