The audio file inserted at the beginning of this essay is part of the soundscape of a gallery installation, which was showcased at Ryerson University in Toronto in October 2015 as part of Transitions in Progress, the art project discussed in this paper. It stands, epigraphically, as an engineered acoustic reminder of the diffracted languaging experience through which the project itself took shape, and, more generally, of the entangled dynamics through which urban ecologies of linguistic diversification take hold. Feel free to leave the audio file in the background while you read, as this option may facilitate a synesthetic and immersive apprehension of the question this paper explores. Namely, what kind of productive openings may happen to our received ideas of language and space when we approach these concepts as unfolding diffractive processes that require attunement to their own patterns of affective resonance of interference, rather than as bounded systems that can be known only when framed by procedures of categorical parsing?

Soundscape for Transitions in Progress Gallery Installation