Patrick Farmer
+447769732635
dr.patrickfarmer@protonmail.com
This lecture was originally going to be about sonocytology as practise of recording vibrations of microscopic cell walls and amplifying them, bringing them into human hearing’s range. Sonocytology is present throughout, primarily as an absence, where presence is felt more in cause and reaction than any direct or explicit integration.
My experiences with sonocytology led me back to Anne Carson and an ongoing question, why bother doing science if they’re not erotic? This question (who is also a statement, rhetorical, open, playful, implicate, vital) is intimately linked to some difficulties (if I can call them that, as I’ve found them very productive nevertheless) with sonocytology, because in trying to practise such erotic as practise of creative drift, I have attempted to glean ways of speaking with and integrating holograms, holistic vocabularies, waters, and memories.
When we love who we love, we’re so often expected to then sort them out into neat and distinct piles. This is akin to being in love with beings we’re not allowed to be simultaneously in love with. Donna Haraway speaks of erotic arousal she experienced when researching biochemistry in mitochondrial membranes, of trying to describe such beings to a consciousness raising group and being met with incredulity, leading Haraway to understand desire in terms of mitochondrial membrane‘s extraordinary liveliness. Speculative philosophy, science fiction, fieldless field and noise of drift are some ways of trying to maintain such arousal whilst corresponding between patterns and anti-patterns, nodes and anti-nodes, + and –