Hyperrhiz 30

Sounding the Bodies of Ambient Nationalism

Jered Mabaquiao
University of Texas at Arlington

John Rose
University of Texas at Arlington

Citation: Mabaquiao, Jered and John Rose. “Sounding the Bodies of Ambient Nationalism.” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, no. 30, 2026. doi:10.20415/hyp/030.b01

Abstract: This article examines the effects and processes of an experimental ambient sound art project that theorizes what I term ambient nationalism: the diffuse, sonic, and infrastructural conditions through which national ideology, capital, and authority become perceptible without requiring explicit declaration. Taking this project as a point of departure, alongside the circulation of an AI-generated “voice” of political figure Charlie Kirk within a U.S. Christian nationalist context, this essay situates contemporary media technologies as accelerants of sonic governance, wherein artificial sounds operate as a relational force that organizes bodies, affects, and collective orientation. Drawing on sound studies, rhetorical theory, and media philosophy, particularly the work of Thomas Rickert, Brandon LaBelle, and Robin James, this project foregrounds listening as a methodological and political practice. Through close attention to ambience, repetition, misrecognition, and AI transcription failure, this essay demonstrates how sonic environments mediate the relationship between individual subjectivity and nationhood, especially under conditions of algorithmic surveillance and techno-nationalism. The accompanying sound work employs sampled directives, and iterative phrasing to produce an immersive auditory field that mirrors the recursive logics of capital and institutional power. Rather than persuading through argument, ambient nationalism invites attunement: a mode of listening that reveals how ideology operates at the level of atmosphere, background, and politicized affect. The article concludes by proposing ambient listening as a resistant strategy—one that enables listeners to perceive disruption and reconfigure the sonic conditions through which nationalism and political unbelonging are continuously reproduced.

Keywords: sound studies, ambient media, algorithmic governance, nationalism, neoliberalism.

Introduction

Following the official announcement of the death of Turning Point USA Co-Founder, Charlie Kirk, on September 10th, 2025, the atmosphere across university and college campuses in Dallas, Texas was eerie and unsettling. It was, as they say, a turning point in American politics and across social democracy. Roughly 4 days in the aftermath of this event, Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas had posted online an “AI spirit” of Kirk, who voiced,

First, I want you to know that I am fine, not because my body is fine, but because my soul is secure in Christ. Death is not the end. It’s a promotion. Don’t waste one second mourning me, I knew the risks of standing up in this cultural moment, and I’d do it all over again. Remember this, America is worth it. Free speech is worth it. Fighting for the unborn, for families, for sanity in a culture gone mad, it is all worth it. So, dry your tears, pick up your cross and get back in the fight. Do it with joy, do it with strength and never ever let evil think it won.

After witnessing this clip, I wondered what was the prompt that a person put into this moment, attempting to capture the essence of Kirk’s ideologies. I briefly wondered why somebody felt compelled to use these digital tools for this specific political moment. Part of the point in bringing up Prestonwood Church and Kirk here is an attempt to understand the speed and ends to which much politicalization reaches its intended audience, even if they don’t know precisely what is being experienced – this sort of digitally materialized acceleration process pushed up against the political contours of time. What this event at Prestonwood Church demonstrates is the throughline for what this project is asking for – an interaction between corporeality, sonic, and precisely an ambience of politics. This precision to move a crowd (rather a congregation) with the sound of a voice is what Brandon Labelle calls “auditory relations.” The work of sound, as Labelle puts it, “is intrinsically and unignorably relational: it emanates, propagates, communicates, vibrates, and agitates; it leaves a body and enters others…” (IX). While obviously sound is different from voice, this project attempts to make the distinction now, in the age of AI, between what “sounds as sound “and what voice is. Voice, in Kirk’s case, may very well be sound, or in a broader sense, noise that pins down the contextual politics of Christian nationalism.

