The landscape of the 21st century city is embedded with the hidden strata of electromagnetic fields and pulses of the postdigital environment. This technosphere is not confined to the city but is a contiguous landscape that envelopes the planet’s surface and extends upwards to the farthest satellite. Recent practices in sound art have increasingly engaged with this invisible electromagnetic landscape, developing tactics to reveal both its ubiquity and its nuance, an agency performed through intensive and environmental affects.

The embeddedness of the networked technosphere to the discourse of the Anthropocene, spurred by the currency of landscape ecologies and the geological dimensions of digital media, implicates these sound art practices with a planetary significance. The qualities of the postdigital electromagnetic landscape which challenge cartographic agenda that seek to make extensive and map the intangible, provide intensive structures and activities which can contribute to some of the more problematic attributes of the Anthropocene. Specifically, the aesthetics of scale that are contested between the everyday and planetary and which lead to a state of ‘scalelessness’, might be more authentically approached through an agency that is intensive and embodied itself.

This paper will examine emergent sonic art practices, including The Chronotopes (2017) project undertaken by the author, which interrogate the postdigital electromagnetic landscape. Specifically, these practices will be framed by the temporal and spatial aesthetics typically allocated to the category of the monument, where landscape is an embodied paradigm. Employed as a technicity and a means of reaching out, monumental processes can be instrumentalised within a postdigital landscape to propagate alternative ontological subjectivities and cultural conditions. New tactics of postdigital co-habitation are mobilised, resisting conventional hierarchies of linear alignments to participate in nonlinear planetary swarm networks.