Dear viewer, these subtitles were generated by a machine via the service Trint and therefore are (very) buggy. If you are capable, please help us to create good quality subtitles: https://c3subtitles.de/talk/891 Thanks!
So now we have a
cat ketterson artist, and
she's making a different kind of
kinds of installations and performances
that explore how we
humans connect to the environment,
and she's going to tell you about that.
So give her a warm applause.
Please forget.
Hello, everybody.
Thank you very much for the introduction.
Thank you for coming to see
my talk.
And hello to the people online.
Thank you for tuning in online.
So I'm going to
be talking to you today about the
approaches that I have been developing
or some of them I've been developing to
explore
the connection between
ourselves and the environments.
I'll be discussing installations,
as I have said, that work on the body
to create an emotional 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
sort of different aspects of
the what we 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,
you know, 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 the
those boundaries that we sort of
consider there to be between ourselves
and the environment. And so
we have we have these
conceptions of boundaries
that are partially conceptual, partially
real. So, for instance, we've got the
skin inside the skin on on
one scale, you know, if I take water
on my skin, I see the water mostly
sort of wash off.
But on a microbial or
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.
Right. And so then my body is actually
really quite a lot in constant flux.
And so that
kind of exploration
of the diffusion of the boundaries
between the self and other 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 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 Technologies and
Redefinition of the Self, because
that's what I'm exploring with all this
work.
So I'm going
to try and get the slides on.
I've had a bit of a computer malfunction.
There we go.
Let's just say
so. The second preamble is
and I don't like I don't like
being anchored to things very much, but
the second preamble is to explain sort
of where I'm coming from in
conceptual terms.
And so I
like to think of myself as a person.
And I also
have the amazing 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 artists in the Arctic for the
Friends of Scott Polar Research Institute
at the University of Cambridge,
Bonhams and Ocean Expeditions, who
sent 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 with my
students.
I lecture the Bachelors in Arts and
Sciences at University College London as
well.
And so
one of the reasons 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 institutions.
So 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 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.
Contributing to climate change
and other environmental issues
and yes, friend
in every scale, from individual through
to global governance,
we are not making significant
inroads into tackling these
problems. 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, because I've been working on
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 know, I'm not blameless
like many of us are also
not blameless.
So it's partially
a personal exploration into
these issues that I'm going to be talking
to you about today.
And so
on to the kind of first approach.
One of the things that I was really
interested in is the role of emotion
in, um,
in kind of creating a different
type of knowledge within ourselves,
one that perhaps might motivate us
a little bit more than
the fact that we're bombarded with quite
often.
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 I consider to be
our primary emotional responses to
these kinds of issues.
And I was wondering, is
there a way to create a more
sympathetic and a more sophisticated
environmental relationship
with the environments?
And so one of the
kind of concepts that really underpins
this work is this idea of
touching the other.
And as you can see, there's been
a lot written on it. And this is a
fantastic quote from current budget,
which is to say,
what if it's only in the encounter
with the inhuman, the liminality of
nothingness, in all its liveliness, its
conditions of impossibility, 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 I'm going to be
telling you about now.
And so I want to
tell you about the current empathy
device, which is my attempt
to touch the non-human that is
coral.
The coral empathy device is an immersive
installation,
as you can see it through and over the
heads.
And the aim of it is
to indeed engender empathy with
coral in the marine environments.
It's not aiming to
replicate the conditions of coral
in the marine environment.
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 emotions that
are human in any way.
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 it's something that you have
to experience.
And, you know, 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.
So as you can see,
excuse me, the car alarm, the device.
Takes you into this kind of
environment 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.
And I talk a tiny bit about that
in a little minute, but I just wanted
to clarify sort of why
why coral?
Why why did I pick coral for this?
And actually.
So, um.
Well, Coral, for a start, is an icon
of our environmental impact.
You know, this year, with 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.
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.
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 of anthropogenic
impacts on the environment.
We also have a huge
amount of kind of literature about
coral, and it's meaning to
us.
But one of the things I find kind of most
evocative about it is the fact
that in some ways it can be considered as
quite a nice analog for
or metaphor for humanity as well.
