AUTOMATED NEMOCENTRIC LISTENING
The concept of nemocentric listening has been conceived while writing my second book, “Psofotopias. Noise: Sounding Out the Unheard” (Auditorium, expected at the end of summer 2025), and is being further researched within my doctoral investigation at ASCA, University of Amsterdam.
In the diagrammatic illustration of the concept presented at the 2025 AUSsts conference in Melbourne, the exploration departs from a diagram describing the movements of perception and cognition between the heard and the unheard, with the variable intervention of noise as a necessary multivalue (it is the background, it is the epistemological constraint, it is the disruption, etc).
This diagram, produced during a Noise Research Union workshop at Unsound Festival (Krakow, Poland, 2024), is the basis for the exploration of the concept of Automated Nemocentric Listening unfolding in the other diagrams and illustrations that are part of this installation.
The Unheard is the noise that remains undigested, uncategorized, and in the background; it can also be the noise that constrains a way of sensing and understanding, of perceiving; it can encompass underrepresented and marginalized portions of society; it can also represent all those conditions and constraints that determine the way we listen…
Automated Nemocentric Listening describes the kind of listening that is prompted and promoted by reticular infrastructures of music recommendation systems.
The term nemocentric points to the nature of machinic listening systems, which are able to access large databases and retrieve information in a synchronic fashion; because of this synchronicity they are everywhere and nowhere at the same time, they have no center. This nemocentrism (Grush, 2000; Metzinger, 2004), with its supposed neutrality (a transparency which is a “special kind of darkness;” Metzinger 2003), is opposed to the embodied, situated, and diachronic listening that unfolds in our everyday lives in the “meatsack world.” This neutrality, or: the lack of frame, produces what I term nemodimensionality, a play on the one-dimensionality theorized by Herbert Marcuse (1964). Nemodimensionality is the result of the continuous, often inescapable, interaction between nemocentric systems and situated and embodied perceptual and cognitive systems (supposedly, humans); this interaction is illustrated in the diagrams as the meatgrinder, or: the synthesizer, or: the fabricator, or: the crapulator. The crapulator operates in the con-fused space of automated non-consensual hallucination (beyond the cyberspace formulated as a “consensual hallucination” by William Gibson 1984) where the distinction between cyber- or digital space and physical, tangible space becomes meaningless.
The different diagrams in the installation describe different cycles and layers of disruption and reconfiguration that are inherent to technical systems, cultural products, modes of temporal perception, habits of interaction within the streaming platforms’ apparatuses. The unheard, the set of constraints and conditions determining the listening, are highlighted at the bottom of each diagrammatic layer; their meaning can be decoded in the symbol explanation at the bottom of this page.
Here ⬇️ you can listen to the track that accompanies the installation at AUSsts 2025:
The track is composed using custom-made waveforms, fragments of top-played tracks on TikTok, royalty-free samples of analog radio technologies, and a recording from a rehearsal with Felicia Ljusteräng (April 2024).
The diagrams and illustrations printed on textiles for the installation can be viewed below:
