Listening to a World Coming to Terms with Itself

Oprescu Simina

What if failure is not collapse but recalibration? This research reconsiders seismic activity as a speculative site of vibratory instability, adjustment, and relational tension, rather than disaster. Drawing on seismic data from the most significant Romanian earthquakes between 1977 and 2023, the project translates magnitudes into an immersive sound installation that renders the inaudible perceptible through algorithmic processing and low-frequency vibration. The resulting sonic environment invites discomfort and disorientation as productive states, reframing failure as a mode through which we may interpret stability itself differently. The work draws from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Jung’s archetypal theory, Bohm’s field theory, Deleuze’s pataphysics, Priest’s aesthetics of failure, and Eshun’s sonic fiction to position seismic resonance as a speculative and unstable threshold between sensing and knowing. Rather than presuming to represent the Earth’s voice, the installation critically engages with the ethical implications of translating geophysical data into sound, acknowledging the gaps, distortions, and interpretive acts involved. Instead of breakdown, failure becomes a condition of listening – one that resists mastery and opens a dialogue between human and more-than-human temporalities through sonic practice.

6. Conclusion: Listening to Planetary Failure as Vibratory Renewal

This conclusion returns us to the central premise: that seismic resonance is not the sound of planetary trauma but a speculative archive of transformation inside a vibratory cosmology in which failure becomes a generative process.

Failure in the seismic sense, the sudden rupture of rocks and release of stress, is typically framed as a catastrophe. Yet through this vibratory lens, disruption appears as a turning point in an ongoing reconfiguration towards an undefined nonlinearity. The Earth listens and responds to its own tensions; its quakes are not stutters in stability, but recalibrations of an ancient, dynamic organism, and what appears to break may be tuning.

This reframing of failure opens for both poetic and practical implications. Artistic processes, such as this very text and its companion compositions, participate in this reframing: by transforming seismic data into immersive sonic fields, they make audible what lies beneath perception, giving form to the Earth’s hidden adjustments. In this speculative poetics, the seismic signal becomes an invitation to attune.

Feelings of a trembling gut on a trembling crust. This body-based resonance reveals the ethical dimension of listening. I have become a student of seismic murmurings: feeling my way into planetary rhythms, understanding failure as communication. This attentive posture invites humility, and it is not the Earth that fails, but my assumptions about stability, scale, and control.

Finally, to listen to failure as renewal is to listen for new temporalities, slow geologies, spectral memories, recursive shifts, archetypal resonance. It is to build knowledge from tremors, to plan not against disaster but alongside its rhythms, whether speaking of acoustic ecology, sonic fiction, or geophysical research, this practice acknowledges that to listen well is to accept uncertainty as structure. In such vibratory ontology, failure is the Earth’s grammar of change and a medium of composition, but also of perception, relation, and epistemic shift. It invites to new modes of sensing, knowing, and co-existing, where listening becomes a practice of staying with instability, and composition an ongoing negotiation with what exceeds control.

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Oprescu Simina - Listening to a World Coming to Terms with Itself - 2025