To be clear, by nationalism, I mean the social and governing conditions that uphold an allegiance to a country, no matter the cost. To only focus here on the ambience of nationalism then means uncovering not only the social conditions, but the sonic governance and relationality between listener, speaker, and audience. Here, auditory relationality undergirds the listening experience of this ambient sound art piece. But perhaps what this essay further seeks to do is not only to supplement the listening experience but to provide readers a sense of ambience in the form of persuasion. Through a combination of AI, corporeality, mimicry, and ambience, the body and spirit of capital encroach on citizen congregations as if being projected onto a screen in the middle of a sanctuary. What follows in this essay is an attempt to understand the “con” in contexts by asking for an attunement to bodily politics – not just the body and not just the politic. I seek to present a possibility of moving beyond a sonic apparatus of political oppression, arguing that listening beyond what is heard can become a useful resistant strategy that ultimately (re)sounds the world. 

This project was originally conceived through a graduate student class with the help of another student colleague. Much of the original body of work, I scrapped. As time went on, the essence of the original project title didn’t sound correct (or at least, didn’t sound like it was capturing what I wanted to put forth). In much of the revision stage, and in playing around with and puzzling with the concepts here, I fell upon this key term, “Ambient Nationalism,” feeling like it captured the aim of this project. As one does, I had to double-check the origin of the phrase to ensure a kind of citational ethics, a component in this essay as a whole. (How do we locate the origin of an idea? What happens when the contexts change?) The Google search results revealed a 2013 blog post, from the International Communist Current (Workers of the World, Unite!) with ambient nationalism attached to the title, “The History of Sport Under Capitalism (Part 1) - Sport in the Ascendant Phase of Capitalism (1750-1914). The term is used three times, none of which really unpack how nationalism in the European sports arena had become ambient. While this post is interesting in terms of the Capitalist evolutionary history of the Olympic Games in Europe, I found myself needing more precision and context for the articulation of this term.

 Jonathan Gray’s 2010 blog post titled “Ambient Nationality,” published in the discontinued website “Antenna” (2009-2016), felt much more aligned with the work I am seeking to put forth here. The original post briefly documents Gray’s encounter with an online targeted ad that disrupted his positionality. Originally from Canada, Gray was taken to a Bing site that showed Madison, Wisconsin content. Usually, he says, Bing maintains connections with Canadian advertisements. Gray ends the post like this:

For all the interest in using foreign media to immerse oneself in a foreign nationality – an interest expressed both by academics studying transnational media consumption, and by racist critics who think that Univision or Cinco de Mayo celebrations aren’t “American” enough – perhaps what a lot of us want/need is simply a background, faint, weak, unobtrusive ambience. Put another way, if any given individual’s experience of national identity may be ambient, appreciating a national dish here, a hat-tip to local knowledge there, perhaps much transnational media use is similarly about encounters with the ambient and the mundane, not (just) the big and showy?

Gray’s concluding thoughts here underscore a throughline between Kirk, Capitalism, and Ambience. Engagement with a nation is not just the celebratory events, the displays of patriotism, or the routines of everyday-ness – The bodies on the soil, concrete, steel, interact with the air, moisture, and the microcosms of life in between these crevices. What is the (ambient) sound of a nation?

It seems that capitalism's ability to constrain, evolve, and transmute connection, relationality, and ethics has, obviously, grown exponentially in the years since Gray’s post. As Rickert persuades us to do, we must be able to see the extent to which, “the demarcation between body and world becomes less powerful or even problematic for rhetorical theory” (44), rather prophetically, Rickert suggests that this point will grow in scope and power, “as ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence, and other forms of ‘smart’ technology become an everyday part of our infomaterial infrastructure.” Worth quoting at length,

Technologies of all kinds, media-related and otherwise, are themselves becoming ambient, not only as scaffolding for our everyday activities, but as material actants affecting us through behind-the-scenes programming, including decisioning algorithms. Mundane artifacts will wake up; the largely invisible background fabric of our lives will be woven, and weave itself, in new, unpredictable ways, even though we are ostensibly the makers (45).

