Radical change in how we connect to the environment
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00:00
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Computer animation
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Integrated development environmentDataflowBit rateConnected spaceTerm (mathematics)Routing
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:19
Yes, I'm Kat, thank you for the introduction.
00:23
It's very nice to be here. And yes, I'm thrilled to be talking on the submarine track about a couple of my projects, which I'm hoping will show you some methods
00:41
that I'm using to explore our relationship to the environment and to see whether there are ways that we can augment and change it for the better. So my practice, my artistic practice, lies along the themes of environment, justice, communities, and human relation to digital culture.
01:03
And I engage with these through a lens of exploring how we know, how we bestow value to knowledge, and how we choose our actions. Today, I'm going to talk about two of my projects which somehow relate to this. I'll be introducing to you
01:23
the two projects that address it in different ways. So first, I'm going to discuss the work that you see on this slide, which is also exhibited upstairs on level two. It's the choral empathy device.
01:41
As Karen Barrett says in On Touching, her essay in differences, what if it is only the encounter with the inhuman, the liminality of no-thing-ness in all its liveliness, its conditions of impossibility, that we can truly confront our inhumanity,
02:01
that is, our actions lacking compassion? What if, indeed, we could go beyond the cognitive mode of knowing and hit an emotional engagement with creatures that are really alien to us, or even environments? What would happen if we could really feel for
02:20
and feel with other creatures, other environments on this planet home that we share? That's where the idea of radical change comes in. We won't live in sympathy with the environment until we really feel it, until we connect with the environments and its facets emotionally.
02:41
That's when we'll want things to change. We already know an awful lot about the science of what's going on in the environment and what our impacts are, but we somehow sometimes lack the motivation to make a real difference. As we all know, and as we will have seen
03:04
in other talks in Republica, coral is in quite a bad way, and it's an icon, really, of the destruction that we're wreaking on the environment. It's an icon of the climate emergency,
03:22
and it's also emerging as an icon of plastic pollution. I'm gonna show you a video which is going to introduce the work, the coral empathy device, for those of you who haven't visited upstairs yet. And if you haven't visited upstairs,
03:40
please go and try it after the talk. I hope the video will provide you with some context for what you will experience using the coral empathy device, but also what I'm going to talk to you about in the course of this lecture. It does what it says on the tin,
04:01
or at least I hope so. It is the coral empathy device.
07:20
So empathy with coral,
07:23
a fascinating life form to which we could relate. As humans, we have a complex microbiome, bacteria and fungi that live on and within and around us that affect not only our physical interactions, but also our perception and thought processes.
07:42
So corals have symbiotic algae. Just as our microbiome can control us and helps us to survive, so does algae keep the coral alive. And as we provide a home for the microorganisms that float within and around us, corals foster a diverse ecosystem under the water.
08:01
In this, coral has a role as a steward of the underwater environment, just as we humans have a role as stewards of our own. We are transfixed by coral's beauty. We're enriched by its diversity. And it's been the subject of multiple perspectives and philosophical explorations over centuries,
08:22
not least because it, like us, builds protective scaffolds around itself. It acts as a standard bearer for the marine environment. Corals have no brain. Instead, like the octopus, it has a decentralized nervous system, in this case a nerve net,
08:40
with its sensory processing happening in a distributed manner. This is an interesting metaphor for us in present days when, as a digitally-enabled society, we are exploring, once again, non-hierarchical means of self-organization. We're trying to find ways of creating our own decentralized systems,
09:03
mesh networks too, something that is important for environmental resilience, as it is for social equality. The coral empathy device, which you'll know if you go
09:20
and put your head in it upstairs, is an intense physical experience that combines smell and vibrations felt through hearing and touch. Alongside the obliteration of the visual, it evokes an emotional and empathic response. I created the piece as a mode of conversation
09:43
with this fascinating marine life form. I was struck by the physical properties of air versus water, one's a denser, wetter version of the other, and the fact that what is a joy and at the same time can be deadly to us.
10:04
To marine life, that's its natural environment. And what could be more alien and yet more relatable in this alien yet familiar landscape than coral? The device acts as a link between human in air and coral in water.
10:24
But more than that, this conversation with coral, the stepping into its shoes, is a way of exploring our own boundaries and the interconnectedness of existence. Our perceptions of ourselves change when we explore this, the permeability of the self,
10:41
and it's something that is a theme through these two works that I'm gonna be talking about. Just as we fail to engage with climate change when it happens on a scale too big for us to see, so we lose sight of our own permeability when it happens on a scale too small to observe.
