Don't stop 'til you feel it
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34th Chaos Communication Congress161 / 167
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VarianceComputer-assisted translationPersonal identification numberInstallation artDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Integrated development environmentGoodness of fitConnected spaceComputer animationJSONLecture/Conference
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CASE <Informatik>BitCompass (drafting)Group actionIntegrated development environmentCondition numberDisk read-and-write headContent (media)Type theorySimilarity (geometry)Dependent and independent variablesComputer animation
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:15
So, now we have Kat. Kat is an artist, and she's making different kinds of installations and performances that
00:26
explore how we humans connect to the environment, and she's going to tell you about that. So give her a warm applause, please, for Kat.
00:44
Good. Hello, everybody. Thank you very much for the introduction, Kat. Thank you for coming to see my talk, and hello to the people online. Thank you for tuning in online.
01:00
So I'm going to be talking to you today about the approaches that I have been developing, or some of them that I've been developing, to explore the connection between ourselves and the environment. I'll be discussing installations, as Kat said, that work on the body to create an emotional
01:23
response in humans to non-humans. And I'll be talking about workshops and performances where participants use techniques drawn from lots of different disciplines to investigate different aspects of what we
01:43
might consider outside world. So I want to give you a couple of preambles so that you know where I'm coming from. And one of those is that I'm going to be talking a lot about ourselves and the environment, because that's what all my work's about. But I want to be quite clear on the fact that actually the work is interrogating those
02:07
boundaries that we sort of consider there to be between ourselves and the environment. And so we have these conceptions of boundaries that are partially conceptual, partially real.
02:22
So for instance, we've got the skin, and so the skin on one scale, if I tip water on my skin, I see the water mostly sort of wash off. But on a microbial or a molecular scale, actually my skin is very, very permeable, and it's letting in and out things that are and aren't what I consider to be myself all the time.
02:44
And so then my body is actually really quite a lot in constant flux. And so that kind of exploration of the diffuseness of the boundaries between the self and other are actually fundamental to the work that I do. And so when I talk about myself and the environment, excuse the hateful air quotes, actually what
03:06
I'm talking about is those things with very, very permeable boundaries that are constantly being redefined. And that's why the subtitle for the talk is multiple knowledges and redefinition of
03:20
the self because that's what I'm exploring with all this work. So I'm going to try and skip the slides on. I've had a bit of a computer malfunction. There we go. Let's just do it this way. So the second preamble is, and I don't like being anchored to things very much, but the
03:44
second preamble is to explain sort of where I'm coming from in less conceptual terms. And so I like to think of myself as a person, and I also have the amazing
04:00
opportunity to be anchored as a cultural fellow at the University of Leeds Cultural Institute where I'm a cultural fellow in arts and sciences. I also have been for this year the artist in the Arctic for the Friends of Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge Bonhams and One Ocean Expeditions who sent
04:23
me into the Arctic this year, and I'm going to be talking about that a little bit later. And I have a long-term residency at the Department of Chemistry in University College London, and I lecture, and I'm going to be talking about one of the projects that I work on
04:42
with my students. I lecture at the Bachelors in Arts and Sciences at University College London as well. And so one of the reasons that it's important to tell you about all of these anchors is because a lot of the work that I do is facilitated by or funded by some of these
05:02
institutions, and the people that I work with at these institutions are hugely instrumental in shaping the work that I do. So props to them, they're awesome. So this is the central question that I'm interested in, and I hope that you're also going to
05:23
be interested in it and the way that I've been trying to answer it. So we know a lot about environmental issues in general and specifically climate change. There's a lot of data out there, there's a scientific consensus about our part in
05:44
contributing to climate change and other environmental issues. And yet, in every scale from individual through to global governance, we are not making significant inroads into tackling these problems.
