Careful Prospecting: Intersections of Art, Technoscience and Ecological Health
Susanne Helene Pratt
A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Environmental Humanities Programme
School of Humanities & Languages
Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences
October 2016 PLEASE TYPE THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet
Surname or Family name: Pratt
First name: Susanne Other name/s: Helene
Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: PhD
School: Environmental Humanities, School of Humanities & Faculty: Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences Languages
Title: Careful Prospecting: Intersections of Art, Technoscience and Ecological Health
Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE) Mounting ecological health concerns-for example climate change, pollution, and loss of biodiversity-occasion the need for innovative methods and interdisciplinary knowledge politics. Through empirical research and artistic mediations I demonstrate that practices of care are vital for reimagining ecological health. I contend that care, when materialised and performed through artworks, can engage with the complex question of how to bring about change.
Within this exegesis, I adopt a case study approach to investigate three different artists' practices, including Natalie Jeremijenko's, Britta Riley's and my own. Jeremijenko's The Environmental Health Clinic stages public art experiments that reframe environmental concerns through a clinical health lens. Riley's Windowfarms is an indoor garden art project that connects online communities who share sustainable designs. In the third case study, Black-Noise and Carbon Valley, I discuss artwork developed in response to the ecological health impacts of open cut coal mining in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales, Australia.*
From an analysis of the three case studies I make a distinctive contribution by developing an ethos of "careful prospecting". Careful prospecting, I argue, can be thought of as a means of learning how to care: it is a cosmopolitical practice that is about carefully tending to, tuning into, or becoming curious about ways in which healthy ecologies are produced. I offer careful prospecting as both a methodological and theoretical device for understanding and embodying practices of care in relation to ecological health concerns. Three modalities of careful prospecting were identified: experimenting, curating and listening. Each of these modalities, contributes to a sense of curiosity and obligation. Careful prospecting is about learning to be affected and mobilsing art as a means of engaging with ecological health crises.
* The artwork is presented alongside this exegesis in the form of documentation of an installation, Black-Noise, and a video artwork, Carbon Valley. To view these works please visit: www.carefulprospects.com.
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Acknowledgements
My deepest thanks and respect go to my two supervisors: Judith Motion, thank you for your encouragement, humour and superb intellectual guidance. Jane Mills, your insightful feedback on both the exegesis and artworks strengthened the scope of this research—thank you.
Thank you to the artists Natalie Jeremijenko and Britta Riley for agreeing to be part of this research, and for providing me with the time and space to research inspiring art interventions. I am indebted to the people I interviewed in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales, Australia, for showing me what it is like to live by open-cut coal mines.
I am grateful for the generous support and feedback from many members of staff at UNSW and City University of Hong Kong, in particular Tom Apperley, Stephen Muecke, Eben Kirksey, Matthew Kearnes, Thom van Dooren, Stephen Healy, Jane Prophet, Charlotte Frost and David McKnight. A special thank you to members of the Environmental Humanities Saloon at UNSW for care-full conversations and generous feedback.
An Australian Postgraduate Award funded this research, and conference travel and overseas research were supported by grants from UNSW. The
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exhibition, Black-Noise, at Kudos Gallery, Sydney, in 2013, was made possible by the attentive coordination of the curator Alexandra Clapham.
My family offered me the ocean and the smell of mānuka during the final stages of writing up this exegesis. They provided me with boundless support and love, for which I will be forever thankful. Nicole, Kate, Mike, Kim, Rachel, Grace, Jen, Craig, Sebastian, Nevena, Helen and the two labrador- shaped companion species, Penny and Clifford—thank you.
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Abstract
Mounting ecological health concerns—for example climate change, pollution, and loss of biodiversity—occasion the need for innovative methods and interdisciplinary knowledge politics. Through empirical research and artistic mediations I demonstrate that practices of care are vital for reimagining ecological health. I contend that care, when materialised and performed through artworks, can engage with the complex question of how to bring about change.
Within this exegesis, I adopt a case study approach to investigate three different artists’ practices, including Natalie Jeremijenko’s, Britta Riley’s and my own. Jeremijenko’s The Environmental Health Clinic stages public art experiments that reframe environmental concerns through a clinical health lens. Riley’s Windowfarms is an indoor garden art project that connects online communities who share sustainable designs. In the third case study, Black-Noise and Carbon Valley, I discuss artwork developed in response to the ecological health impacts of open cut coal mining in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales, Australia.*
From an analysis of the three case studies I make a distinctive contribution by developing an ethos of “careful prospecting”. Careful prospecting, I argue, can be thought of as a means of learning how to care:
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it is a cosmopolitical practice that is about carefully tending to, tuning into, or becoming curious about ways in which healthy ecologies are produced. I offer careful prospecting as both a methodological and theoretical device for understanding and embodying practices of care in relation to ecological health concerns. Three modalities of careful prospecting were identified: experimenting, curating and listening. Each of these modalities, contributes to a sense of curiosity and obligation. Careful prospecting is about learning to be affected and mobilsing art as a means of engaging with ecological health crises.
* The artwork is presented alongside this exegesis in the form of documentation of an installation, Black-Noise, and a video artwork, Carbon Valley. To view these works please visit: www.carefulprospects.com.
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Table of Contents
Originality Statement ...... i
Acknowledgements ...... ii
Abstract ...... iv
Table of Contents ...... vi
List of Figures ...... ix
List of Tables ...... xi
Achievements ...... xii
Introduction ...... 1 1.1 Significance ...... 2 1.2 Definitions ...... 3 1.3 Research Questions ...... 5 1.4 Outline of Chapters ...... 5
Practices of Care ...... 9 2.1 Introduction ...... 9 2.2 Matters of Care ...... 10 2.3 Careful Cosmopolitics ...... 15 2.4 Composing Prospects ...... 17 2.5 Politics, Aesthetics and Public Engagement ...... 19 2.6 Art, Care and Ecological Health ...... 29 2.7 Conclusion ...... 33
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Research Design ...... 35 3.1 Introduction: Politics of Method ...... 35 3.2 A Performative Paradigm ...... 36 3.3 Performative Case Study Approach ...... 39 3.4 The Cases: Access, Role and Research Settings ...... 45 3.5 Methods ...... 49 3.6 Concerns, Limitations and Challenges ...... 57 3.7 Conclusion ...... 61
The Environmental Health Clinic ...... 62 4.1 Introduction ...... 62 4.2 A Crisis of Agency in the Face of Mounting Ecological Crises ...... 63 4.3 Reframing Health-Care with Public Experiments ...... 65 4.4 Public Experiment as Spectacle ...... 73 4.5 Tending to One’s Experiments ...... 83 4.6 Conclusion ...... 86
Windowfarms ...... 90 5.1 Introduction ...... 90 5.2 Windowfarms ...... 92 5.3 Curating as a Practice of Care ...... 94 5.4 Dehydrated Lettuces ...... 96 5.5 Curating Ecologies ...... 98 5.6 Conclusion ...... 106
Black-Noise and Carbon Valley ...... 109 6.1 Introduction ...... 109 6.2 Making Things Public: Matters of Care in Carbon Valley ...... 112 6.3 Sympathetic Resonance: Grieving and Connecting ...... 118 6.4 Residents of Carbon Valley: Listening for Patterns of Shared Vulnerability ...... 127 6.5 Conclusion ...... 138
Careful Prospecting ...... 142 7.1 Introduction ...... 142 7.2 Learning to be affected: moving from curiosity to responsibility ...... 145 7.3 Status and Range of Careful Prospecting ...... 156 7.4 Contribution ...... 160 7.5 Future Directions ...... 161
Bibliography ...... 198
Appendices ...... 224 Appendix A: Ethics Approval Letter (2011/12) ...... 225
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Appendix B: Ethics Approval Letter (2013/14) ...... 226 Appendix C: Participant Information Statement and Consent Form (Artist) ...... 227 Appendix D: Participant Information Statement and Consent Form (Hunter Valley) ...... 229 Appendix E: Model/Performance Release Form ...... 231 Appendix F: Introduction Letter ...... 232 Appendix G: Sample Interview Questions ...... 233
