Post-Digital Sonic Media Art: Composing Systems of Resistance through Sound
Post-Digital Sonic Media Art: Composing Systems of Resistance through Sound
My practice operates at the intersection of sound, system, and theory, transmuting noise into knowledge and framing listening as an act of resistance. I repurpose obsolete infrastructures, geological and biological data, informational flows, and algorithmic processes to construct immersive sonic architectures that interrogate perception, embodiment, and control.
This is not traditional sound art; it is a post-digital media ecology, a field of aesthetic events generated through noise, glitch, systemic collapse, and distributed agency, shaped by the continuum of natural and artificial forces. I collaborate with machines, sensors, and environments to build speculative systems that think through vibration, from micro-sonic grains to maximum amplitude, probing perceptual thresholds and liminal zones where sound becomes a critical interface between human and non-human, culture and infrastructure.
From hacked natural and technological artefacts to orbital satellites and electromagnetic fields, my work sonifies the technological unconscious. It exposes hidden operations of contemporary systems while reconfiguring the politics of space, care, and attention. Each piece functions as an epistemic instrument, inviting engagement with the infrasensible and listening beyond conventional representation.
Sound is inseparable from the material afterlives of technology, planetary radiation, and the quantum imaginary: the detritus of infrastructures, the hum of abandoned machines, the residues of industrial processes, and vibrational networks that sustain sonic events, objects, and places. These agents remind us that obsolescence persists, revealing fragile ecologies, material survival, and adaptive strategies across expanded notions of place. By transforming residues and radiation into critical material, my work listens through the debris of late capitalism and reactivates it as possibility.
Central to this research is an engagement with subcultural art and music communities that construct techno-ethnographic narratives and counter-infrastructures. These practices mobilize sound and media art as radical imagination and refusal, challenging algorithmic dominance and rerouting its logics toward solidarity, speculation, and survival. Listening and artefact becomes not only resistance but a practice of inquiring: attentive to the fragile entanglements of human, machinic, and environmental systems.
My work embraces algorithmic uncertainty, chaos, glitch, and machinic agency not as instruments of control but as collaborators in stochastic composition. Errors and instabilities act as co-authors, producing post-human ecologies of sound where authorship is distributed and listening becomes insurgent.
Here, post-techno aesthetics emerges as a methodology, distinct from post-digital aesthetics, which primarily critiques media obsolescence and glitch. Post-techno reframes rhythm, repetition, and automation as instruments of systemic critique. It foregrounds stochastic processes, machinic collaboration, and non-linear composition as methods for resisting control and generating speculative futures. Post-techno is not an extension of techno, it is its rupture, transforming its logic into a tool for cultural and political invention.
My practice traverses multiple temporalities and scales: from the micro-sonic grain of particles to the orbital dance of satellites, from the fragility of biometric pulses to planetary rhythms and cosmic vibrations. These layers fold into one another, creating resonances where collapse becomes generative, instability becomes productive, and listening reveals interconnected realities across analog and digital domains.
Informed by agential realism, post-human epistemologies, biopolitics, and vibrational ontology, I treat sound as a site of intra-action where matter and meaning co-emerge through vibrational entanglement. My compositions, installations, and performances are not representations but autopoietic systems, adaptive, distributed, and ecological, reprogramming listening, post-human interaction, and technological speculation.
This manifesto is not a boundary but an opening: a call to collaborators, curators, and researchers to engage sound as a critical technology for sensing, resisting, and reimagining the infrastructures of life.
I compose systems, not sounds.
I seek resonance, not harmony.
I destabilize reality, I do not document it.
In noise, the signal of the real is revealed.
In resonance, futures otherwise are glimpsed.
Through sound, worlds are inhabited, resisted, and regenerated.
Hugo Paquete, 2025