06:01
And I know that sounds terribly judgmental, but really, it's about time we did something, don't we think? So I was wondering, is there something else that we need to know to galvanize ourselves into action, and how do we need to know it? And this is a personal question for me as well, right, because I've been working on
06:23
environmental problems in one capacity or another for my whole career, and I've been engaged with environmental issues since I was a child. So, and yet, still sometimes, you know, I fly, I don't take the train sometimes, you
06:43
know, I'm not blameless, like many of us are also not blameless. So it's partially, you know, a personal exploration into these issues that I'm going to be talking to you about today. So, on to the kind of first approach.
07:03
One of the things that I was really interested in is the role of emotion in kind of creating a different type of knowledge within ourselves, one that perhaps might motivate us. A little bit more than the facts that we're bombarded with quite often.
07:23
And when it comes to questions of climate change and other environmental problems, often we have these responses that are kind of demarcated as either anxiety or disgust. You know, these are what are considered to be our primary emotional responses to these
07:40
kinds of issues. And I was wondering, is there a way to create a more sympathetic and a more sophisticated environmental relationship with the environment? And so one of the kind of concepts that really underpins this work is this idea
08:01
of touching the other. And as you can see, there's been a lot written on it, and this is a fantastic quote from Karen Barrett, which is to say, what if it is only in the encounter with the inhuman, the liminality of nothingness in all its liveliness, its conditions of impossibility,
08:21
that we can truly confront our inhumanity, that is, our actions lacking compassion. So I thought maybe if we want to foster a bit more compassion for the environment, maybe I should try touching the inhuman or the non-human in the case of the work that
08:44
I'm going to be telling you about now. And so I want to tell you about the Coral Empathy Device, which is my attempt to touch the non-human that is coral. The Coral Empathy Device is an immersive installation.
09:03
As you can see, it's worn over the heads. And the aim of it is to indeed engender empathy with coral in the marine environment. It's not aiming to replicate the conditions of coral in the marine environment.
09:21
What it's trying to do is to look at specifically anthropogenic consequences for coral and then to create an environment for humans that should engender a similar type of response without anthropomorphizing coral or ascribing to it emotions that are human in any way.
09:44
So I'm going to tell you more about the Coral Empathy Device shortly. But first, I want to show you this video, which I think should, because it's something
10:00
that you have to experience, and generally it should be in an embodied way, but you're sitting in a lecture hall and we don't have it here. So this is the best proxy that I hope will clarify with a bit of context.
13:38
As you can see, the Coral Empathy Device takes you into this kind of environment
13:51
where you're surrounded by sound and you're also surrounded by smells and vibrations. And that's what you experience when you put the helmet on.
14:04
And I'll talk a tiny bit about that in a little minute. But I just wanted to clarify sort of why coral, right? Why did I pick coral for this? So, well, coral for a start is an icon of our environmental impact.
14:24
You know, this year was the second year in a row where there was a significant bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef. And without sort of time in between these bleaching events, the reef doesn't have an ability to recover itself.
14:42
And so you get a kind of increased complete death of the coral reef. And that's happening partially because of climate change and warming, but it's also happening because of acidification and plastic pollution in the environment.
15:01
And so it's in this kind of beauty that it has and precariousness, it's this fantastic kind of, I don't want to use the word fantastic because it's too happy. It's this very powerful icon of anthropogenic impacts on the environment.
15:23
We also have a huge amount of kind of literature about coral and its meaning to us. But one of the things that I find kind of most evocative about it is the fact that in some ways it can be considered as quite a nice analogue or metaphor for humanity
15:43
as well. We have a relationship to it, even though it looks nothing like us in as much as, you know, coral is a steward of a lot of marine life. The coral reefs are wonderful ecosystems that foster lots and lots of different species.
16:04
They're very biodiverse. And just like we're stewards of our environment, you can consider that coral is a steward of its environment too. Similarly, you know, we as humans are actually not just human cells.
16:23
I'm sure you've all heard all of the statistics flying around about, you know, how much of our body is also a microbiome full of bacteria and fungi all working together. And coral lives in symbiosis with algae in much the same way.
16:43
And just as our microbiome can affect our decisions and our ability to digest and, you know, lots of other things about keeping us alive and the way that we live, coral has this symbiotic relationship happening within it all the time as well.