What does this have to do with U.S. media technology now? What does this have to do with the deafening rhetoric of U.S. exceptionalism and a Christian nationalist agenda in the wake of Kirk’s absence? It is through eventful reverbs, the instantiations, and the remix of capital’s aurality that I seek to critique the spacetime in which these contexts always already uphold a nation.

LaBelle, in writing through the aims of sound art, reminds us that “repetition, rhythms, flows and explorative pauses, accentuations and exclamations, punctuate spatiality with other vistas, passages, and meeting points.” This temporalizing of space can be heard as an architectural performance, for auditory events conversant with space utilize it as an instrument. This architecture, I argue, is also a place for sound/bodies to be reused. The construction of such a space on and in the body of a nation holds the potential for something to happen, to be used at some point, and to be occupied at a specific time. In Labelle’s words, “space is a potential awaiting activation through durational insertion” (164). I argue that, in the age of AI, ambience, nationalism, and the state of surveillance coincide to shape and inform how we encounter rhetoric and how rhetoric encounters us. This sort of waiting period, after the Badiouan Event, revises the sound of a space/time in which we exist and would have existed. This project overall is a kind of experiment, supported partly through the work of Thomas Rickert, Brandon LaBelle, and Robin James. The .mp3 file here, through the action of experiential listening, supplements this essay.

Originally drafted in 2023 for a graduate school final project, this sound art piece is the result of experiential play and curiosity on an auditory scale. The original context of the sounds and language in this piece was pulled from various personal moments, a choir singing at the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, Texas, and a few soundbites from this particular graduate class, for example. The actual music notes within the piece were supplemented by the device, Orba 2 by Artiphon, alongside editing software Adobe Audition. In its origins, my collaborator (John) and I had “an intention to wrestle with how the aesthetic sound of capital can position oneself between the material conditions of ambience-as-persuasive, and alienation-as-severance. Between these two conflicting moments, the atmosphere and ambience that surrounds this piece of music inform and allow for evolving occasions to be heard.” This intention has been deformed and misshapen, transformed into something else, as I return to this sound project under different, and exacerbated, political conditions. The original context of this project sounded fine at the time – an opportunity to explore new avenues of thought and to sound different from other projects I previously engaged with. It’s clear, as I returned to the drafted work, that I didn’t know I was articulating, that this recontextualization of this graduate school project is representative of the kind of nationalist, ambient, epistemic, and sonic reformation that is occurring under the second Trump administration. In this way, the process was made clear retrospectively, and in the muddying of the groundwork, maybe, some new meaning-making had only now come to fruition.

The recorded .mp3 file opens with a directive: “Please rise for the singing of America, the Beautiful.” The phrase carries ceremonial weight, formal and inclusive, recalling state rituals of collective performance. Its tone is deliberate, summoning a public into order, a body into posture. This frames the overall sound art project, but especially in the repeats of these phrases, “There is No End to the System” and “Move Fast and Break Things.” Listeners of politics, readers of art, and audiences alike may recognize the latter as a phrase spread through Silicon Valley by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. The former phrase, “there is no end to the system,” finds roots in this project calling attention to the container of subjectivity, and the systems in which U.S. politics relishes in. Furthermore, I emphasize the technocracy of the Zuckerbergian phrase to show two things: the “vesselhood” of language and the potential for sound. This is in part with what Robin James terms the Sonic Episteme, which, to put it rather concisely, ranges between the sonic measurement, constructive, qualitative, and affective humanistic responses determined by neoliberal factors in order to show how sound can organize socialization. James puts it this way, “Sound, and even resonance, can be a productive model for theorizing if and only if it models intellectual and social practices that are designed to avoid and/or oppose the systemic relations of domination that classical liberalism and neoliberalism create” (5-6). In other words, this project attends to the ways that we can resist social reorganization, especially through the concept of (re)sounding the body politic, techno-nationalism, and the ambience of capitalism.