We have a relationship
to it, even though it looks nothing like
us. And 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 that are very diverse.
And just like with stewards
of our environment, you can consider
that coral as a steward of its
environment, too.
Similarly, you know, we as
humans are actually not just
human cells.
And so you've all heard all of the
statistics flying around about
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. 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. 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
that I think is
super interesting.
And it's the case of a lot of marine
life. And that's one of the reasons 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 you're when we're thinking about
kind of social structures
for humans, you know, because
we have
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 the body that helps move the brain
about, 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, including
other people in it and including
non-human entities as well.
So one of the reasons that
I take away so with the
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.
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
its phenomenological thing 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
with how about how you're going to
respond beforehand.
Now, embodied knowledge is
super interesting in and of itself,
but Shogo Tanaka,
who is a very interesting
Japanese phenomenologists,
has been writing about how
embodied knowledge helps to
create
sympathy, empathy with
the other through intercultural reality.
And as he says here in
this reference paper, through
these embodied interactions into
subjective meanings are created and
directly shared between the self and the
other without being mediated by
mental representations.
So this is what I
am trying to aim for
with the current empathy device using
an artistic implement to
create these mediated
interactions between the
human he's
experiencing it and the other,
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 be quick plug,
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 and a deeper look at
embodied knowledge and
validation of of an approach
that attempts essentially to
create a way of communicating
that is non codified.
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.
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 knowledge is
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 happens in the background to
create this work and
how that fits into another approach
that I use.
So the car alarm, the device
was initially conceived out of a
workshop that was convened by Robert
Janik for
Pixel Festival.
It was called the Slow,
Deep Dove Underwater Interception.
And as part
of it, four of us got together
to run this workshop
and we were looking at acoustic
pollution and micro
plastic pollution.
And so with the
director of the Earth Institute,
which I
created these where we started on the on
the path to create DIY chemistry
protocols that could be used to look
at micro plastics in the environments.
So I don't know who's familiar
with DIY science, but
nobody's looking like the
one thing to jump out 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 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 and
way, way back.
And so we decided to
have a crack at seeing if
we could extract micro plastics and
analyze them without the use
of a sophisticated
lab.
So we started off trying to work on
kelp, you know, seaweed.
It was a bit
difficult because of the weight,
the strength of the the biological
framework in the south.
So what we ended up doing
was
moving across to fish
guts.
And because fish girls are
a lot easier to break down and get
these larger identifiable particles
that the fish have ingested.
And so we set up
Sushi Roulette, which is a
project looking at micro plastics in
fish.
And it's a multi day workshop
which in which
participants are invited to work with us
to use household
products that can be like peroxide
for dyeing your hair or
drain cleaner, which is a hydroxide
in it, to digest
the fish guts and then filter and extract
them and then analyze
the different size and
try to use a column, a
density column to identify what
kind of plastics those might be.
And fundamental to
this approach is that we
we do all of the DIY science.
We compare it to
using the
chemicals 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.
And the documentation
you see here is from a
workshop that we did in Norway,
ethnic conference in collaboration with
Picasso Festival.
And
and we used locally sourced
Norwegian fish.
And
perhaps not surprisingly, but rather
sadly, we found
quite a lot of
micro plastics in the fish guts.
But then, you know, 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 out of 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, which is
vital flows and vital flows,
is a
kind of a two parties 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 do,
in fact relate to
to climate change and the environment.
You may not think that the food stuff
does, but it really does because.
Well, because food has
a massive carbon footprint
food provision, it must have carbon
footprint. And it's
an enormous factor in social
inequalities and health.
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, because whenever
we eat, we take the outside world
inside ourselves, and then you
can fill in the upper end.
So that fight
or flight and vital is
the process
that we use.
And flows are my own
artistic interpretations from
partaking in those processes.
So I'm going to talk about vital
first.
And there's some growing
documentation on vital
food to talk about
the different processes and the different
tools that I'm developing with
vital.
So if you're interested, like the
some of the stuff I'm going to be talking
about is up there and it's going to be,
you know, updated more as
time goes on.
And the.
Yeah, so I have been
iterating on these processes
through
using them in collaboration with
a community to communities.
