Earworm isolates a recurring form: one person entering the intimate space around another person’s ear. The reasons vary, but the physical arrangement repeats. A body leans in. A hand crosses the boundary of the head. Attention gathers around an organ that usually disappears into the ordinary act of hearing.
Merleau-Ponty’s writing on embodiment helped me understand the ear as more than a passive receiver of sound. It is one of the places where the body opens onto the world, but it can also become the object of another person’s attention, care or intervention. The meaning of that access is never fixed. The same proximity can register as tenderness, necessity, protection or intrusion.
Aby Warburg’s work on recurring gestures shaped how I thought about the sequence. Once the action appears across different bodies and situations, it begins to detach from any single reason for it. The gesture circulates as a form of its own. By isolating and repeating it, I make that form difficult to stop seeing.