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List of Figures
Figure 4.1: xClinic website home page (Environmental Health Clinic 2014e)...... 68 Figure 4.2: AgBag demonstration at Curating Cities Conference, Sydney, Australia, November 22, 2011...... 69 Figure 4.3: Demonstration of how to assemble an AgBag, Curating Cities Conference, Sydney, Australia, November 22, 2011...... 70 Figure 4.4: Farmacy AgBag Clinical Trial information sheet (Environmental Health Clinic, 2013c)...... 72 Figure 4.5: An AgBag on Vo’s balcony (Courtesy of Vo)...... 73 Figure 4.6: Clinic appointment on the Floating Mobile xClinic (GOOD Magazine 2007)...... 75 Figure 4.7: xClinic hula hoop exercise documentation as part of material for xClinic exercise program for “Civic Action” (2012)...... 78 Figure 4.8: Video still of xClinic hula hoop exercise performed during “Civic Action” (Jeremijenko, 2012)...... 80 Figure 4.9: xSpecies Drinking Fountain map (Gallardo and Pratt 2012)...... 81 Figure 4.10: xSpecies Drinking Fountain structure (Gallardo and Pratt 2012)...... 82 Figure 4.11: noPARK installation (Jeremijenko 2009)...... 83 Figure 5.1: Images taken while assembling my windowfarm, 2014, Hong Kong...... 91 Figure 5.2: Lettuces growing in my windowfarm, 2014, Hong Kong...... 96 Figure 5.3: Dead lettuces...... 97 Figure 5.4: Section of the our.Windowfarms Terms of Service (our.Windowfarms 2014)...... 103 Figure 5.5: Plant strung up in Hong Kong and polystyrene boxes in Hong Kong...... 104 Figure 5.6: User comment from our.Windowfarms (Martin 2011)...... 105
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Figure 6.1: Installation view of Black-Noise at Kudos Gallery, Sydney (Pratt 2013). 111 Figure 6.2: Video still from Carbon Valley...... 113 Figure 6.3: Installation view of Black-Noise, Kudos Gallery, Sydney (Pratt 2013). 113 Figure 6.4: Close-up of coal-dust patterns caused by noise vibrations (Pratt 2013). 114 Figure 6.5: Installation view of trays (Pratt 2013)...... 115 Figure 6.6: Installation view (Pratt 2013)...... 117 Figure 6.7: Close-up of water resonating, due to noise emanating from speakers beneath trays (Pratt, 2013)...... 117 Figure 6.8: Close-up of coal-dust patterns in tray due to noise emanating from speakers beneath tray (Pratt 2013)...... 121 Figure 6.9: Water rippling due to infrasound (Pratt 2013)...... 125 Figure 6.10: Coal dust patterns on trays (Pratt 2013)...... 126 Figure 6.11: Close-up of bottle of water propping up the side of the tray (Pratt, 2013). 131 Figure 6.12: Video still from Carbon Valley of Bowman wiping dust off her picture frame (Pratt 2014)...... 135 Figure 6.13: Close-up of turbulent water and coal dust resonating due to noise emanating from speakers beneath tray (Pratt 2013)...... 140 Figure 7.1: Careful prospecting conceptual framework...... 144
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List of Tables
Table 3.1: My performative case study research design…………………………..40 Table 3.2 Performative case study approach contrast to a post-positivist and social constructivist case study design……………………………………...42 Table 3.3 “Ontological and epistemological aspects of Yin and ANT” as articulated by Hansen (2011, 115)……………………………………………..43 Table 3.4 “Conventional aspects of ostensive case study methodology,” ” as articulated by Hansen (2011, 120)…………………………………………..44 Table 3.5 Source: “Phases of thematic analysis” (Braun and Clarke 2006, 87)….51
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Achievements
Relevant Publications
Pratt, Susanne. 2015. “Of Mice and Measure: Beatriz da Costa’s ‘The Cost of Life Series.’” Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 32: 28-35.
Pratt, Susanne. (forthcoming). “Black Noise: The throb of the Anthropocene.” Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal Theorytr 3.
Pratt, Susanne. “xClinic Farmacy: Natalie Jeremijenko,” In Curating Cities: A Database Of Eco Public Art. Sydney: UNSW. eco-publicart.org/xclinic- farmacy/.
Artworks
Pratt, Susanne. 2013. Black Noise. Sydney: Kudos Gallery.
Gallardo, Fran and Susanne Pratt. 2012. xSpecies Drinking Fountain. [Tap City Fountain Competition winners, see: http://www.bustler.net/index.php/article/winners_of_tap_city_a_competit ion_around_a_drinking_fountain/].
Presentations
Pratt, Susanne. 2014. “Tasting Smog: Articulations of Becoming Affected,” Paper presented at the Conference on Deleuze’s Cultural Encounters With the New Humanities, Hong Kong, June 9–12.
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Pratt, Susanne. 2013. “Re-routing everyday water practices through Tactical Institutions.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), San Diego, California, October 9–12.
Motion, Judith, Catherine Lumby, Susanne Pratt, Kathleen Williams and Jennifer Beckett. 2013. “Modalities of Engagement: Virtual and Real Participation.” Paper presented at BNC Meeting #3: International Public Relations Conference, Barcelona, Spain, July 2–3.
Pratt, Susanne. 2012. “Farming across multiple open windows: A case study of the Windowfarms online community.” Paper presented at BNC Meeting #2: International Public Relations Conference, July 3–4, Barcelona, Spain.
Pratt, Susanne. 2011. “Communicating ‘Matters of Concern’ through an art and science network.” Paper presented at Australia New Zealand Communication Association (ANZCA), Hamilton, New Zealand, July 6-8.
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Introduction
This research is driven by my experience and practice as an artist. It adopts an empirical case study approach to investigate three different artists’ practices, including Natalie Jeremijenko’s, Britta Riley’s and my own. Jeremijenko’s The Environmental Health Clinic stages public art experiments that reframe environmental concerns through a clinical health lens. Riley’s Windowfarms is an indoor garden art project that connects online communities who share sustainable designs. For the third case study, Black- Noise and Carbon Valley, I created two artworks based on my investigation of ecological health concerns about open-cut coal mining expansion in the Hunter Valley, Australia: an installation called Black-Noise and an art video titled Carbon Valley. For video documentation of the installation and to view the video Carbon Valley please see the USB accompanying this exegesis or visit the website: www.carefulprospects.com. My central argument, which I develop in my discussion chapter (see Chapter 7), is that that care, when materialised and performed through artworks, can engage with the complex question of how to bring about change to ecological health concerns. The key theoretical contribution this exegesis makes is the development of an ethos of care, termed careful prospecting, for composing ecological health prospects and intervening in contemporary knowledge politics.
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This exegesis and associated artwork draws on my experiences of developing and exhibiting art that addresses issues of social and environmental concern. Before starting this doctoral research I explored these issues primarily through time-based media, convergent media installations and site-specific events. My earlier artwork concentrated on critiquing the way consumer products are marketed with images of “nature” and the toxic impacts these products have on the environments used to sell them. This doctoral research is driven by my desire to develop tools for intervening in ecological health issues. I wish to extend my art and research practice, to explore how other contemporary artists are engaging in pressing issues of ecological health concern and use the findings drawn from this exploration to further my art and research. To conduct this research I adopt a “practice-led” approach—“research in which the professional and/or creative practices of art, design or architecture play an instrumental part in the inquiry” (Rust, Mottam, and Till 2007, 11; see also Haseman 2006; Smith and Dean 2009).
1.1 Significance
A litany of global ecological crises is surfacing (Vitousek et al. 1997): According to the IPCC’s (2014) “Fifth Assessment Report” weather conditions, due to human-induced climate change, have become increasingly severe: tropical cyclones, bush fires, droughts and floods are all impacting different regions in damaging ways. At the same time, atmospheres are becoming increasingly polluted from activities ranging from the extraction and consumption of geologic matter, such as coal to large scale agricultural practices, including factory farming. Ocean acidification and temperatures are also on the rise as a result of increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. All of these changes—in which humans are complicit—are resulting in global biodiversity declines, due to escalating extinction rates, and reductions in ecological resilience (ref), which is to say global ecological health is suffering, just in unevenly distributed ways. Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill (2007) suggest that the epoch, the Holocene,
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has ended and that our current epoch should be named the “Anthropocene”—an epoch in which humans are the prevailing geological force. There are a number of critics to this suggestion (Malm and Hornborg 2014), who argue that this branding places humans in the centre of ecological debates. However, it has provided a powerful impetus to propel engagement in the types of ecologies and futures human actions enact (Latour 2014b).