Such concepts are contained in the system of this .mp3 file, asking directly that listeners interact with this work through headphones, earbuds, or any in-ear device to demonstrate the blending of corporeality with technology. Should the readers (and listeners) of this essay follow suit, they will have performed a version of James’ politics within the sonic episteme. James puts it like this, “Politics happens when some body performs a function supposedly inconsistent with its ‘nature’ – when it utters or practices a logos, its phusis [nature] was thought to be incapable of producing” (57). The natural sonic expression factored out between online digital platform aural objects is enmeshed with the natural sounds of the atmosphere where the listener is –  sitting at a desk, interacting with this on mobile device, reading/listening in a classroom, an office space, outside “in nature,” or inside; the point here, in other words, is that the internalization and external vocalization, represent conflict between body and subjective thought and this is what politics performs. ‘This performance is evidence that the current organization of bodies into positions…is open to reorganization’” (57). Put differently, we are composed, rather than composers. In some ways, I am arguing for the after effects of (de)composition. One may imagine Kirk, for example, as a component of what this conceptualization represents rather than what it is.

Thomas Rickert’s work on ambient rhetoric helps illuminate the compositional strategies at play in this sound piece. The piece functions as a designed sonic environment in which listening becomes a mode of engagement with social and political structures. Ambient sound is never neutral; it organizes attention and situates you, the listener, within relational fields that connect your perception to broader societal and ideological frameworks (Rickert 2013, 45-48). In attending to subtle variations, you become aware of how capital, ideology, and everyday rhythms shape both individual and collective experience. It’s the subtleties of everyday life, gathering, dwelling, listening, and hearing, that continually reshape the subject. Gray’s post demonstrates the precarity of national identity circa 2013 with the mediated advertisements that had tracked locations and suggested ways to be in the Madison, WI community. As of this writing, the targeted ads, tracked locations, and algorithmic desires of not only social media, but assemblages of technologies that we carry on, in, and use with our bodies, nearly completely uphold our relationality to the objects encountering us.

The sound art piece here argues, in its own medium, how to rewrite these relationships with time and context in order to make new meanings from the original context of an idea. Since the piece cannot solely convince its listeners, I do speak on behalf of its project as its author, creator, and interlocutor, indeed as the writer-writing. In this way, Rickert asks, “Who or what writes when something is written?” and intends to expand on this notion, developed first by Mark C. Taylor, as the writer writing as an emergence through network(ing) ambience. Taylor states, “thought thinks through him in ways that are unfathomable, he traces this flow and identifies it as a spectral quality of writing” (100). In this way, I’m often curious about the unwritten vacancies in the mind that seem to be exacerbated through ambient nationalism in conjunction with artificial intelligence. This process of writing, from Taylor, asks us to be instrumentalized rather than the instrumental. It’s between these concepts of agency and passivity that I ask listeners to consider the Kairos of this piece.

Rickert’s concepts, of course, build from James Kinneavy’s concept of Kairos. Kairos, in Kinneavy’s key, is defined as the right or opportune time to do something. From this definition, Rickert seeks to parse the connections between kairotic invention, ambience, and emergence as ways of understanding how complex ideas emerge and interact beyond our own control because it is an ambient situation. One of the most important takeaways here is that the emergence of networks is the prime mover for the actor in any given situation. In other words, that which we had participated in participates in us to produce something in a certain place and time. This is what I argue here, and what is the most significant takeaway, that space/time draws us back to action. Politicized space/time then, reminds us that we cannot be actors here but are instead reminded of the place and position. Thus, this sound art piece expands on the notions of Kairos through the notion of memory and place-making. For me, as the writer, the memory of the original conceptualized project has been rewritten by the political contexts in which it now exists. Being attuned to kairotic invention then means performing on the part of political (in)activity as a reference to something else. This performance can be defined as something that cannot be analyzed through or predicted from the component elements but rather enters a new state of order that transcends the initial state. Perhaps, in other words, the process of developing something new that “grows” out of the original thing, which cannot be entirely separated. In other words, the process of this project: the origin, the evolution, and the execution all resonate between modes of sonic and cultural production.