So I turned this
project into an undergraduate
course at University College London
for the Arts and Sciences Bachelor's.
And
and we
run 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, but
also other techniques like forum theater
and foraging, urban foraging
and co creation
and mindful esthetic eating
and cultural exchange
and creation.
Did I say that already to explore
our relationship to food?
And
so the DIY chemistry part, I should
say, is it's not looking
for nasty things in food like the
I decided with vital fliers
that I wanted to celebrate.
I wanted to celebrate our relationship
with food because there's
a lot of scaremongering 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.
Oh, so that's my
approach for this.
For food, if I 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
with the DIY chemistry for food is
micronutrients.
Things are important for our health,
but that aren't reported on the back
of a on the back
of a packet, you know.
So I developed
two protocols that
work fairly well
for extracting micronutrients
and I yeast.
We use a DIY spectrometer
to characterize what
we get out.
So we're looking at lycopene
and groups of polyphenols
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.
But essentially we're using
engine starter fluids and
surgical spirit to do the extractions
and using DIY spectrometer
to analyze the results
with spectral workbench.
And there's a comparison between
laboratory spectra using EUV
machine in the chemistry labs
versus the DIY spectrometer.
And like, it's a good start, I
think.
But one of the key things about
sort of doing all of these processes,
including, you know, including
the Forum Theater, including cultural
exchange and food diaries,
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,
because it really changes
not only
the world of science, but it changes
the person who's doing it to and you get
a greater sense of agency
in doing it. And I think, you
know, that's why this project stemmed
from I wanted to find something
that meets all of these wonderful things
had been experiencing 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, 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 so
we run the workshops,
seven workshops with the young people
you can see on the top.
Right. We're out foraging in
Bakhtin Park in
Eastland. Then we were working
with students in sixth
form college, and
they
they were super great, Nerem is
a tricky place because
it's
not super well off and
it's an urban feat, 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
like a fast food shop.
And one of one of our students
actually, right at the start,
one of the students from
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 like really
like super expert in identifying,
like the source of the food 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, you know, even though, like
for me, it's a highly political project.
But what really surfaced was
from the from the experiences and from
the participation was
this idea of accessibility
of different types of food.
So and we didn't talk about
being a food that's healthy food, that
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 and
the on the top right
that for 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.
So, you know, these are
these were the relevant questions for the
young people 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 with
the young people in sixth form college,
I asked, what are the most what's
the most important thing about food?
And universally they answered
it was the calorie content and
calorie content is a highly
while calories are highly political
unit.
Right. So the calorie was actually
devised to
be considered to be representative
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
available. It's just the energy.
And it was done so that
factory owners could work out
how much fuel their workers
needed to run through a day,
and that 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.
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.
And I'm putting them in a
forthcoming paper.
But this one this
one, I think is useful.
I now connect with my food and
experiencing it, experience it,
using my full senses.
It made my heart sing to
to see that
because I you know, it really kind of
felt like
there was a new esthetic appreciation,
at least
that was coming into this young
person's experience of food.
And that's what I was hoping for, really
was, as I say, celebrate our
relationship with food and understand it
a bit better.
And in so doing, understand
what motivates our decisions
about food. And then, you know, we can
make a better judgment on what we want
to do when
we're better informed.
So that's
I. Yes, right.
And so the tools this is
just a useful slide for showing.
The tools, you know, that's designed on
the 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.
You see all undergraduates and UVic
students together.
And we had some that tried
to imagine completely
new recipes that synthesized
everybody's likes and some
that were like, you know, we're just
going to have a menu that everyone can
pick what they want of it, you
know?
So but they all managed
to find some sort of nice collaborative
way of creating this new menu
to keep everybody happy
on the bottom. Right.
That's the
UCLA students putting together a
DIY spectrometer.
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 and
easy to follow.
And this is online.
And, uh, 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 so Creative
Commons. So go ahead, basically.
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 Flo's,
which is the other half
of vital flows.
And this is
output that
I was inspired
to make.
It's an ongoing project.
So that'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 satisfaction
of food
moving 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, this
the food porn hashtag is like you
have massive amounts
of images
associated to 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.
So cards are what
we see. These young ladies having
made to
advertise themselves
in London phone boxes.