Scholarship on public engagement in environmental issues typically concentrates on discursive notions of framing and engagement (Davies 2014). This exegesis draws on research that calls for greater attention to “the non-discursive—to the role of, for instance, the emotional, material or creative within public engagement” (Davies 2014, 94), in order to respond to complex ecological health concerns. Specifically, it focuses on creative artistic responses and new aesthetic strategies to ecological crises, and engages with recent scholarship on material participation and practices of care in relation to technoscientific innovation. In doing so, it builds on a body of artistic political practice, spurred by activist intentions of intervening in ecological issues of concern. However, rather than critiquing divisions between nature and culture and how art can mediate this binary (which has been well articulated in ecocritical work, this exegesis has a particular focus on care. It explores how care manifests in artworks, how care, as both a practice and a value or ethos, can inform artistic engagement in matters of ecological concern. Before exploring intersections of care, art and politics in existing literature, in Chapter 2, the terminology in this exegesis needs clarification, specifically: “ecological health” and “technoscience”.
1.2 Definitions
1.2.1 Ecological Health
The World Health Organization (WHO 2006, 1) officially defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. This widely used Western
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definition of health has not been amended since 1948 and does not acknowledge health as a shared ecological issue. The aim of this exegesis is to look at health in a broader sense, not just in terms of the health implications for humans, but health as an interconnected, social and ecological concern. The term “environmental health”, defined by WHO (2015, par. 1) as “all the physical, chemical, and biological factors external to a person, and all the related factors impacting behaviours”, has wider implications but still does not adequately convey health as socio-ecological issue and state, constituted between people, non-humans environments. In contrast, the term “ecological health” understands “health as a pattern of relations rather than as a quantitative outcome (that is, viewing health as a process nested in contexts rather than as a static attribute of individuals)” (McLaren and Hope 2005, 9; see also Kickbusch 1989), hence the term ecological health is used in this exegesis to refer to the emergence of a pattern of relations.
1.2.2 Technoscience
The term “technoscience” in this exegesis is drawn from Latour (1987, 29) and the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) to denote the way science and technology are interdependent. On a philosophical level, it implies that scientific knowledge is co-produced with the technologies it creates and with which it is produced (Latour 1987). Encapsulated in the term is the recognition of “the ways in which materiality plays subtle and deep roles in our ways of moving about in the world” and construction of scientific knowledge (Ihde and Selinger 2003, 1), alongside the temporal and spatial situatedness of knowledges.
With the key definitions articulated, I now move to the core research questions driving this exegesis and then provide an outline of the chapters.
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1.3 Research Questions
The aim of this practice-led research is to explore how ecological health is enacted in contemporary art, and how this might facilitate healthier ecological prospects. The research asks:
1. How is ecological health enacted in contemporary art, and how might these enactments help to compose healthier ecological prospects? 2. What knowledge politics are involved in improving ecological health? 3. How can art develop methods for, and understandings of, alternative knowledge politics that may assist in generating healthier ecologies? 4. What role does care have in enacting healthier ecological prospects? 5. How, as both a researcher and an artist, do I care, for what and for whom?
1.4 Outline of Chapters
In Chapter 2, “Literature Review”, scholarly developments in Science and Technology Studies (STS) on the politics of knowledge are discussed in relation to practices of care and art. I start this chapter with a discussion of the role of care in matters of ecological health concern, drawing on Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2011, 86) extension of Latour’s (2004b) “matters of concern” to “matters of care”. The affective, material and ethical dimensions of matters of care are then situated in the ethical and political notion of “cosmopolitics”—a concept proposed by Isabelle Stengers (2005) and built on by a number of STS scholars, including Latour (2004d) to extend politics beyond discursive debates among humans in order to develop a more material and embodied form of politics. Drawing on Latour (2010) I flesh out a definition of prospects and prospecting and discuss the merits of shifting from critique to what Latour (2010, 478) describes as a “compositionist” mode of enquiry. Within this compositionist framing relationships between aesthetics, politics, and affective and embodied
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understandings of public engagement with science are discussed. This discussion on public engagement addresses affective understandings of public engagement, what Davies (2014, 103) describes as a “lacuna” in public engagement with science literature. It also draws out how matters of care are an important means of engaging publics in ecological health concerns that are often neglected within traditional forms of science communication. Finally, the practice-led component of this doctoral research is instantiated through a discussion of key artworks addressing matters of care that have informed my research and art practice.
In Chapter 3, “Research Design”, I build on the practice-oriented and performative approach outlined in Chapter 2 in order to develop my methodological framework. First, I begin with a discussion of the politics of methods, drawing on recent debates in STS (Asdal and Marres 2014; Back 2012; Harding 2005; Lury and Wakeford 2012; Steinmetz 2005). This chapter adapts a performative case study approach, building on Hansen (2011), to suit practice-led research (Barrett and Bolt 2007; Haseman 2006). Next, I provide a comprehensive description of my case study methods: semi-structured interviews; participant observation and visual diary; document, media and artefact analysis and photography, video and digital storytelling. The final component of this chapter is a discussion of the key limitations, concerns and challenges I faced while conducting this research.
In Chapter 4, “The Environmental Health Clinic (xClinic),” the first empirical case study in this exegesis, I explore the artist Jeremijenko’s art project, xClinic. The xClinic adopts the familiar structure of the university health clinic model, but develops an approach to health that acknowledges the interconnection between human health and the health of the environment and non-humans. This chapter explores how the xClinic addresses ecological health concerns by creating public experiments— spectacles—to attune people to health as not simply a genetic or biological issue, but also an ecological one composed of interdependent relationships. The central argument within this chapter is that public creative experiments can be used as a means to creatively intervene in issues of environmental
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health through three key modes: fostering attention by encouraing people to attend to concerns that they care about; creating spectacles, for example, by hijacking and twisting familiar imagery and practices such as the red health cross; and re-framing health repertoires (repertoires understood as a stock of skills and items, such as clinical trials) that provide scope for action.
In Chapter 5, “Windowfarms”, I examine the artist Riley’s project Windowfarms. Windowfarms started in 2009 as an art experiment investigating collaborative ways of farming indoors using vertical hydroponic growing systems. It has evolved into an online community. The key finding from this case study is how ecological health is enacted through acts of care in the form of practices of curation. This chapter highlights the competing demands of care, through what I describe as a tension between transformation and control, and the importance of being attuned to what emerges in practice. Central to the notion of curation developed in this chapter are three core components: re-imagining ecological values, co- creation and practicality.
In Chapter 6, “Black-Noise and Carbon Valley”, I describe the two artworks produced as part of this practice-led investigation into the ecological health concerns about open-cut coal mining expansion in the Hunter Valley: the art installation Black-Noise and the video artwork Carbon Valley. The chapter describes how I developed the artworks through interviews with Hunter Valley residents and explorations of mining sites and affected wetlands and homes. It goes on to discuss the practices involved in creating the artworks and the resulting artworks, in particular emphasising the role of noise, in the form of infrasound, and practices of listening. The principal argument of this chapter is that listening is not just a form of hearing, but is an embodied means of attending to ecological matters that people care about. To develop this notion of listening as a form of care, I draw on Marks’ (2002) formulation of “haptic visuality” and Nancy’s (2007) exploration of the resonant properties of listening to explore a practice of material, haptic listening—a form of sensing the tactile, material and corporeal aspects of listening. Three key components of haptic listening, as a
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form of care, emerged: witnessing and tuning into the ways in which entities are mutually transformed—a process I referred to as sympathetic resonance; second, “making things public” (Latour and Wiebel 2005) by affectively articulating the embodiment of ecological health impacts and third, tracing patterns of shared vulnerability.
In Chapter 7, “Careful Prospecting”, my discussion chapter, I make a distinctive contribution by developing an ethos of “careful prospecting”. Careful prospecting emerged out of the analysis of my case studies and the three modalities of care that I identified: experimenting, curating and listening. Each of these modalities contributes to a sense of curiosity and obligation. Careful prospecting, I argue, can be thought of as a means of learning how to care: it is a cosmopolitical practice that is about carefully tending to, tuning into, or becoming curious about ways in which healthy ecologies are produced. Drawing on the case studies I demonstrate how practices of care move participants from curiosity to responsibility by 1) encouraging tending to existing concerns, discussed via means of experiments to foster attention, curating as a practice of practicality and listening to generate sympathetic resonance; 2) processes of public inventive problem-making, explored through experiments as a form of spectacle, curating to re-imagine ecological values and listening as a means of making things public; and 3) facilitating caring relations driven by experiments as a tool for reframing health repertoires and relations, curating as a form of co- creation, and listening to trace shared vulnerabilities.