This growth is something I want to spend time on. In terms of composition, decomposition, ambience, and nationality, I seek to understand how difference and reference manifest themselves through space/time in the medium of the network.

Haunted Nation-Networks and Decomposing Being

This section plays with the growth, transformation, and indeed disfiguration of an object-text. I am experimenting here on the emergence of “haunting” through networking. Networking for Rickert, drawing on Taylor, can be seen as part of complexity theory insofar as certain materials are enmeshed and transformative. The idea of haunting, though, is defined by Rickert as the “conjoining [of] the spectral and the material” that requires areas of actualization such as incarnation, embodiment, and emplacement. Rickert uses these terms, “Network(ing) and Haunting,” as a way to develop dwelling, or Chora. Rickert reminds us that Chora is a place where movement resides, and generation gets its bearing and sets forth. “Choric navigation, then, moves us towards a reconceptualization or a fresh disclosure of place accompanied by a further refinement of what it means to navigate, associate, or compose” (Rickert, 69). In this way, the navigation and “being in the lostness” of the text is demonstrated through the technical/temporal breakdown and transcription of the actual art-object in this piece.

Again, the aim of this project follows the senses, processes, contexts, and reverbs of politicality and the affect on everyday Being. Through this combination of navigation, Chora, by way of Rickert, suggests digital networks as a way to be-(together)-in-the-world. He then extends this idea to the world (in a Heideggarian sense) of language in that language speaks the Being. In other words, the temporality of using language perpetuates the emergence of Being. Perhaps Being resides in and from language but that Being is not in our control and is constantly developing or transforming boundaries between materials. But what if we cannot locate the boundary? Probably, the most important observation here is that ambience resides in this extended sense as resonating in immersion and permeation between in and of networks. The residual, the resonance, and the reference are notions of what I’m seeking to unpack here under this project/essay. Returning to LaBelle, and worth quoting at length, he says,

Reference to [listening’s’] source underscores sound in such a way as to encourage, or set the stage for, liberated perception, for it insists upon the direct correlation between [a] culture of listening and sound as indicator of everyday life as found in material objects and their ultimate appropriation. Such performativity underscores material presence by establishing reliance on the sound source as a signifier from which sounds arise, and in a sense, return. For listeners, we are asked to hear sounds as liberated from traditional representational devices of [composition] through the very material source…We are asked to understand the liberation of sound in relation to material conditions: the material of objects, the material of sounds, the material of our own bodies and the space in which we are positioned. These become conditions that refer to themselves rather than signifiers of some other reality. (LaBelle, 25)

What follows in this section is another reality – the alternative. This section provides a transcript and documentation of the process where I used to compose a GPT-5 analysis on the metadata that was held in the .mp3 file – what was revealed is the inconsistencies, limitations, and “failure” to render the actual language in the file. The choice in GPT-5, more specifically in the audio reader, “WhisperAI,” stems from the lack of tools needed to compile information on a more specific level of engagement.

I asked, “what are your parameters for reading and extracting data from a .mpg file?”

ChatGPT replied:

Good question — here’s a detailed breakdown of how I handle .mpg (MPEG) files and what the parameters and capabilities are when it comes to reading and extracting data from them:

1. Supported Content

An .mpg file is typically a container format (MPEG-1 or MPEG-2) that can include:

• Video stream: encoded as MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 video.
• Audio stream: often MP2 (MPEG Layer II) or AC-3 (Dolby Digital).
• Metadata: timestamps, bitrates, frame rates, and optional subtitles or timecodes.