17:02
And, you know, what that speaks to for me is a kind of reliance on the other that's actually, you know, materially embodied, right? So the other thing about coral that I think is super interesting, and it's the case with a lot of marine life,
17:22
and that's one of the reasons that I've been focusing on marine life for the past couple of years, is that coral has a decentralized nervous system. And I think that's quite interesting when we're thinking about kind of social structures
17:40
for humans, you know, because we work as an organism ourselves all together, you know, and I think that kind of thinking about our own decentralization, moving away from thinking of ourselves as brains with a body that helps move the brain about,
18:01
but also thinking more about us as individuals as part of a whole is part of the kind of step change that really might be quite useful if we want to change our attitude towards living in the world and then maybe, you know, live in a more sympathetic way with the outside world,
18:22
including other people in it and including non-human entities as well. So one of the reasons that I take away, so with the coral empathy device, as you saw in the video, it goes black when you put it on, you can't see anything when you put it on.
18:41
And one of the reasons that I did that was because I wanted to focus on kind of on other senses to investigate and experiment with the concept of embodied knowledge. So embodied knowledge is a phenomenological thing
19:02
where you think about doing without representing. So it's kind of what you might call, but probably shouldn't, instinctive or automatic reactions in some ways, but it's more about responding to the physical environment without creating a mental model about how you're going to respond beforehand.
19:25
Now, embodied knowledge is super interesting in and of itself, but Shogo Tanaka, who is a very interesting Japanese phenomenologist, has been writing about how embodied knowledge helps to create
19:45
sympathy, empathy with the other through intercorporeality. And as he says here in this reference paper, through these embodied interactions, intersubjective meanings are created and directly shared between the self and the other
20:00
without being mediated by mental representations. So this is what I am trying to aim for with the coral empathy device, using an artistic implement to create these mediated interactions between the human who's experiencing it and the other,
20:25
which is a bit of a step, but I think it's been working. We'll see. Yes, I think that's probably all about Shogo. And so if you want to, a bit quick plug,
20:41
if you want to see more about the kind of background to this approach that I've been talking about, I just, over Christmas, this paper that I wrote about has been published in the Oxford artistic practice based research platform. And this is looking at kind of a deeper look at the philosophy
21:04
and a deeper look at embodied knowledge and validation of an approach that attempts essentially to create a way of communicating that is non-codified.
21:20
So by which I mean not using language and not using the same kind of visual language that we often use, particularly when we're trying to communicate about environmental issues. So there have been other projects that try to create empathy with the natural world.
21:40
And you're probably familiar with lots of them, and a lot of them rely on visual stimuli over other embodied stimuli. And my aim with the current empathy device fundamentally was to explore what the other senses can bring to that by removing codification and looking at non-measurable and tacit knowledges.
22:08
So, and I'm going to be talking a little bit more about that kind of approach shortly, but first I want to tell you a bit more about the kind of research that happened in the background to create this work
22:23
and how that feeds into another approach that I use. So the coral empathy device was initially conceived out of a workshop that was convened by Robertina Szabianich for PIXL festival. It was called the PIXLO Deep Dive Underwater Interception.
22:44
And as part of it, four of us got together to run this workshop and we were looking at acoustic pollution and microplastic pollution. And so with the director of the Ura Institute, Ginos Szucic,
23:02
I created these, well, we started on the path to create DIY chemistry protocols that could be used to look at microplastics in the environment. So I don't know who's familiar with DIY science, but nobody's looking like they're wanting to jump about
23:24
and say that they are. So DIY chemistry essentially is taking chemistry out of the lab and putting it into the public realm where people can do certain types of chemistry
23:42
using chemicals that you can get off the shelf or off the internet rather than needing a sophisticated lab with lots of different licenses to do it. And so Gino and myself both have scientific training way back.