I offer careful prospecting as both a methodological and theoretical device for understanding and embodying practices of care in relation to ecological health concerns. Careful prospecting is about learning to be affected and mobilising art as a means of engaging with ecological health crises. I end with a discussion of what an ethos of careful prospecting means for the role of the researcher, particularly in relation to my own practice-led research.
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Practices of Care
2.1 Introduction
This chapter draws on scholarship on the politics and ethics of care to reflect on the principal question driving this research: How can art enact healthier ecological prospects? It is developed across five domains: (1) matters of care, (2) cosmopolitics, (3) composing prospects and (4) politics, aesthetics and public engagement (5) art, care and ecological health. First, the ethical and affective dimensions in Latour’s (2004b, 2008) notion of matters of concern are extended via Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2010, 2011) articulation of matters of care. Second, practices of care are situated within the wider ethical project that Stengers (2005, 2010, 2011) refers to as “cosmopolitics”. Third, this chapter examines Latour’s “Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto’” (2010, 471), which calls for composition rather than critique, a mode of working that “underlines that things have to be put together” (473). Fourth, follows a discussion of the politics of knowledge and public engagement, as developed within STS engagement literature, and a proposal that aesthetics and art provide a means to examine knowledge practices and politics. In particular, this section focuses on the capacity of art to highlight and problematize affective and material practices of care that pertain to complex public issues involving ecological health and technoscience. The chapter concludes with a discussion of artists who are
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engaged in ecological health practices of care. Through an analysis of these artworks a series of questions and provocations are developed that inform the discussions in later chapters.
2.2 Matters of Care
2.2.1 Matters of Fact and Matters of Concern
Give me one matter of concern and I will show you the whole earth and heavens that have to be gathered to hold it firmly in place. (Latour 2004b, 246)
Latour’s (2004b) discussion of matters of concern is explored in this section because of its emphasis on the value-oriented qualities inherent to the construction of knowledge. However, first, I briefly describe the STS context within which Latour’s scholarship is situated. The discipline of STS has had a long-standing engagement with ethico-political issues pertaining to the construction of scientific knowledge (Collins and Pinch 1993; Latour 1987; Pickering 1995; Shapin and Schaffer 1985). This work, which builds on Kuhn’s (1962) articulation of science as a social practice in Scientific Revolutions, has addressed the way politics is enfolded in relational networks and issues (Sismondo 2008). Subsequent work has involved examining: the role of interests in shaping the scientific facts that are put forward as reality (Hacking 1983; Knorr-Cetina 1981), the construction of facts in laboratories using ethnographic studies (Knorr-Cetina 1995; Latour and Woolgar [1979] 1986; Law 1994; Lynch 1985) and mapping material and semiotic relations—often referred to as an actor-network theory (ANT) approach (Callon 1986; Callon, Law, and Rip 1986; Latour 1987, 2005b; Law 2009; Law and Callon 1988; Law and Hassard 1999).
For Latour (2008), “a matter of concern is what happens to a matter of fact when you add to it its whole scenography, much like you would do by shifting your attention from the stage to the whole machinery of a theatre” (39). This is a form of empiricism that engages with facts by recognizing that “matters of fact are not all that is given in experience” and tends to the
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wider scenography of a “matter of fact” (Latour 2004b, 232). Latour (2004b) argues, “matters of fact are only very partial and … very polemical, very political renderings of matters of concern” (232). So the bifurcation between fact and concern is a false dichotomy as facts and concerns are inextricably entangled and implicated.
Representing matters of concern engages in a form of empiricism that Latour (2004b, 232) refers to as a “second empiricism”. Latour (2004b) draws on Whitehead’s ([1920] 2004, 27) argument that classical empiricism relied on the “bifurcation of nature” into “primary” (real) and “secondary” (perceived) qualities and that a new empiricism is necessary. “For us the red glow of the sunset should be as much a part of nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon” (Whitehead [1920] 2004, 29). The danger, or what Latour (2014c) refers to as “the great irony” (303), in believing in a bifurcation of nature is that it was “the surest way to continue to lose sight of what the Moderns themselves were doing: namely, multiplying interagentivity through science, technology, and economics” (303). Hence, the Moderns (Latour’s [1993] term for those who believe in the bifurcation of nature) were blind to the messy entanglements that occur between humans and non-humans, such as climate change. Rather than assuming the dualisms of object-subject, facts-values or nature-culture Latour’s (2004b, 2014c) second empiricism, and engagement with matters of concern, offers a way to escape an “idealistic definition of matter” (Latour 2014c, 303).
With this second empiricism Latour (2004b) does not intend to debunk empiricism, his aim is to avoid feeding into the practices of, for example, climate deniers who co-opt practices of critique. Instead, matters of concern are part of a renewed empiricism that reattaches facts to the material and social conditions of their production—they are a means of accounting for “a thing in all of its complexity” (Latour 2011, 162). Latour (2004b) argues that he was mistaken in believing “that there was no efficient way to criticize matters of fact except by moving away from them and directing one’s attention toward the conditions that made them possible”
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(231). This movement away from facts regarded facts as primary, it “meant accepting much too uncritically what matters of fact were” (231). Shifting attention to matters of concern opens up possibilities for addressing the ethical and political problems of cohabiting with non-human others. But is concern enough? Or, are there other ways of conceptualising the way knowledge is produced and how reality is made?
Reflecting on matters of concern, Puig de la Bellacasa (2011) suggests that concern is not affective enough to describe what is given in experience. She contends that “the implications of care are thicker than the politics turning around matters of concern” and, therefore, extends the affective dimension of matters of concern through her notion of matters of care (86). This exegesis builds on her proposal that matters of care offer a way of paying closer attention to the ethical and affective aspects of matter, and mattering, to create a “transformative ethos” and “contribute to liveable worlds” (100).
2.2.2 Matters of Care
In proposing an extension of Latour’s (2004, 2010) notion of matters of concern to matters of care Puig de la Bellacasa (2011) describes care as “an affective state, a material vital doing, and an ethico-political obligation” (90).
Care, when considered as an affective state speaks to the way caring manifests itself physically, as something that is felt. For example, the ways in which we observe, analyse and represent matters have an affective charge— these research practices affect the composition of things. The word “care” is derived from the Old English word caru, which, according to the online edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, means “grief, burdened state of mind, serious attention”. Metzger (2014) argues, “to learn to pay attention is … fundamental to learning to care, as attention formation sensitizes us to that on which we focus our attention” (1004). In caring, in becoming sensitized and affected, grief may occur as we become
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attuned to other entities. Puig de la Bellacasa (2011) argues that care arises from “a strong sense of attachment and commitment” (89). Matters of care are a means of tending to the attachments and commitments that are a necessary part of relating (Puig de la Bellacasa 2010). Tsing (2011) discusses “mushroom lovers” and emphasises how practices of “noticing” (6), such as searching for mushrooms, are “a way of teaching … open yet focused attention” and a means of creating “passionate immersion in the lives of the nonhumans” (19). Care is situated in, and arises from, material practices that generate affective attachments.
Thinking of care as a material vital doing, is to consider care as more than simply a feeling of concern for others, but as a means of physical and material action. “It requires that we get involved in some concrete way, that we do something (wherever possible) to take care of another” (van Dooren 2014, 291–292). Care, as a practice, can move beyond mere concern and attend to things in the margins, the neglected and vulnerable (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011). In addressing the way care is entangled in practices, Puig de la Bellacasa (2010) highlights that care is not about prioritising self-care, but acknowledging an interdependency of human and non-human actors and that “we are in relations of mutual care” (164). Care, as a form of “material vital doing” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011, 90), builds on notions of care that arise from feminist scholarship, particularly evident in Fischer and Tronto’s (1990) oft-quoted definition of care: “Everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all that we seek to interweave in a complex, life sustaining web” (40).