When you upload a .mpg file, I can:

• Access its metadata (duration, resolution, frame rate, codec, audio format, etc.)
• Extract and analyze frames (as images) for content or visual analysis.
• Extract and analyze audio (for transcription, waveform, loudness, etc.)
• Work with timestamps to reference parts of the video/audio.

2. Parameters and Extraction Options

If you upload a .mpg file, I can process it using these effective “parameters”:

These are conceptual parameters — I don’t “run” ffmpeg directly, but I can process or help you script extractions using it or other tools depending on your goal.

3. Limitations

Currently:

• I can’t play or stream .mpg files directly.
• I can’t extract raw frames or audio unless you upload the file.
• I don’t decode binary video data directly — I rely on intermediate decoding steps.
• If uploaded, I can analyze (e.g., extract keyframes, generate transcripts, summarize scenes) but not re-encode or compress output video.

4. Typical Use Cases I Support

Once you upload an .mpg file, I can:

• Generate a transcript or extract dialogue.
• Identify scenes or transitions.
• Summarize the visual or auditory content.
• Extract stills from key moments.
• Analyze pacing, tone, or editing patterns.

Would you like me to show you a Python example for extracting frames and metadata from an .mpg file using ffmpeg and OpenCV (the same workflow I can emulate internally)?
That would clarify exactly what “parameters” and extraction processes are available.

I said:

I am about to upload a .mp3 file. Your task is to generate a transcript that holds timestamps on the moments that are being expressed (vocals, music, and other sounds). if there is any needed clarity on the file's sounds, ask. This needs to be a timestamped, documented and thoroughly extracted output analyzing precise pacing, tone, and patterns in the scope of the file. Ready?

After uploading the .mp3 file, this was the output GPT-5 generated. The inconsistencies and rupture of meanings are bolded and reveal significant differences than what is in the original file.

Open AI’s interpretation of the .mp3 file is not incorrect, and it is interesting. On one level, listening in context with the shifting atmospheres in American democratic governance, the introduction of this piece is framed with the segment of a symphony’s opening address, “Please rise for the singing of ‘America the Beautiful.’” The artists suggest that American capitalist ideology can be at the center of the listeners' experience. The difference, though, of misinterpreting “Pomp and Circumstance” for “America the Beautiful,” shows a nationalist breakdown that is encoded in GPT-5. The ears of a human can clearly delineate the phrase in the original .mp3 file. The substitution warrants a musical connection between transitioning out of adolescence or young adulthood, into something else, as a rite of passage. “America the Beautiful,” on the other hand, and as previously mentioned, frames the conflicts, challenges, and dialectics of unifying a nation under a system of division and chaos. 

Further differences in data extraction, interpretation, and transcription are exemplified through “We ask you to…” and “Move Fast.” The original phrase, “Move Fast and Break Things” in the context of this project again asks listeners to reconsider or be convinced of a particular techno-capitalist ethos. But the AI (mis)interpreted phrase, “We ask you to,” demonstrates an interesting disjunction. The temporal layering creates tension between ceremonial formality (Pomp and Circumstance/America the Beautiful) and persistent background presence, reflecting how institutionalized authority (We, I, It, They) permeates daily life. As we attune to these shifts, the piece’s reinterpretation models engagement with the interplay of personal perception, falsified community, and an overarching national ideology, revealing the subtle rhythms through which collective structures influence subjective experience. It’s here, playing between personal perception and national ideologies, that I interact with space/time under ambient nationalism. I ask, how exactly is this object being assembled with/in, and to, our senses, the corporeality, and the network of Being? From here, Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World, author Keller Easterling describes such media as “an assemblage, a ‘dispositive’ (in Foucault’s sense) of heterogeneous conditions and elements” (37). I therefore lean into a sonorous version of the dispositive in this way, not unlike James’ sonic episteme, I construct the tension between “I” and “nation,” “ambient” and “composed.”