24:02
And so we decided to have a crack at seeing if we could extract microplastics and analyze them without the use of a sophisticated lab. So we started off trying to work on kelp, seaweed. It was a bit difficult because of the strength
24:25
of the biological framework in the cells. So what we ended up doing was moving across to fish guts and because fish guts are a lot easier to break down
24:41
and you get these larger identifiable particles that the fish have ingested. And so we set up Sushi Roulette which is a project looking at microplastics in fish. And it's a multi-day workshop in which participants are invited
25:03
to work with us to use household products that can be like peroxide for dyeing your hair or drain cleaner which has a hydroxide in it to digest the fish guts and then filter and extract them and then analyze the different size
25:22
and try to use a density column to identify what kind of plastics those might be. And fundamental to this approach is that we do all of the DIY science. We compare it to using the chemicals
25:42
that you need to get from a lab. And then we talk about the topic as a whole and the kind of socio-cultural aspects of it. And then at the end of the workshop we co-design with the participants a pop-up exhibition that's open to the public.
26:02
And the documentation you see here is from a workshop that we did in Norway at Essnet conference in collaboration with Pixel Festival and we used locally sourced Norwegian fish.
26:20
And perhaps not surprisingly but rather sadly we found quite a lot of microplastics in the fish guts. But then if you've been watching the news recently that's not at all a surprise because it's in all our tap water anyway. So best to drink it out of?
26:41
No, maybe not. Right so, but this approach, this bringing DIY chemistry together with other disciplinary approaches and then adding in co-creation is something that I've been using also for another project that I want to tell you about. Which is the other project mentioned in the abstract for this talk
27:03
which is Vital Flows. And Vital Flows is a kind of a two-parted project. And the topic of Vital Flows is food and our relationship to food. Now all of the projects that I'm talking about here
27:21
do in fact relate to climate change and the environment. You may not think that the food stuff does but it really does because food has a massive carbon footprint. Food provision has a massive carbon footprint and it's an enormous factor in social inequalities and health.
27:48
And this is the main reason why I wanted to focus on food. It's the most easy to understand example of this diffuse boundary between ourselves and the outside world that there is
28:03
because whenever we eat we take the outside world inside ourselves and then you can fill in the other end. So that's Vital Flows. And Vital is the processes that we use and Flows are my own artistic interpretations
28:24
from partaking in those processes. So I'm going to talk about Vital first and there's some growing documentation on vitalfood.org about the different processes and the different tools
28:42
that I'm developing with Vital. So if you're interested, some of the stuff I'm going to be talking about is up there and it's going to be updated more as time goes on. And so I have been iterating on these processes
29:05
through using them in collaboration with a community, two communities. So I turned this project into an undergraduate course at University College London for the Arts and Sciences Bachelors.
29:22
And we ran the first go of it last year and I'm running it again next month with a whole new intake. And what we do is use not just DIY chemistry
29:42
but also other techniques like forum theatre and foraging, urban foraging and co-creation and mindful aesthetic eating and cultural exchange and co-creation, did I say that already, to explore our relationship to food.
30:03
And so the DIY chemistry part, I should say, is not looking for nasty things in food. Like I decided with Vital Flows that I wanted to celebrate our relationship with food because there's a lot of scaremongering
30:22
and maybe it's time for something happy, you know. Like it's funny, I was thinking the other day, I think I turned into a bit of a hippie because I was thinking, you know, what if we just loved each other more? Wouldn't that be nice? Yeah, so that's my approach for this with food as well.
30:42
Like what if we just celebrated the nice things about it and kind of enriched ourselves that way. So what I'm looking at with the DIY chemistry for food is micronutrients, things that are important for our health but that aren't reported on the back of a packet, you know.
31:01
So I developed two protocols that work fairly well for extracting micronutrients and we use a DIY spectrometer to characterise what we get out. So we're looking at lycopene and groups of polyphenols
31:23
from tomatoes and grapes respectively. And it's just a start, right? But you can see linked off of the Vital Food website, there's a link to the public lab documentation of the development of those protocols.
