More-than-Human Media

Submission Type

Paper

Start Date/Time (EDT)

19-7-2024 2:15 PM

End Date/Time (EDT)

19-7-2024 3:15 PM

Location

Narrative & Worlds

Abstract

This paper will detail the artist’s latest efforts at using varied strategies of critical making, speculative design, and technologies of generative writing and imaging to articulate the nature of human and more-than-human relations. In so doing, it will forward an argument concerning the importance of practice-led, experimental research in providing rich, alternative narrations, vocabularies, and modes of knowledge-making at a time of profound ecological crises. The aspiration is not to suggest that such endeavours will somehow ameliorate present day harms, but to enhance modes of environmental thought and literacy that can better acknowledge the irrecoverably transformed state of the planet, wherein damaged, technogenic phenomena and environments constitute the default medium through which all human and more-than-human beings move.

This paper will showcase different possibilities in this regard using three distinct projects, all linked by their explicit incorporation of real-time environmental phenomena—wind, weather, light, and movement—within digital processes of ‘intelligent’ sensing and poetic inscription, staging a collaboration between human, technological, and material agencies that reflects their entangled status across the observable world. Lines of Flight is a project in which the movements of a glider aircraft, piloted by the artist, are recorded and used to generate volumetric poetry that is expressed through the intersection of wind, wing, and piloting technique. Algorithmic Light uses a combination of machine vision and timelapse imagery to create narrations of environmental change across multiple timescales at several field sites within the United Kingdom. Finally, Nephoscope employs visual analyses of cloud movements to create dynamically vectorised poems that emerge and respond to a changing skyscape.

All these projects provide instances of how artistic digital practices can function as critical sites for ‘sounding’ our changing conceptual understandings of the fraught and complex challenges of the present moment.

Bio

Richard A Carter is an artist and lecturer in Digital Culture at the University of York, UK.

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Jul 19th, 2:15 PM Jul 19th, 3:15 PM

More-than-Human Media

Narrative & Worlds

This paper will detail the artist’s latest efforts at using varied strategies of critical making, speculative design, and technologies of generative writing and imaging to articulate the nature of human and more-than-human relations. In so doing, it will forward an argument concerning the importance of practice-led, experimental research in providing rich, alternative narrations, vocabularies, and modes of knowledge-making at a time of profound ecological crises. The aspiration is not to suggest that such endeavours will somehow ameliorate present day harms, but to enhance modes of environmental thought and literacy that can better acknowledge the irrecoverably transformed state of the planet, wherein damaged, technogenic phenomena and environments constitute the default medium through which all human and more-than-human beings move.

This paper will showcase different possibilities in this regard using three distinct projects, all linked by their explicit incorporation of real-time environmental phenomena—wind, weather, light, and movement—within digital processes of ‘intelligent’ sensing and poetic inscription, staging a collaboration between human, technological, and material agencies that reflects their entangled status across the observable world. Lines of Flight is a project in which the movements of a glider aircraft, piloted by the artist, are recorded and used to generate volumetric poetry that is expressed through the intersection of wind, wing, and piloting technique. Algorithmic Light uses a combination of machine vision and timelapse imagery to create narrations of environmental change across multiple timescales at several field sites within the United Kingdom. Finally, Nephoscope employs visual analyses of cloud movements to create dynamically vectorised poems that emerge and respond to a changing skyscape.

All these projects provide instances of how artistic digital practices can function as critical sites for ‘sounding’ our changing conceptual understandings of the fraught and complex challenges of the present moment.