Abstract

This paper explores how field recording practices can be impacted by concepts from the fields of energy production/efficiency (Lovins,1976) and energy ethics (Marder, 2017). 

We’ve seen greater focus on the agency of field recordists at work; from noisy non-presence (Wright, 2017), to extractivist listening (Robinson, 2020), yet attempts to capture worlds without anthropogenic noise persist (Winderen, 2019). Simultaneously, the embodied energies of recording tools have come under scrutiny (Polli, 2017, Wright 2022); where ethics of care are held close. 

But what of the field itself? From an energy perspective, we need actualisation rather than potential for fieldwork, and thus require the field to expend energy for our purposes. In this paper, I’ll look, via Michael Marder’s philosophical work, at how we have come to think of energy as a resource. How post-WWII optimism led to the energy crisis of the 1970s, and how mitigating strategies contributed to the present energy situation.

With reference to my own fieldwork: with more-than-human worlds in experimental nuclear fusion, and isostatic uplift in the Baltic, I consider the energy dynamics of human expectation and demand on the field itself and show, despite the best intentions, how we often still operate within 20C energy strategies and paradigms. 

I conclude by looking at Marder’s threefold alternative energy paradigm that reworks Aristotle’s energeia: energy as actualisation, not as potential, and how it might be applied to field recording practices in order to improve the balance going forward.




Being-at-work in the field: Rethinking field recording through energy ethics and actualisation

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