31:42
But essentially we're using engine starter fluid and surgical spirit to do the extractions and using a DIY spectrometer to analyse the results with spectral workbench. And there's a comparison between a laboratory spectra
32:02
using a UV-Vis machine in the UCL chemistry labs versus the DIY spectrometer. And it's a good start, I think. But one of the key things about doing all of these processes, including the forum theatre, including cultural exchange and food diaries,
32:23
is that these are techniques that help to give us a sense of agency in the world because we're generating knowledge for ourselves by doing it. And that's one of the reasons that I'm so committed to DIY and citizen science
32:41
because it really changes not only the world of science but it changes the person who's doing it too. And you get a greater sense of agency in doing it. And I think that's where this project stemmed from. I wanted to find something that made all of these wonderful things that I'd been experiencing
33:02
through going to hacker spaces and learning about DIY science and learning about artistic research. I wanted to make that all accessible to other people who maybe hadn't come across it yet. And so I thought this setting up a suite of workshops that I could do with communities,
33:21
which is what I do in other parts of my work too, might be a good way of starting to make that sort of accessible. And so we run the workshops, seven workshops with the young people. You can see on the top right,
33:41
we're out foraging in Becton Park in East London. We were working with students at Newham Sixth Form College and they were super great. Newham is a tricky place because it's not super well off
34:04
and it's an urban food desert, which means that you have to walk a lot further to get to fresh fruit and vegetables than you do to have to get to a fast food shop. And one of our students actually, right at the start,
34:22
one of the students from Newham Sixth Form College said that he was able to tell just by tasting it, which shop the fried chicken he was eating was coming from. So he'd become really super expert in identifying the source of the food
34:42
that was most commonly coming into his life. At the end, we created this exhibition, which ran for a few days. And what was really interesting was that, you know, like for the first run of this project, I didn't bring in a lot of political aspects,
35:05
you know, even though like for me, it's a highly political project. But what really surfaced was from the experiences and from the participation was this idea of accessibility of different types of food.
35:22
And we didn't talk about Newham being a healthy food desert. We didn't talk a huge amount about global supply chains. But actually, you know, the installation in the bottom right is all about accessibility of food. And it covers everything from financial accessibility to cultural accessibility to physical accessibility.
35:45
And on the top right, that's the banana journey. And it's about the global supply chain and the financial considerations of banana importing and what the impacts are on the environment for that.
36:01
So, you know, these were the relevant questions for the young people that I was working with. And what was really gratifying was that it did seem to enrich how they were thinking about food. So when we started off in the first workshop
36:22
with the young people at Newham Sixth Form College, I asked like, what's the most important thing about food? And universally, they answered it was the calorie content. And calorie content is a highly, well, calories are a highly political unit, right? So the calorie was actually devised to be representative
36:47
of the amount of fuel that a food has in it. Not the nutritional content, not the taste, just the amount of pure energy. And that's not even the energy that's bioavailable, it's just the energy.
37:00
And it was done so that factory owners could work out how much fuel their workers needed to run through a day. And that's the origin of the calorie. And it's not super representative of anything that's particularly useful for the person who's eating it.
37:20
And so what was quite interesting was that by the end of the course, the young people's attitudes to food had changed quite a lot. And this is one of my favorite quotes from one of the participants. And I have a diversity of them that I can share with you if you're interested.
37:42
And I'm putting them in a forthcoming paper. But this one I think is beautiful. I now connect with my food and experience it using my full senses. It made my heart sing to see that.
38:01
Because it really kind of felt like there was a new aesthetic appreciation at least that was coming into this young person's experience of food. And that's what I was hoping for really was to, as I say,
38:20
celebrate our relationship with food and understand it a bit better. And in so doing, understand what motivates our decisions about food. And then we can make a better judgment on what we want to do when we're that informed. So that's, ah yes, right.
38:42
And so the tools, this is just a useful slide for showing the tools. That's co-design on the left. We've got a dream food menu in the middle. Actually, the dream food menus are really interesting in looking at the dynamics between people because we had groups that, you know, groups of sort of five or six people,
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UCL undergraduates and New Vic students together. And we had some that tried to imagine completely new recipes that synthesized everybody's likes. And some that were like, yeah, we're just going to have a menu that everyone can pick what they want off it, you know.