Notions of materiality and non-human vitality are also expressed across a range of STS scholarship (Haraway 2008; Moser 2008; Mol 2008; Pols 2003). For example, in Mol’s (2008) discussions of care and technology she writes “technologies always have unexpected effects. … in the logic of care it is something that points towards a task. … Do not just pay attention to what technologies are supposed to do, but also to what they happen to do, even if this is unexpected” (48–49). Being open to the vitality of matter and
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what occurs in a given situation is equally a part of care (Bennett 2010). In her description of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention Stengers (1997) demonstrates that if people are encouraged to take up practices that they care about, rather than providing people with technological fixes such as compulsory testing, then there is greater success.
As an ethico-political obligation, Sevenhuijsen (1998) has described care as “an ability and willingness to ‘see’ and to ‘hear’ needs and to take responsibility for these needs being met” (83). The notion of care and responsibility as a form of ethico-political obligation is also articulated in Haraway’s (2008, 2012) research on species interactions. She uses the term “response-ability” to denote the desire and capacity to respond to new knowledge (2008, 36), what she refers to as a “praxis of care and response” (2012, 302). Drawing on the etymology of responsibility Hache and Latour (2009) state, “respondeo: I become responsible by responding, in word or deed, to the call of someone or something” (312). Like Haraway’s (2008, 2012) notion of “response-ability” Hache and Latour (2009) highlight that responsibility is a practice, a mode of doing, which entangles care as a form of ethico-political obligation with care as a mode of vital material doing.
To further clarify the difference between matters of concern and matters of care Puig de la Bellacasa (2011) emphasises that care “aims to add something to matters of fact/concern with the intention of not only respecting them, but of engaging with their becoming” (100). She contends that as “an affective state, a material vital doing, and an ethico-political obligation” care is explicitly involved in the way that matters emerge (90). With emergence in mind, what does care mean for research and knowledge practices? Drawing on Puig de la Bellacasa, caring is not a moral stance by, say, a researcher, but involves the mutual becoming of both the researcher and the researched. Care is “not so much a notion that explains the construction of things than a suggestion on how those who study things can participate in their possible becomings” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011, 100).
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2.3 Careful Cosmopolitics
To further explore what matters of care can contribute to discussions of artistic intervention in ecological health I contrast Latour’s (2004a, 2004d) and Stengers’ (2005) versions of “cosmopolitics”. In contrast to a conventional notion of ethics, cosmopolitics advances an ethics and politics that are not based on the bifurcation of nature. To understand the term “cosmopolitics”, it is useful to break it down into its constituent parts:
Politics: Cosmopolitics does not reserve politics solely for humans; this notion of politics as not-just-human rejects the modernist presumption of a separate nature and society duality and the representational political practices it produces to bridge this gap between nature and society, which Latour (2008) declares to be a “‘hopeless problem’ of bridging a non-existent gap” (37).
Cosmos: Cosmopolitics rejects the notion that the cosmos pre-exists its articulation, waiting to be discovered, and instead proposes that the cosmos is progressively composed, mobilised by human and non-human actors (Latour 2008; Stengers 2005). Cosmopolitics is not to be confused with Becks (1999) cosmopolitanism. In contrast to mononaturalism, the “one cosmos” that Beck’s cosmopolitanism falsely presumes, a cosmopolitical approach (as suggested by Latour and Stengers) instead argues that a singular world is enacted and asks, “how this ‘same world’ can be slowly composed” (Latour 2004d, 457).
The “same world” or “common world” that Latour (2004d) refers to in developing his version of cosmopolitics, is built by a “collective” of humans and non-humans who democratically decide what beings/entities are to be part of the collective, a process and forum Latour (2004a) refers to as the “Parliament of Things” (227). Writing on democracy one of the arguments Latour (2005a) makes is that our attachments to things—issues— creates a public space, a political space, within which to assemble to discuss our concerns and come to a “provisional makeshift (dis)agreement” (13). He states “we might be more connected to each other by our worries, our
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matters of concern, the issues we care for, than by any other set of values, opinions, attitudes or principles” (2005a, 4). Latour (2005a) offers the Parliament of Things and “Dingpolitik” (a politics of things) to underpin this shift towards bringing sciences and democracy together (30). He states, “in the object-oriented conception, ‘parliament’ is a technical term for ‘making things public’ among many other forms of producing voices and connections among people” (24). The “Ding” in the word means “thing” and Latour uses the term to refer to both the actors that assemble due to their concerns and the reason for their concern (12). Dingpolitik is Latour’s way of engaging with the way concerns are entangled in settings; it replaces Realpolitik to stand for his expanded definition of the political. However, as Puig de la Bellacasa (2011) points out, Latour does not discuss the limits of representation within the Parliament of Things, this stands in contrast to Stengers’ (2005) notion of cosmopolitics:
Stengers’ cosmopolitical proposal gives a prominent space to the “victims”—those who retain no power to represent themselves; to groups who disrupt, or fall out of the cycle of representative politics; and to the “idiots”, who don’t want to be “included” and cannot “contribute” because they feel that “there is something more important” than the proposed issue. (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011, 101)
In contrast to a Parliament of Things, Stengers (2005) states that the cosmos in cosmopolitics does not refer to a known form. It does not refer to “any particular cosmos, or world, as a particular tradition may conceive of it. Nor does it refer to a project designed to encompass them all” (995). Rather, for Stengers, cosmos refers to “the unknown constituted by … multiple, divergent worlds, and to the articulations of which they could eventually be capable” (995). Marres (2012), like Puig de la Bellacasa (2011), is critical of Latour’s (2005a) Parliament of Things. She challenges his use of “the Parliament and the public debate to conjure up the space of democracy” (2012, 148). For Marres, this is an abstraction and does not adequately address the specific, relational aspects and affordances of settings and objects in the enactment of spaces of participation. Instead, she argues:
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Rather than conjuring up the space of participation by projecting institutional democratic forms onto empirical practice, we must investigate how the organization of participatory space involves a far more experimental assembly of specific technologies, settings and objects: smart meters, green living blogs, demonstrational houses and so on. (Marres, 2012, 149)
What this implies for art that adopts a cosmopolitical approach is the need to engage in experimental assemblies that negotiate what types of practice might support ecological health. But as Stengers (2005) warns, it is not the intention of a cosmopolitical practice “to say what is … but to provoke thought … to arouse a slightly different awareness of the problems and situations mobilizing us” (995). Drawing on Stengers’ (2005, 2010, 2011), notion of cosmopolitics the aim of this doctoral research is to establish a way of creating, a mode of artistic practice, that does not definitively state how ecological health ought to be, but problematizes practices that enact ecological health through an engagement with matters of care.
2.4 Composing Prospects
The critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles (Latour 2004b, 246).
2.4.1 Prospecting
Latour (2010) makes the distinction between having a future and having a prospect using the French words le future and l’avenir. Le future refers to future in the sense familiar in English—the progression of the present moment. In contrast, l’avenir is closer to the English term prospects, which Latour (2010) describes as “the shape of things to come” (486). He uses these two ways of thinking about futurity to discuss the predicament of the Moderns—“the Moderns always had a future (the odd utopian future of someone fleeing His past in reverse!) but never a chance, until recently that is, to turn to what I could call their prospect: the shape of things to come” (486). In using the term prospects he calls for a “radical transformation in
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the definition of what it means to progress, that is, to process forward and meet new prospects. Not as a war cry for an avant-garde to move even further and faster ahead, but rather as a warning, a call to attention, so as to stop going further in the same way as before toward the future” (473).
Drawing on Latour (2010), engaging with ecological health concerns can be seen as a “move from an idea of inevitable progress to one of tentative and precautionary progression” (473). It is to move beyond an understanding of future as inevitable technoscientific progress to something that is enacted, something that is prospected, with attention and care. Prospecting shifts the noun, prospects, into a verb, turning it into a “material vital doing” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011, 90). Latour (2010) does not explicitly take up a notion of “prospecting” to refer to a method of enacting prospects. However, prospecting is a useful way to refer to the practice of tending to what comes next as it shifts progress from a sense of manifesting the “inevitable thrust of progress” (Latour 2010, 488). Prospecting moves the pursuit of knowledge without care of consequence to “tentative and precautionary progression” (Latour 2010, 473). In using the term “prospecting” I do not propose to address expectations of technoscience, the hopes, hype, promises and anticipation of science and technology. This is well explored in sociology of expectations literature—the exploration of how user expectations shape innovation and change in science and technology (see Brown and Michael 2003). I draw specifically on Latour’s notion of prospects to imply a questioning of progress, a means of slowing down technoscientific practice to ask “what ought to be done?” (Latour 2004a, 125). As Latour (2004a) writes, “the question of what ought to be … is not a moment in the process; rather, it is coextensive with the entire process” (125).