11:01
Though our pause, through our pause, through our membranes and incrementally through our emotions, through our history, we're changing matter and being. One of the main concepts
11:21
that shaped my approach to the coral empathy device is that of embodied knowledge. This is the idea of doing without representing, a concept which originates from phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's work. It's the notion that the body knows how to act. Most of us know how to ride a bicycle
11:40
and we're able to do it without any deliberation. There's no need to verbalize or represent in the mind all the procedures required. The knowledge seems to be imprinted on one's body. The knowing subjects here is the body itself and not the mind. Or more precisely, the knowing subject is the minded body, the embodied mind.
12:04
This is an idea that resonates with the decentralized nervous system that I was just discussing of coral, which is present in other marine life. It's knowledge held not only in the brain but in the rest of the body too.
12:20
For the coral empathy device, I've drawn heavily on the work of Japanese contemporary phenomenologist, Shogo Tanaka from Tokai University. Tanaka has done a good deal of work on intercorporeality in the human sphere and the idea that the body is a vehicle for our social cognition. And this is something that I wanted to explore
12:41
in creating the coral empathy device, whether acting on the body directly could help with a social cognition for a different species. As Tanaka writes, through these embodied interactions, intersubjective meanings are created
13:01
and directly shared between the self and the other without being mediated by mental representations. This is how our embodied interactions affect our notions of self and other, our empathy. Tanaka tells me that it's his view that it's not only is there no duality
13:21
between mind and body but also not between internal and external. I agree. And this is something that I've carried through into the next project that I'll be talking about. Indeed, it's true physically as well as philosophical. Membranes are permeable. Skin is porous.
13:42
Our physical boundaries are in fact a lot more diffuse than we believe them to be. And the substance of our being is in constant flux. For me, what we consider to be our bodies is in fact a flux and a flow of matter and energy within multiple gradations which we perceive on different scales,
14:02
giving us the perception of boundaries. It's a perspective that's also useful to apply to the human body as it is to society and institutions that we create around us. This is a really pivotal aspect of the choral empathy device but it's also a pivotal aspect
14:22
of the next project I want to discuss with you which is called Vital Flows. Vital Flows is about food. Food is a physical connection that we can easily perceive although we don't often conceive of it this way that shows us the relationship
14:41
between what we think of as inside and what we think of as outside of our bodies. And it's this interrogation of the inside and the outside that I think is something that can be really useful in terms of how we relate to the environment because understanding our permeability
15:02
brings us closer to what we think of normally as other. The methods in Vital Flows are an exploration of transdisciplinary practice as a route to a more integrated relationship between the self and other.
15:21
It's the crossing of these diffuse boundaries physically and conceptually. I've seen food as a conversation between ourselves and multiple facets of the environment, nature, nutrients, society, culture and meaning, global systems, politics. And the point with this project
15:41
is to look at these things from multiple perspectives, perspectives of multiple knowledges, not only to connect emotionally with the environment but to understand the other factors that are affecting our decision making. The project has two sides, Vital and Flows.
16:01
The first I'm going to discuss is Vital which comprises the processes used to explore this whole area. The first delivery of Vital Flows or the first delivery of Vital Flows is the project which was an undergraduate course
16:25
at University College London Arts and Sciences Bachelors in collaboration with the community in Newham in East London. Newham is well known for having a crisis in the availability of healthy foods.
16:43
The idea was to take the research methods that I've developed through my artistic practice and open them out for use by other people. It's an idea of having seen the transformative power
17:01
of undertaking these researches myself. I wanted to put them out into the world and see what other people make of them. So we tried it with these absolutely excellent students that I was fortunate enough to have and this wonderful community in East London.
17:22
And we ran a series of workshops with these participants using methods of cultural exchange, aesthetic eating, DIY chemistry, which forms quite a large part of the research in my practice, foraging, forum theater and co-design.
17:43
Actually one of the most powerful tools that seemed to really kind of influence the workshop participants was the forum theater which is the bottom right photo here. We had a script of three different scenarios
18:04
of people interacting with food. And the first was somebody buying like a takeout, running on the hoof, buying some food and going off and eating it as they were on the go. The second was cooking for a friend who comes to visit.
