Conclusion
The Sine-Saloum Delta is characterized by the incessant confluence of materialities beyond fixed divisions of dry and wet. Aissatou and other gleaners know how to attune to these materialities’ movements, and haptics and sound assist them. An audio-visual practice, I demonstrated, can follow gleaners’ versatility-in-movement “hands-on” in an experimental way that allows for “failure.” The resulting audio recordings can be “normal” and “clean”, and they can be “indeterminate”, “disproportionate” or “imperfect.” They defy the clear categorization that we might have used to from a terrestrial audio-visual practice. Yet, they are literally “in touch” with the deltaic materiality and the bodies that move therein (see MacDougall 2006) and convey a distinct haptics that is reminiscent of the haptics of gleaning.
Haptic sound, as presented in this article, has excessive qualities and can be alluring and gripping yet strange and disorienting. It is transgressive, can get under our skin, and move us in unexpected ways. It might let us experience a sense of alterity as well as an approximation within ourselves, and at the same time a sense of both otherness and closeness towards the nonhuman. Although it remains to a certain degree unfathomable, it ruptures common notions of aesthetics and leaves us and our relations with others changed. Through renegotiating the boundaries between self and world, inside and out, haptic sound – with its immediacy and urgency – allows us to steer away from questions of sound’s signification: it fosters an understanding of our embodied engagement with the acoustic world (Marks 2000: 183; Lovatt 2013: 66) and of experiential knowledge as knowledge-in-the-making, constituted not as the outcome of but as experience (Unger 2017: 14; Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009: 129). Haptic sound thereby also makes tangible our entanglement in multispecies relations, echoing touch as a gesture of response-ability that always inherits difference and limits (see e.g. Haraway 2008; Manning 2007; Barad 2012; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017; Tammi and Hohti 2020). It highlights how the excessive, as the never fully graspable, that nevertheless mediates our being and experience, entails a decentering of the human and of anthropocentric scopes of reference (Birks 2021: 2, 103, drawing on Georges Bataille).
Technology and its affordances and limitations mediate haptic sound. An action camera and its microphones, as used in the case presented here, interact in direct contact with the human and more-than-human bodies and the materialities of the world, entwining with their movements (Bégin 2016), at times turbulently transducing them into audio-visual data. The resulting recordings might evoke a touching sensuality and often disorienting aesthetics while also making tangible their own constructedness (see Unger 2017). The hapticity of sound could also be explored further with the help of directional or contact microphones, represented through Ambisonics surround sound formats and used in virtual or augmented reality settings. Moreover, haptic sound, often understudied in comparison to filmic visuality (Lovatt 2013), might also be mobilized as an integral part of haptic cinema, which employs visual texture, low resolution, blur, soft focus, close-up or details, and so forth to break with cinema’s visual-centrism and visual mastery and to foster whole-body experience (Marks 2000, 2002, 2014). Haptic sound can thus be further explored through various technologies and in conjunction with existing audio-visual practices and theoretical premises. Moreover, in mobilizing both experience and reflection and disrupting anthropocentrism, it can guide us to reshape such existing audio-visual practices and theoretical premises with an ear to an embodied multispecies conviviality.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Aissatou and the other gleaners I was able to accompany during my times in the Sine-Saloum Delta. I also thank the DELTA team, the participants of the EASA lab “Rubbish, noise, experimentations: new afterlives of field recordings”, the reviewers, the journal editors, and the special issue editors.