Making Mycorrhizal Noise:Hypermedia, Digitality, and Interpreting the Parafictional Universes of the Noisebringers

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.<br/><br/>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.<br/><br/>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?"<br/><br/>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?<br/><br/>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:<br/><br/>• 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.<br/>• Playfulness, in juxtaposing different registers of language and media, we hope to find new connections between ideas, disciplines, and concepts.<br/>• 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<br/>• 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.<br/>• 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.