Shadows, undercurrents and the Aliveness Machines
- Submitting institution
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Cardiff Metropolitan University / Prifysgol Metropolitan Caerdydd
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- AD098
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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- Book title
- Participatory Research in More-Than-Human Worlds
- Publisher
- Routledge
- ISBN
- 9780367138745
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Research process and insights
The chapter provides a theoretically underpinned and first-hand, reflective account of how a technologically enabled, eco-art residency worked in terms of ‘participatory research in more-than-human worlds’ (the title of the collection that the paper appears in). The paper describes a collaborative project in the North Devon UNESCO Biosphere Reserve where authors / artists Jon Pigott and Anthony Lyons engaged in a ‘slow’ art residency bringing together local communities, open-source technologies and environmental concerns culminating in an exhibition of kinetic sculptural artefacts (the Aliveness Machines) that responded to and represented environmental data, harvested from the biosphere using novel techniques.
The insights of the paper coalesce around the project working as a case study for a range of ideas relating to participation, ecologies, human / non-human relationships and comparisons between environmental data and a situated experience of place. The ideas explored include: notions of human ‘intimacy’ with scientific instruments (Malina’s 2009); ‘active science’ (Reason 2009); ‘informational citizenship and material participation’ (Marres 2012); ecologies of place (Thrift 1999) and media ecologies (Parikka 2012) among others. The paper sets out how it was possible to relate and apply such positions to the artists’ residency through its various phases of community engagement, collaboration, technological development and through the shaping of artistic outcomes.
Dissemination
Following the artist residency an initial exhibition of the Aliveness Machines was staged within the North Devon Biosphere as part of Confluence at the Appledore Arts Festival (2012). The project was then exhibited as a poster and film at the Royal Geographic Society (RGS-IGB) Annual International Conference in London in 2014. This paper was first presented as part of a panel on the Co-production of Knowledge with Non-Humans. The subsequent Routledge volume within which the paper is published, contains a number of papers from that same panel.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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