18:24
And the third was growing the food and then taking it and preparing a meal for a group of friends. Forum theater normally explores, it's a process where actors have a loose script
18:42
and they explore different social interactions through the play, the audience intervenes and adds interpretation to what's going on in the play. With this forum theater I used only mimes
19:04
so we weren't speaking. And the reason for that was because not only were the people playing people, the people were also playing the food and the environment. So what you see in this bottom right photograph
19:21
is one of the participants being a gardener and one of the participants being the earth. And at this juncture we stopped and we started having a discussion about how to interpret these bodily gestures. And this is a fantastic example actually
19:43
of the body expressing more than you immediately think consciously because we had a really interesting discussion about where the agency lies in this dynamic.
20:02
And the room was kind of split. So we had a lot of people saying the agency is with the gardener, the gardener's getting in there and digging and growing the plants and they're a human and so of course they've got more agency.
20:22
And then one of my students said, well actually I don't think it's the gardener that has the most agency because the ground is making her bend down. And it was a real kind of pivotal moment for a lot of the people in the workshop
20:41
because we hadn't explicitly discussed non-human agency so much in the course of the workshops but this was a fantastic way to kind of bring that perspective of objects or things that we think of as inanimate
21:01
actually bringing to bear on us and our behavior which is an important perspective when we think about our relationship to the environment. So these are the methods and what came out of it at the end,
21:21
we had two co-design workshops. I like to incorporate co-design when I run workshops with communities because I think that it's a really powerful tool for allowing people to kind of assimilate knowledge and then create something new out of it,
21:42
promoting their own perspectives and their own learning. What was really interesting is that some of the things that we didn't cover in the workshop came out that were really important in the area. They came out in the co-designs, right?
22:02
So we didn't touch so much on finance in the workshops but the two pieces on the right-hand side of the screen both were looking at financial accessibility
22:21
and financial systems and the piece on the bottom left is a kind of mock-up citizen science, DIY science experimental space which is looking at the availability of nutrients, nutritious foods, superfoods to people
22:42
comparing the quite pricey superfoods that you can buy in the supermarket with superfoods that you can forage in the wild. So there was a really nice kind of synthesis happening with the workshop participants of the different methods that we'd used
23:03
to look at food and to look at food as a conduit to understanding our relationship not only with what you could call natural environment but also with the systems that affect the choices that we're making.
23:23
A bit of the feedback from this first iteration of the project. This is my absolute favorite, right? I now connect with my food and experience it using my full senses. This is from a 16-year-old workshop participants.
23:43
A couple of other ones are it made me know what foods are eatable and the ones that are poisonous, foraging, and I eat more healthily and understand where the food comes from. So we got quite nice sort of change in perspective.
24:02
The tools kind of cover what I've already said but I'm putting these up online. There's a DIY spectrometer that was designed for the testing of micronutrients using the DIY chemistry protocols,
24:22
one of which you see on here. There's sensory eating practices for workshops, food diaries, extractions of micronutrients, as I say, the forum theater script. And that's all going up Creative Commons on this website. It's still being added to
24:43
because I only just finished the project but over the summer that's gonna become complete and I'm gonna be giving one of the workshops at the Long Night of Sciences at the German Paintings Office at the end of June if you want to come and experience it. From this project I also created
25:03
two more traditional artworks, less of an intervention. One of which is a series looking at the supernormal aestheticization of food which turns it more into an object
25:21
and less of a thing with which we have a relationship. These are called tart cards and I post an intervention in central London over the course of this February where I place them next to the more traditional type of tart cards. If anyone's familiar with London you will have seen these in London
25:41
from the late 80s onwards of cool girls showing their wares. And finally there's, we have some to hand out I think for you to look at the sensual eating talismans which are talismans to take and hold
26:03
and touch as you're eating. And I'm gonna finish with a poem on which the text for the sensual eating talismans are based by D.H. Lawrence, it's called The Mystic.
26:22
They call all experience of the senses mystic when the experience is considered. So an apple becomes mystic when I taste it in the summer in the snows, the wild welter of the earth and the instance of the sun. All of which things I can surely taste in a good apple.
26:41
Though some apples taste preponderantly of water, wet and sour and some of too much sun breakish sweet like lagoon water that has been too much sunned. If I say I taste these things in an apple I am called mystic which means a liar. The only way to eat an apple is to hog it down
27:01
like a pig and taste nothing that is real. But if I eat an apple I like to eat it with all of my senses awake. Hogging it down like a pig I call the feeding of corpses. And with that I would like to thank you for your attention and my many thanks to the people
27:23
who've supported this work, these two works over the last three years. Thank you, if we have time for questions I'm not sure but I'm very happy to take them while you fiddle with the sensory eating talismans otherwise you can catch me afterwards.
27:41
I don't know, do we have time for questions? No we don't. I overran. Thank you, thank you. Thank you.