And these are I mean, nowadays
they have a life span of about
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 to
use images
of food porn to starve them out
using the same esthetic and
to rig up a whole load of
phone numbers
with appropriate voicemail messages
to
to receive any telephone calls 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 say
so. That was that's cos
it's the first intervention from
flows.
And the second I want to talk to you
about is the sensual eating
talismans
and the sensual eating talismans are
all about this kind of flux and flow
of the boundaries of the self through
food.
And I want to read to you
the poem that actually
that the that the placards
beneath the talismans are inspired by,
and it's called The Mistake by
D.H. Lawrence.
So warning poetry
they call all experience of the senses
mystic when the experience is.
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,
those some apples taste preponderantly of
water, wet and sour,
and some of too much sun,
brackish, sweet like lagoon
water that has been too much sand.
If I say I taste these things in an
apple, I am called mystic, which
means a liar.
The only way to win an apple is to
hog it down like a pig 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 Barraclough, who is a
friend of mine, who, when he
saw the sensual 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.
So those are the talismans.
And so there's a whole load of talismans.
You take them with you and
keep it with you. And when you eat
you you use it as an
icon to remind yourself
of this process
that you're engaging in,
this kind of communing with the world
that you're engaging in, because we do
it when we're breathing tube.
You know, if we thought about that all
the time, we'd probably never 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. But this is the matter of
the soul. It's the project that I
began this year on my residency in
the Arctic. And I traveled to Baffin
Island in Canada
for the Canadian high Arctic
as the first step in this project.
And I'm developing it now as part of my
fellowship at Leeds.
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,
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 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.
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.
So
I think one of the reasons 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, but also that my
presence and the presence of other
other migrants was changing
things around
me in the in the place
where I lived.
And you can think about water molecules
doing the same thing.
So I can specifically,
if you think about a water molecule
and if it's kind
of sitting
quite tightly held, you know,
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, like it's also surrounded
by lots of other agents that are changing
how it behaves to, you know, sort of that
sodium and chlorine
floating about all those ions are
changing how it's behaving.
So I wanted to think about these
these transitions without
applying to them the.
Sort of judgmental aspects that
we normally
give to the
effects of climate change,
because I think that maybe that's
quite a useful thing when we when we
start to think about climate
change, actually, and what our
motivations are for doing things about
it, you know, I think
it's bad. But why do I think it's bad?
Well, I think it's mostly because
in the end, it's going to hurt human
beings and irrevocably change
the planet.
And and I think that,
you know, kind of bringing ourselves
back into thinking about, you know, like,
why do we care about it might
be quite an interesting way forward.
So not very finely
crafted brain thoughts coming
out, but that's because it's a work in
progress. So
the aim with it is to use
load of recordings
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 Coral Sea device,
but different.
And
yeah. And so that's
that's going to happen over the next
year. I'm going to create it the
the sounds that come out of.
So I'm measuring
rather than making the recordings of the
water, I am
measuring
the acidity, the ocean, the salinity
of the water and then taking sounds
from those measurements.
So it's also
it's also a critique on the act of
measurement as a way of engaging
with the environment, which is
something that, if you watch
carefully, is actually an undercurrent in
my work that kind of
shows through in the other projects, too.
So it's exploring the active
measurement as well sonically.
And the
sounds come out of
the Schmitz's and conductivity
meter hacks, which
were initially hacked with the help of
Simon Schaffer from Monet Shop in
Berlin.
And I'm going to play you
a quite quick video
that gives you an idea of some of the raw
sounds. So these are unedited
sounds.
Oh, hang
on. There we go.
Which I hope you're going to hear.
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.
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
find interesting.
And thank you very much for sticking
with me and listening.
Thank you very much, Ted.
We have eight minutes for questions,
if you have any. I see there is a
question and the IOC 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.
So the question from the Internet is
related to the beginning of the talk,
the part about the corals and just read
the question.
In my understanding, Centonze 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.
Would you agree? And in light of that,
could you clarify your arguments for
coral sentience?
Or in other words, why does it make more
sense to empathize with the coral 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 with an entire
ecosystem, I know I don't
agree that there has to be sentience on
the other end for empathy.