2.4.2 From Critique to Composition
For Latour (2010), a Kantian ([1790] 1952) notion of critique is no longer tenable because it is based on the idea that “a true world of realities” can be uncovered (474). In contrast, within a compositionist approach, there is no bifurcation of nature and hence no true world. Rather, he asks scholars
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“to associate the word criticism with a whole set of new positive metaphors, gestures, attitudes, knee-jerk reactions, habits of thoughts” (2004b, 247). He makes this request more fervently through the form of a manifesto, arguing: “it is time to compose—in all the meanings of the word, including to compose with, that is to compromise, to care, to move slowly, with caution and precaution” (2010, 487). Latour (2010) states, “what performs a critique cannot also compose. It is really a mundane question of having the right tools for the right job” (475). It is argued in this exegesis that care—when combined with a practice of prospecting and asking “what ought to be done?”—becomes a methodological device for composing; a tool with which to “repair … assemble, reassemble, stitch together” (Latour 2010, 475). In demonstrating how entities are created, gathered, assembled, the point is not to decompose them; rather, to reveal the attachments that hold things in place is “to care”. It is to ask: “how can a liveable and breathable ‘home’ be built…?” (Latour 2010, 488). A range of public engagement approaches to composing prospects have been articulated and critiqued within STS, these discussions provide further insight into how one might compose alternative ecological health prospects.
In the next section science communication and public engagement practices are explored in more detail through STS literature, in order to elaborate how healthier ecological prospects might be composed. The line of enquiry then shifts to a discussion of affective engagement practices in art, drawing on the STS literature, to provide a context and theoretical basis for the empirical research conducted in this exegesis.
2.5 Politics, Aesthetics and Public Engagement
Trench (2008) usefully categorises existing science communication practices into three different modes: “deficit”, “dialogue” and “participation” (119). The deficit mode, or “information-deficit model”, is defined by Trench as, “one-way communication from experts with knowledge to publics without it” (119). The deficit model has been widely
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criticised within STS for relying on false epistemological assumptions, as it does not adequately take into account the contexts, barriers and relations necessary for successful communication (see Wynne 1992; Wynne 1993; Irwin 2001; Irwin 2006). Trench (2008) articulates the dialogue model as a process that “engages publics in two-way communication and draws on their information and experiences” (119). In contrast to both the deficit and dialogue models, the participation approach described by Trench offers greater “multidirectional” communication between publics and experts (132). In the participation approach “communication about science takes place between … diverse groups on the basis that all can contribute, and that all have a stake in the outcome of the deliberations and discussions”, states Trench (132). Although Trench’s conception of the participation model offers greater flexibility for public engagement it still focuses on discursive practices, “to the exclusion of other features, such as embodiment, materiality, affect and place” (Davies 2014, 90).
Irwin (2008) argues that alternative possibilities for engagement arise if we move beyond the “unreflexive language of ‘deficit and dialogue’” (210). Rather, he advocates a “reflection-informed practice” of public engagement, which involves “contextual judgement” as it calls for “more critical reflection … about the relationship between technical change, institutional priorities and wider conceptions of social welfare and justice” (207). The purpose of a reflexive mode is to “open up fresh interconnections between public, scientific, institutional, political and ethical visions of change in all their heterogeneity, conditionality and disagreement” (210). In an extension of participatory and reflective practices a number of scholars have articulated modes of engagement that deal with greater affective and material registers (see Davies 2014; Horst 2011; Horst and Michael 2011; Marres 2012a).
Michael (1998) has articulated the pleasures that can arise during the purchasing of technoscientific devices and has demonstrated that people have many ways of engaging with technoscience, for example, not just as citizens but also as consumers. Horst and Michael (2011) have explored the
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playful and seemingly “idiotic” ways in which members of the public have engaged with a science installation in a suburban shopping centre, subverting the intentions and assumptions of the researchers. The material dimensions of engagement have been explicitly and extensively discussed by Marres (2012a) in her efforts to “locate public engagement with environmental issues in everyday material practice” (3). Material forms of participation can be characterized as:
An investigation that queries how objects, devices, settings and materials, not just subjects, acquire explicit political capacities, capacities that are themselves the object of public struggle and contestation, and serve to enact distinctive ideals of citizenship and participation. (Marres and Lezaun 2011, 491)
Shifts towards material forms of participation are offered to reformulate a depiction and understanding of publics as solely discursively constituted (Marres 2012; Marres and Lezaun 2011). They dislodge the deeply embedded conception of politics, citizens and democracy as primarily linguistic (Marres 2011). As Marres (2011) argues, “we have only to think of a term such as ‘public sphere’, and the careful delimitation of the kinds of activities conductive to its emergence that defines its use in contemporary democratic theory, to grasp the difficulty of coming up with a political vocabulary that is not premised on disembodied ‘voice’ and linguistic exchange” (492). Davies (2014) also points out the lack of incorporation of “the emotional, creative, aesthetic and embodied into our engagement practices”, what she refers to as a “lacuna in the literature on public engagement with science” (103). She argues that examples from art “seem likely to help introduce different kinds of knowledge and experience into public participation, or to highlight aspects of science or everyday experience that are often occluded in deliberation” (98). To counter this affective deficit, scholars across a range of fields are explicitly investigating the socio-material aspects of public engagement and asking how settings, things and materials constitute an expanded sense of political engagement, including research into pharmaceuticals (Barry 2005), fat (Bennett 2010) and plastic bottles (Hawkins 2011).
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Given current understandings about deficits in engagement practices what role does art and aesthetics have? Of relevance to this practice-based research project is the ways in which innovative forms of material and affective participation are used in art and how they might lead to an expanded notion of matters of care in ecological health. In the next section, before highlighting practices of care within existing contemporary artworks addressing ecological health concerns, the implication of Latour’s (2013) call for a “new aesthetic” for matters of concern is explored in relation to care and contemporary art.
2.5.1 Connective Aesthetics
Latour (2013) proposes that producing, and engaging with, matters of concern requires a new aesthetic. He frames aesthetic in the original etymological sense of the word, which is the ability to make oneself sensitive; to “agree to hear in the word aesthetic its old meaning of being able to ‘perceive’ and to be ‘concerned,’ that is, a capacity to render oneself sensitive, a capacity that precedes any distinction between the instruments of science, of art and of politics” (97). Latour (2008b) (taking this understanding of aesthetic) argues that a new aesthetic for matters of concern is not predicated on the “‘hopeless task’ of bridging a non-existing gap” between subject and object, as is the aesthetic, or “style”, of matters of fact but describes “our real state of affairs” (46). But, how is this new aesthetic for matters of concern, or rather matters of care, to be achieved? How are we to render ourselves sensitive? And what role can artists play in creating this new aesthetic to improve ecological health?
Latour’s (2008b) articulation of aesthetics shares similarities with Rancière’s (2006) more extensive scholarship on aesthetics. Rancière’s re- formulation of aesthetics as a disruption into the everyday has been influential to artists wishing to stage a post-Kantian engagement with the political (see Bishop 2012). As Tanke (2011) states, “Rancière is fond of saying, the arts contribute to projects of political emancipation what they can: they re-configure the sphere of appearances, reframe the way problems
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have been posed, and they contest the apportionment of capacities, voices, and roles” (78). Central to Rancière’s (2006) conception of “the aesthetic regime of art” is the paradox in which art and non-art are articulated as separate, however there are no clear distinctions of how to separate them, leading to productive ambiguities. As Rancière argues, “the aesthetic regime asserts the absolute singularity of art and, at the same time, destroys any pragmatic criterion for isolating this singularity. It simultaneously establishes the autonomy of art and the identity of its forms with the forms that life uses to shape itself (23); this paradox allows for the “redistribution of the sensible” (43). Art, therefore, opens a space for re-imagining what can be articulated and visualised by, in part, refusing to be part of everyday life. For Rancière this is the political power of art—it alters the framework of the sensible. However, there is an “anthropocentric prejudice” to Rancière’s articulation of aesthetics and conception of politics, which must be resisted if a more expansive cosmopolitical and care-full aesthetics is to be put in practice (Bennett 2005, 142). For, Rancière’s notion of aesthetics focuses on a human-centred understanding of aesthetics, rather than a more expansive more-than-human understanding that is developed in this exegesis.
