The Skin of the World: Desire as interaction in the sonic artwork 'This Excited Surface'

This Excited Surface is a context-specific artwork sited in camera obscuras. The work combines sounds from our ionosphere with a spoken narrative that interweaves astronomical histories, solar physics and desire with a sonification of the sun’s activity on the outer edges of our atmosphere. This article gives a description of the artwork and extends the context of this research through a discussion about touch via Juhani Pallasmaa and Karen Barad and about desire and longing. I propose the idea of the ionosphere as the skin of the world, a dynamic interface between the sun and the earth and liken this to interactions at the proposed boundaries of our own bodies. This attunement with other systems or beings affords an engagement with these other worlds, whether terrestrial or cosmological and an entanglement with other beings and things.