My starting
my starting point for empathy
is to feel with another
rather than to just feel for another.
But I don't think that sentience
is a prerequisite for that.
OK, thank you.
Are there any more questions, just come
to the microphone, please.
No one is next to you.
Yes, I
first of all, thanks a lot for your super
interesting talk.
Finally get a chance to actually discover
your work.
We are friends. We just actually
get to see each other and anyway
learn about each other's work.
And so you're
talking a lot about the, you know,
sensual knowledge.
I don't know if you would call it that or
just acknowledges that we acquire
through diverse senses,
maybe less focused on the visual sense.
And I'm actually wondering, because
there's, um.
Well, I'm aware of it since like the
early 2000s, this new,
like branch and academia that
is, you know, the sensory turn
and, you know, also going
against while there is a certain like
school that is in Montreal going against
like, you know, visual, like
visual, lissome.
And and I'm actually wondering, like, how
you relate to
I mean, it's a it's a huge trade.
It's a little bit and yeah.
I'm wondering, like, how you see your
work relating to that and
maybe maybe taking a stand
or maybe you actually don't want to, you
know, 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, like, some
some insight into that.
Thanks.
Thank you for the question, Lauren.
So I guess.
Yeah, no, I
would say
from the get go the
works that I'm
using to create empathy
or to try to engender empathy are
experiments rather than answers.
So they 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.
And so, you know, I guess
what you're referring to kind of relates
to all sorts of things from
like the the primacy of
vision argument to a
different stratifications
of knowledge and knowledge grids,
which also relates to consciousness.
But I think what I
I don't have a position on it
except that,
except that
what I'm using is the basis
for my experimentation is
the work, the
phenomenological work
looking at embodied knowledge,
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.
Um, with the
with vital of are,
there's a real focus on multisensory
experience of food and
there is evidence definitely that
if you pair up
taste with other senses, visual,
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
and appreciating the senses,
not in isolation.
Any more questions?
Yes, take the microphone.
So thank you for your talk.
There were parts of it that I mean, that
one particular part that I particularly
resonated with me was the poetry.
And it's interesting because with climate
change, we're often I think
many people are intellectually able
to engage with the topic.
But the challenge is often going from
thinking to feeling, which I look looks
like something that's something that
you're interested in.
And poetry often does that to me, as does
music.
Do you find that to reach
different audiences?
You know, you've done your work with
music. You work with something that's
more immersive and sensorial.
Do you find that a particular medium
works better or is that what
what, um, how do
you choose your medium in that context?
Thank you for the question.
I love my 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 are these these embodied approaches
and also experiential approaches,
which are the workshops where
we kind of explore multiple
different modes
of connecting with knowledge, generating
knowledge.
So I suppose uncritically
one might call that a bit of a scattergun
approach.
My hope is that what
I do is a small contribution
to lots of creative and creative
outputs of people working
to address this problem,
and that I hope that people will
self select to engage with
the things that touch them most
in order to address it.
OK, 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,
OK, if I'm going to 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?
So why is you use the
umbrella of artistic
here in this?
I hope this question is not
offensive at all.
You have every right to raise any
question that you see fit to.
And, you know, it's
interesting because, like, obviously,
you know, one of the projects happens
within an education to educational
environments. Right?
I would say the difference
is that
I'm providing a means
by which to raise questions
and seek your own answers
in that project rather than,
uh, rather than
kind of giving what I would consider
a classical education.
I'm not I'm not educating
people about climate change.
I think there's a lot of information
about climate change.
And it's all a lot clearer
than what I'm doing, which
with with some of my projects
is to try and work out how
to create a more emotional engagement
with it and with others.
It's to try and work out how
investigating something for oneself
changes the self.
So does that answer
your question?
Sort of.
Um, I don't know how to better answer
it, so maybe we can have a chat about
it afterwards instead.
OK, I segment on high.
Maybe art can be educating too,
so maybe I'm not sure it's its primary
aim and it's certainly not my primary aim
with this work either, but.
Well thank you very much for your talk.
I really would like to enjoy a
fresh apple with my full sense as a way
to give a warm applause
to Cat Aften.