Kagan’s (2011) articulation of an “aesthetics of sustainability” begins to answer how an aesthetics of matters of care for ecological health might be practiced (67). He draws on Dewey’s ([1934] 2005) notion of “aesthetics as experience, pointing at personal affectivity in everyday life and at a human being’s overall interrelationship with his/her [their] environment” (Kagan 2011, 67). Dewey’s understanding of aesthetics is expanded via Bateson’s (1972) conception of aesthetics as “responsive to the pattern which connects” (Bateson 1972, 8), although Kagan acknowledges that “aesthetics may not always be ‘connective’” (69). Crucially, for Kagan, an aesthetics of sustainability “is to be understood as a subset of aesthetics as understood by Dewey, i.e. a form of relation and process-centred aesthetics, which bases itself on a sensibility to patterns that connect at multiple levels”. It involves “probing for connections across differences”, whereby “tensions and
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conflicts are recognized as harbouring potentialities for new levels of unity” (69).
The pivotal role aesthetics plays in generating connections, is emerging as an interdisciplinary concern across a range of fields, including STS, cultural geography, environmental humanities, posthuman studies and political theory particularly around the role imagination might play in ethical thought and practice (see Gabrys and Yusoff 2012). For example, the political theorist Bennett (2010) examines how human bodies might be sensitised to “an aesthetic-affective openness to material vitality” as a political act (x). The posthuman scholar Hayles (2014) also calls for a redefinition of “the aesthetic mission” to generate connections across humans and non-humans (178). She addresses how we might re-imagine our understanding of humanness by challenging anthropocentrism and acknowledging “a posthuman world in which other species, objects, and artificial intelligences compete and cooperate to fashion the dynamic environments in which we all live” (179). To move beyond anthropocentric aesthetics Hayles outlines a “speculative aesthetics” to imaginatively project alternate worldviews (178). As she explains:
The traditional division in aesthetics between those who hold that aesthetics is grounded in the object’s own qualities, and those who locate it in human perception, is in a certain sense fused into a single approach which holds that the object’s own qualities are expressed through the evidentiary bases, and that these are apprehended by human imagination and perception to create analogue projections of an object’s world view. At the same time, aesthetics is separated from its traditional basis in beauty and re-located in the endeavour to recognise that every real object possesses—or even more strongly, has a right to—its own experience of the world, including biological, animate, and inanimate objects. (Hayles 2014, 178)
What Latour (2008b, 2013), Racier (2006), Kagan (2011), Bennett (2010) and Hayles (2014) share, in their call for and exploration of how a different conception of aesthetics might be understood and practiced, is a sensitisation and connection across difference; thus returning to the etymological roots of aesthetics in “esthetic, sensitive, sentient” (Hayles
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2014, 158). What can be gleaned from these insights is the potential of art, and aesthetic engagement more widely, to assist in connective, affective, material practices to advance public engagement in ecological health.
This discussion of aesthetics requires contextualising within contemporary art practice: How does this conception of aesthetics relate to the rapidly expanding body of artistic engagement in environmental issues at the intersection of art, ecological health and technoscience? What is the status of ecological art now? The emergence of ecological art needs to be briefly explored to contextualise the discussion. To articulate the way artistic practice and notions of the aesthetic have expanded from early (1960s) ecologically focused artwork I contrast a restorationist eco-aesthetic (generated by artists involved in restoring ecosystems) with an expanded notion of aesthetic offered by contemporary artworks featured in the exhibition curated by Latour and Weibel, Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (2005). Then, the remainder of the chapter explores instantiations of care by contemporary artists addressing ecological health concerns.
2.5.2 Ecological Art: Restorationist Aesthetics to Making Things Public
Ecological focused art is typically driven by artists who wish to directly intervene in matters of ecological concern and often results in artists moving from studio-based practices to adopting public engagement approaches. Davis and Turpin (2015) state that “what is particularly interesting in this movement from the studio to [what they refer to as] the landfill is that the role of art becomes equally contentious and exploratory; its position is opened up to inquiry in ways that remain inconclusive and open-ended, but nevertheless political and partisan” (14). There are multiple genealogies of aesthetics and art that have influenced/are influencing exploratory contemporary artistic engagement in ecological health: ecological art or eco-art (Brookner 1992; Gablik 1991), “restorationist eco- aesthetics” (Demos 2009), “ecovention (ecological intervention)” (Spaid 2002), “socially engaged art” (Thompson 2011), “relational aesthetics”
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(Bourriaud 2002), “synthetic aesthetics” (Ginsberg et al. 2014), “critical design” (Dunne and Raby 2013), BioArt (da Costa and Philip 2008) “adversarial design” (DiSalvo 2012) and post-human aesthetics (Dixon et al. 2012) to name a few. Each of these various practices employ a range of modes to engage with environmental issues, including: representational and documentation modes, experiential works, critique, direct protest and/or activism, remediation, social sculpture or relational works, pedagogical/educational and speculative futures. It is outside the scope of this research to detail these genealogies or describe in detail the different modes of intervention used. However, by contrasting a “restorationist eco- aesthetic” (Demos 2009) with an expanded notion of aesthetic offered by Latour and Weibel’s exhibition Making Things Public (2005) I endeavour to contextualise the breadth of this field.
Artworks focused on restoring ecologies arose in the late 1960’s, mainly in North-America and West Europe alongside the growing environmental movement (Matilsky 1992, 36). The dominant aesthetic within these works is what Demos (2009) refers to as a “restorationist eco- aesthetics”, a term that describes “art that attempts to repair damaged habitats or to revive degraded ecosystems” (19). Artistic ecological restoration works included turning landfills into parks, redesigning watersheds to improve water quality (Haacke 1972) and restoring contaminated plots of land by leaching toxic metals from the soil. The American artist, Mel Chin’s Revival Field (1990–1993) is also exemplary of this approach. The project, designed in collaboration with a specialist in land reclamation, Rufus Chaney, consisted of a field of plants specifically chosen to remove toxic metals from contaminated soil on a State Superfund site in Minnesota—an abandoned site listed by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as containing hazardous waste. Restorationist works experimented with ways to improve the ecological health of different sites and, as in the case of Chin’s Revival Field, they developed practices that could be adopted by others to care for contaminated areas. However, some restorationist artworks have been
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criticised for perpetuating an ontological division between nature and society (Demos 2009). The problem of a restorationist eco-aesthetic—as exemplified by the framing of Revival Field in the prominent American show on environmental art, Fragile Ecologies (Matilsky 1992)—is the tendency to position “nature” as self-evident (Demos 2009; McKee 2007). In this way “nature ends up objectified as an ontology divorced from social, political and technological processes” (Demos 2009, 20). Nonetheless, what early restorationist artworks do allude to is the way art has the potential to publically stage performative experiments with different ecologies—such as restoring fields and revitalising rivers; and the question becomes how can art gather and reconfigure material realities without taking nature as self- evident and simplify ecological health concerns through easy categorisation? From the seventies, eighties and nineties, alongside artworks that engaged in restorationist eco-aesthetics, there are examples of art that illustrate a more interconnected and politically orientated notion of ecology and that engage with and produce matters of concern.
The art exhibition, Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, and accompanying catalogue organised by Latour in 2005 at Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM), Germany, with artist, curator and theoretician Peter Weibel is exemplary of wider notions of politics, art and ecology. It featured a hundred artists, philosophers, scientists, sociologists and historians who were asked to imagine: “What would an object-oriented democracy look like?” (Latour 2005a, 4). Taking up this question, the artworks and texts variously explored what it would mean to move politics from the realm of parliaments and congresses restricted to “human” affairs, to enable politics to incorporate things (Latour 2005a). As Latour elaborates:
We hope that once this assembly of assemblies is deployed, that which passes for the political sphere – namely the parliaments and the offices of the executive branches – will appear as one type among many others, perhaps even a rather ill equipped type. This approach to presenting the representation technology of parliamentary life will not seek to ridicule its antiquated ways or to criticize the European way of imagining public space. On the contrary, in the object-oriented conception, “parliament” is
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a technical term for “making things public” among many other forms of producing voices and connections among people. (Latour 2005a, 24)
In contrast to many artworks that employ a restorationist aesthetic, the artworks featured in Making things Public could be said to “unsettle the self-evidence of ‘environment’ itself, addressing it as a contingent assemblage of biological, technological, economic and governmental concerns whose boundaries and agencies are perpetually exposed to conflict” (McKee 2007, 557).