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So, but they all managed to find some sort of nice, collaborative way of creating this dream menu to keep everybody happy. On the bottom right, that's the UCL students putting together a DIY spectrometer.
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And this is an example of the, one of the protocols for extracting lycopene from tomatoes. This is the layout that I used, which is designed to be safe and informative
40:02
and easy to follow. And this is online. And, you know, if you can think of any improvements or want to use it yourself, then it's up there and it's all there to be used. It's all Creative Commons. So go ahead, basically.
40:21
Oh, right, yeah. So, naked ladies. No, don't look at the naked ladies. Look at the picture in the middle while I tell you about flows, which is the other half of Vital Flows. And this is output that I was inspired to make.
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It's an ongoing project, so there's probably going to be more coming out after this next round of interactions through the workshops. But one of the things that I was really kind of interested to look at was this supernormal aestheticization of food,
41:05
moving it into the visual realm. And, you know, as you know from what I've been saying about the coral empathy device, I'm really interested in this, the primacy that we give to visual and what that means for how we understand knowledge. And, you know, the food porn hashtag
41:24
has massive amounts of images associated to it on social media. And so I went through and found some of these food porn images, and I turned them into tart cards. Now, for those of us who didn't live in London in the 90s,
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tart cards are what we see these young ladies having made to advertise themselves in London phone boxes. And these are, I mean,
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nowadays they have a lifespan of about top 30 minutes in a London phone box. Like, when I first moved to London years ago, they'd be there, the whole phone box would be papered with them forever. But so I thought it was a fun juxtaposition
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to use images of food porn to, like, star them out using the same aesthetic and to rig up a whole load of phone numbers with appropriate voicemail messages to receive any telephone calls
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and then put them up in an intervention in central London. So I did that last February. And before you ask, I haven't listened to the voicemails. I'm not sure that I actually want to, but I also promised myself that I wouldn't.
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So that was, that's, tart cards is the first intervention from Flows. And the second I want to talk to you about is the central eating talismans. And the central eating talismans are all about this kind of flux and flow of the boundaries of the self through food.
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And I want to read to you the poem that actually, that the placards beneath the talismans are inspired by. And it's called The Mystic by D.H. Lawrence. So yeah, warning poetry.
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They call all experience of the senses mystic when the experience is considered. So an apple becomes mystic when I taste in it the summer and the snows, the wild welter of earth and the insistence of the sun. All of which things I can surely taste in a good apple.
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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 like a pig
44:23
and taste nothing. This 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 I want to say thank you to Simon Barrowclough,
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who is a poet friend of mine, who when he saw the central eating talismans, pointed me towards this poem, which I think more adeptly than anything I can do sums up actually what I'm aiming for with vital flows.
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So those are the talismans. So there's a whole load of talismans. You take them with you and keep it with you, and when you eat, you use it as an icon to remind yourself of this process that you're engaging in,
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this kind of communing with the world that you're engaging in. Of course, we do it when we're breathing too, but if we thought about that all the time, we'd probably not get anything done. So finally, I want to talk to you about the project that I'm working on at the moment, and I'm going to keep it quite brief,
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but the Matter of the Soul is the project that I began this year on my residency in the Arctic, and I travelled to Baffin Island in Canada, so the Canadian High Arctic as the first step in this project, and I'm developing it now as part of my fellowship at Leeds.
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And the Matter of the Soul is taking the approach used in the coral empathy device, but instead of trying to create empathy with a non-human species, it's trying to create empathy with an entire ecological region, which is the Arctic,
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and specifically trying to engender a feeling of dispersal and transformation. And the focus is on dispersal and transformation because I wanted to think about melting in a different way,
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and I wanted to think about migrating in a different way. So, the transformation between water molecules in water in ice and water molecules in seawater is a physical one.
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The water molecules both comprise the ice or the seawater, but are also affected by the emergent properties of multiple water molecules being in that state. And you can consider that we, humans, act in the same way in our cultures.