The interpretive notion of AI also adds to the ambient environment of the song as a place where people are happening. This “happening” is attributed to a belief in community and especially attending to the always already happening of assembling community relations between moments of alienation. The covert recordings that form much of the soundscape can become mistranslated between lived social experience (a memory) and an ambient composition (a decomposition). This is the misfiring that is necessary to understand between the social contexts and the psychic life of ambient nationality. Phrasing shifts occur as murmured conversations and street noises initially appear in mid-range frequencies, then gradually ascend into higher registers. These incremental variations in pitch, duration, and spacing produce an evolving sonic environment, allowing us to perceive micro-social dynamics and the recurring patterns of everyday life in a heightened, reflective way.

Overall, audiences of this creative sonic art project must become attuned to the political and cultural work that is drawing us apart – through funding cuts, firearms violence, and the frequency of pressure to adhere to an authority that is, in itself, ambient. As previously stated, this piece is meant to be listened to with headphones – immersed, close, and intimate. In this way, listeners are sonically engulfed by the multilayered pieces intertwined throughout the piece. This inundation of sound presents us with a way to move beyond the noise, the sound, and the body politic of an atrophied nation. Thus, the foundational musical throughline permeates the listener and invites them to hear through hums and screeching to the crowd beyond the ideological system and a life beyond the framework of U.S nationalist hauntings. It is among the bass-line hums and countertenor screeching that listeners push themselves beyond ambiguous and arbitrary boundaries of sound and into Being.

Much of this section is founded on curiosity as defined by Natalie Loveless, who describes curiosity as articulating “relation[s] set into motion by those moments that Lacan understands as the ‘splits’ that create the subjective crevasses that distinguish each of us in our specific modalities of desire” (84). I was compelled to split the desire of this project; to split the version that had existed in the “alternate timeline” and to compose something else. In other words, I wondered what GPT-5 would do with this work, and how it would describe and (de)compose the data, meaning, and contexts. In this way, through the misfirings of AI and Ambient National relationality, we emerge here among artificial sounds and organic and embodied samples. I believe that much of this work bridges, forms, undoes, and reforms connections across networks of being, splitting and reassembling the subjective desires that contribute to the ambient positionality of this piece.

Perhaps, though, the largest reveal of the machinic and technical dissection of this piece comes from the phrase, “Break Systems.” This phrase does not appear in any duration of the original piece. As we encounter the interplay of low-frequency drones and high-pitched screeches, the work creates experiential “splits” between tension and release, familiarity and disruption. These sonic shifts simulate the splitting and reassembly of subjective experience, highlighting the constant negotiation between individual desire and collective sociopolitical pressures. By moving through this layered environment, we engage in an ethical and perceptual attunement to ambient space, where listening itself becomes reflection. Through the orchestration of sonic texture, temporal modulation, and spatial layering, the piece foregrounds your awareness of the interplay between individual perception and larger ideological structures.

Attending these shifts enables insight into how the rhythms of capital, community, and institutional life shape consciousness and relational experience. I wonder how we move beyond network(ing) and adopt ambience; how do we break a system? Rickert states that what is ambient is immersive, osmotic, and peripheral. The attunement of kairotic invention and Chora creates a way for being in the world that is in and transcends the world. I want to believe there is a deep relationality and background intelligibility from which practice, values, judgments, and attitudes emerge.  In this way, this project, “ambient nationality,” can be used to understand productive relations between political materialities and potential and artificial hauntings.

Bibliography

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Holland, John. “The Capitalist Uncanny.” https://jhollandtranslations.com/docs/HOLLAND-The-Capitalist-Uncanny.pdf.

“International Communist Current.” The History of Sport Under Capitalism (Part I) - Sport in the Ascendant Phase of Capitalism (1750-1914),  International Communist Current, Jan. 2013, en.internationalism.org/worldrevolution/201301/6055/history-sport-under-capitalism-part-i-sport-ascendant-phase-capitalism-1.

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