Mark Peter Wright
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Contact Zone #1
Mark Peter Wright is an artist and researcher working at the intersection of sound arts, critical theory and education. His practice explores the relationship between humans, animals, environments and their associated technologies of capture: critically and playfully generating debate through installation, performance and writing. His collaborative practice with Helena Hunter is called Matterlurgy and works across art, science and technology. With Salomé Voegelin he co-convenes Points of Listening, a series of public activities exploring collective listening and soundmaking. |
Contact Zone #1 is an assemblage of sounds gathered from various wildlife and animal entertainment television outtakes. The work is a field recording of media that sounds the rights of nature within situations of asymmetrical power. Both humorous and uneasy, Contact Zone #1 draws attention to the violence of anthropocentrism whilst offering an affirmative glimpse into the sound of nonhuman resistance. The work is part of an ongoing series examining the negotiation of agency within human, animal and technological encounters, and draws context from Mary Louise Pratt’s coining of the term (Contact Zone) as a space of ‘copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radical asymmetrical relations of power’ (Pratt, 1992, p.7).