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So, I think one of the reasons that I started thinking about this is because I emigrated here to Germany a few years ago, and I noticed that there were forces acting on me,
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but also that my presence and the presence of other migrants was changing things around me in the place where I lived. And you can think about water molecules doing the same thing. So, specifically, if you think about a water molecule in ice,
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it's kind of sitting quite tightly held, but it's still vibrating, but you move it into water and it's got loads more motion, it's kind of dancing around a lot more, but it's also, if you're talking about ice in the Arctic and seawater,
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like it's also surrounded by lots of other agents that are changing how it behaves too, because all of that sodium and chlorine floating about all those ions are changing how it's behaving. So, I wanted to think about these transitions
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without applying to them the sort of judgmental aspects that we normally give to effects of climate change. Because I think that maybe that's quite a useful thing when we start to think about climate change actually
49:02
and what our motivations are for doing things about it. Like, I think it's bad, but why do I think it's bad? Well, I think it's bad mostly because in the end it's going to hurt human beings and irrevocably change the planet. And I think that kind of bringing ourselves back into thinking about
49:23
why do we care about it might be quite an interesting way forward. So, not very finely crafted brain thoughts coming out at you, but that's because it's a work in progress. So, the aim with it is to use a load of recordings
49:42
that I made when I was in the Arctic to create music that will be played through a sculpture in the same way as the choralempathy device, but different. And yeah, and so that's going to happen over the next year.
50:04
I'm going to create it. The sounds that come out of, so I'm measuring, rather than making direct recordings of the water, I am measuring the acidity, the pH and the salinity of the water
50:20
and then taking sounds from those measurements. So, it's also a critique on the active measurement as a way of engaging with the environment, which is something that if you've watched carefully is actually an undercurrent in my work that kind of shows through in the other projects too.
50:41
So, it's exploring that active measurement as well, sonically. And the sounds come out of the pH meters and conductivity meter that are hacked, which were initially hacked with the help of Simon Schafer from MonoShop in Berlin. And I'm going to play you a quite quick video
51:05
that gives you an idea of some of the raw sounds So, these are unedited sounds. Oh, no, hang on. There we go. Which I hope you're going to hear.
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I'm going to make a symphony out of that somehow. Right, and so without further ado, that is me pretty much done and I'd like to answer questions because I've got time.
52:40
But just want to say before we get to that, thank you to all of these people who are listed on here. Without them, I wouldn't be here in front of you having had the opportunity to tell you about this work, which I hope you found interesting. And thank you very much for sticking with me and listening.
53:05
Thank you very much, Kat. We have eight minutes for questions. If you have any, I see there is a question in the IRC. Maybe we start with that. And if you want to ask questions, there are microphones here and there. So, just come to them and ask.
53:21
So, the question from the internet is related to the beginning of the talk, the part about the chorals, and I'll just read the question. In my understanding, sentience is a prerequisite for empathy. Accurately showing compassion for an entity seems to require subjective, evaluative awareness on the part of the being we empathize with.
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Would you agree? And in light of that, could you clarify your argument for choral sentience? Or in other words, why does it make more sense to empathize with the choral than it would to empathize with the piece of chalk? Thank you very much for the question. You know, considering that I'm now trying to empathize
54:03
with an entire ecosystem, I know I don't agree that there has to be sentience on the other end for empathy. My starting point for empathy is to feel with an other
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rather than to just feel for another. But I don't think that sentience is a prerequisite for that. Okay, thank you. Are there any more questions? Just come to the microphone, please. Number one is next to you. Yes.
54:41
Hi. Yeah, first of all, thanks a lot for your super interesting talk. Finally get a chance to actually discover your work. We're friends. We just never actually get to see each other. And anyway, learn about each other's work. So you're talking a lot about the sensual knowledge.
55:02
I don't know if you would call it that, or just knowledges that we acquire through diverse senses, maybe less focused on the visual sense. I'm actually wondering, because there's, well, I'm aware of it since the early 2000s, this new branch in academia that is the sensory turn,
55:23
and also going against, well, there's a certain school that is in Montreal going against visualism. And I'm actually wondering how you relate to, I mean, it's a huge, right? It's a huge field. But yeah, I'm wondering how you see your work relating to that,
55:44
and maybe taking a stand, or maybe you actually don't want to be part of any of this movement at all. I'm just curious. I know it's a very large question, but maybe you could give us some insight into that. Thank you for the question, Lauren.
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So, I guess, yeah, no, I would say from the get-go that the works that I'm using to create empathy,
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or to try to engender empathy, are experiments rather than answers. So, they're a form of questioning, and partially what I'm questioning is what the relation of these different senses has to our ability to know in different ways.
56:44
And so, I guess what you're referring to kind of relates to all sorts of things from like the primacy of vision argument to different stratifications of knowledge and knowledge grids,
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which also relates to consciousness. But I think what I don't have a position on it, except that what I'm using as the basis for my experimentation is the work, the phenomenological work looking at embodied knowledge,
57:26
which is a multisensory approach. So, I guess I'm playing with lots of senses and seeing both subjectively and hopefully in collaboration, objectively, what answers I can find through those experiments.
57:45
With vital, there's a real focus on multisensory experience of food, and there is evidence, definitely, that if you pair up taste with other senses,
58:02
visual or auditory senses, it changes your taste perception, and that's one of the things that we explore in the workshops. And so, you know, on that basis, I would say that I'm more in the camp of appreciating more of the senses
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and appreciating the senses not in isolation. Any more questions? Yes, take the microphone. So, thank you for your talk.
58:42
There were parts of it that, I mean, the one particular part that I particularly resonated with me was the poetry. And it's interesting because with climate change, I think many people are intellectually able to engage with the topic, but the challenge is often going from thinking to feeling, which looks like something that you're interested in.
59:03
And poetry often does that to me, as does music. Do you find that to reach different audiences, you've worked with music, you've worked with something that's more immersive and sensorial, do you find that a particular medium works better, or how do you choose your medium in that context?
59:23
Thank you for the question, what a lovely question. So, yes, I think that different approaches work with different people. I don't think it's very easy to generalize what's going to work with whom, but the two approaches that I'm really aiming for
59:42
are these embodied approaches and also experiential approaches, which are the workshops where we kind of explore multiple different modes of connecting with knowledge or generating knowledge. So, I suppose...
01:00:00
uncritically, one might call that a bit of a scatter gun approach. My hope is that what I do is a small contribution to lots of creative and non-creative outputs of people working to address this problem and that I hope that people will self-select to engage with
01:00:22
the things that touch them most in order to address it. Okay, we have one more minute. So one last question. Thank you for your talk. I was just trying to summarize what you were saying for myself and I thought
01:00:42
okay, if I'm gonna try to tell what you're doing I could also say it's some kind of education about climate change and then I was wondering what is actually the difference between an artistic intervention and education?
01:01:01
So why is you use the umbrella of artistic here in this? I hope this question is not offensive. Not at all. You have every right to raise any question that you see fit to. And no, it's interesting because obviously one of the projects
01:01:22
happens within an education, two educational environments, right? I would say the difference is that I'm providing means by which to raise questions and seek your own answers
01:01:41
in that project rather than rather than kind of giving what I would consider a classical education. I'm not educating people about climate change. There's a lot of information about climate change and it's all a lot clearer than what I'm doing which with
01:02:01
with some of my projects is to try and work out how to create a more emotional engagement with it and with others is to try and work out how investigating something for oneself changes the self. So, does that answer
01:02:20
your question? Sort of. I don't know how to better answer it so maybe we can have a chat about it afterwards instead. Okay, smashing end on a high. Maybe art can be educating too. Maybe, I'm not sure it's its primary aim and it's certainly not my primary aim with this
01:02:41
work either. Well, thank you very much for your talk. I really would like to enjoy a fresh apple with my full senses awake now. Give a warm applause to Kat Austin. Thank you.