With a notion of aesthetics articulated and contemporary ecologically focused art contextualised, I wish to return to Latour’s (2004b) sentiment that we need to compose as, to paraphrase Latour, critique has run out of steam. Composition, as Latour (2010) reminds us, “has clear roots in art, painting, music, theatre, dance, and thus is associated with choreography and scenography” and “draws attention away from the irrelevant difference between what is constructed and what is not constructed, toward the crucial difference between what is well or badly constructed, well or badly composed” (473). But what are the aesthetic frameworks for analysing and valuing a well or badly created composition? Latour does not provide a clear guide. The contribution this exegesis makes is the extension of matters of care to artistic interventions in ecological health crises in order to develop the conceptual, ethical framework careful prospecting (see chapter 7). It asks how artistic forms of participation can contribute to an understanding of the role of care in research practices. Before moving onto my methodology and articulation of how I intend to develop this framework, the next section provides further contextualisation of my research through a description of contemporary political art engaged with practices of care.
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2.6 Art, Care and Ecological Health
In order to contextualise the following empirical case studies (chapters 4-6) I will briefly explore how care and ecological health are entangled in four contemporary artworks: Patricia Piccinini’s sculptures in Nature’s Little Helpers (2004); Coal Fired Computers by YoHa (2010), Kathy High’s installation Embracing Animal (2004-2006) and the multi-media work Pigeonblog by Beatriz da Costa (2006). These artworks were selected as they have influenced my own artistic practice and, as an artist-researcher, I identified with their values.
Piccinini’s Nature’s Little Helpers (2004) series portrays genetically modified creatures designed to assist animals at the edge of extinction. The life-size sculpture, Surrogate (for the Northern Hairy Nosed Wombat) (2004) within this series, proposes a creature that has been genetically modified to hold and care for six wombats in pouches along its back. Walking around the sculpture, its fleshy pink stomach and front morphs into a hairy armoured spine, with wombats in different stages of maturity visible nestled in the drawstring dorsal pouches on it’s back. Piccinini does not dictate a moral judgement through this artwork; rather, through the fleshy shaping of these creatures she invites an embodied curiosity, or unsettling physical repulsion. In Australia, the northern hairy nosed wombat is currently facing extinction, and scientists are experimenting to see if the southern hairy nosed wombat can be a surrogate for its northern kin. Nature’s Little Helpers propels notions of surrogate species into the near future and invites speculative questions: what is the role of genetic engineering in supporting ecological biodiversity and health, what crises might arise from genetic manipulation, or what loving, caring relations?
Writing on Piccinini’s work, Haraway (2011) asks: “how might a speculatively fabulated … art object help morph eroded and disowned no- places into flourishing and cared-for places?” (100). By way of an answer, Haraway states “the point for me in Piccinini’s Nature’s Little Helpers is
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parenting, not reproducing. Parenting is about caring for generations, one’s own or not; reproducing is about making more of oneself to populate the future, quite a different matter (117). For Haraway, part of the practice of making kin is taking responsibility for the technoscientific trouble that emerges in the process of composition. Latour (2012) refers to this trouble as the ethical obligation to “love your monsters”. With reference to Mary Shelley’s work of fiction, Frankenstein (1823), Latour writes, “Dr. Frankenstein's crime was not that he invented a creature through some combination of hubris and high technology, but rather that he abandoned the creature to itself” (para. 4). Piccinini echoes this sentiment in a statement about her artwork: “In my work, perhaps I am saying that whether you like them or you don’t like them, we actually have a duty to care. We created them, so we’ve got to look after them” (quoted in Haraway 2011, 101). What Piccinini’s works call for is the necessity of taking care of the unexpected, for “the ecological, evolutionary and assisted-reproduction narratives of Nature’s Little Helpers all pulsate with pastpresent lives and the ongoing care they demand” (Haraway 2011, 108).
On a less speculative fiction register, High’s installation Embracing Animal (2004-06) features a rat house designed by High along with three transgenic rats inhabitants named Matilda, Tara and Star, who lived in the installation for 10 months. Matilda, Tara and Star were Model HLA-B27 rats provided by Taconic and contain human DNA so that they can be studied to provide insights into human health. This particular rat model contains traits that enable autoimmune disease research on illnesses similar to the artist’s own Crohn’s autoimmune disease. The house built for the rats—“an ersatz laboratory, a penthouse living quarters” according to High (2004-06, para.3)—provided an opportunity for people to interact with the rats. However, due to the nocturnal habits of rats and the health and safety policies of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), the main interactions occurred with the night watchman Mike Wilber. Accompanying the installation of the rat habitat High included videos and sound, and a website featuring a Rat Love Manifesto and Rat Care
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Manual. The care manual outlines for the caretakers what the rats needs are, beginning with the claim: “Rats are delicate creatures. They need lots of attention and care. They are very intelligent animals” (High 2004, para. 1). The material elements of the artwork are listed on the artists website as “Site-specific, mixed media installation with glass tubes, video, sound, live transgenic laboratory rats in extended rat habitat, computer terminal with website” (High 2004-06, caption 1), however it is the socio-material relationships of care that are central to the project.
The aim of the installation was to honour “our kinship with our transgenic animal partners” (High 2004-06, para. 4). In order to explore this kinship High (2008) states, “I bought [transgenic rats] to conduct research and to treat them holistically with alternative medicines, environmental enrichment, good food, and play. I want to relate to them because I, too, have autoimmune problems” (466). The practices of care within the exhibition were a means for High to make visible the invisible labour of rats as instruments of science. It was a practice of taking responsibility, or in High’s (n.d.) words, “a symbolic gesture to ritualize the invisible worker rats who remain unnamed, uncounted, unrecognised” (6). These practices of care visualised in Embracing Animal is a step towards what Gruen (2009) describes as “engaged empathy” a process which “requires gaining wisdom and perspective and, importantly, motivates the empathizer to act ethically” to care (23).
In contrast to non-human animal others, Coal-Fired Computers (2010) by UK-based artists YoHa (Graham Harwood and Matsuko Yokokoji) in collaboration with Jean Denmars, explores how energy is manifested in political arrangements of health, disease, labour, waste and coal consumption. The media installation Coal-Fired Computers, or “contraption” to use YoHa’s terminology, consists of a coal powered steam-engine powering one computer that searches a database for people with symptoms of coal induced lung disease. As new records emerge the contraption is triggered, causing a pair of black lungs to inflate, explicitly linking the consumption of coal to the toxic health impacts it has on human bodies.
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The purpose of the project, according to YoHa, is to encourage people to re-imagine their relationship with coal and ask how we become entangled with the devices we regularly use. The work was produced in consultation with UK miners. Out of these conversations emerged the sentiment from ex-Miners that the production of coal and globalisation would be significantly different if the miners had won the 84/85 UK miners strike. Taking the strike as its starting point, Coal-Fired Computers explores the relocation of coal production, and negative environmental health impacts, to places like China and India. Gabrys (2014), writing on the materialisation of energy in the project, states, “the materiality of energy is not a performance of economizing, but rather of materializing in order to make present the political arrangements that sustain energy extraction and use” (2104).
As with High’s artwork, Embracing Animal, Coal-Fired Computers asks for empathy and care to be extended to invisible labour. The artwork calls for concern and care for the people and contexts, predominantly in the global South, burdened with the health impacts of energy and technology consumption in the global North. Similar to Embracing Animal, attendants of Coal-Fired Computers also contributed to the articulation of practices of care through the tending to the artwork, but also, more significantly, via the conversations they had with audience members. The attendant’s YoHa invited to look after the work were ex coal miner’s with lung disease and miner activists health residues. YoHa explains:
Coal Fired Computers allows those who man the installation, its miners, its steam engine fed on coal, its computer and attached lungs and the audience, to explore through a physical diagram the shifts of lung disease and coal production across the world since the UK’s 1984-85 miners strike. The politics is here but it is the understanding of technologies of power, electrical, fossil fuel, microbial or mineral. (Digicult n.d., para. 9)
Continuing with the theme of dust in lungs, the media artwork Pigeonblog (2006) by Beatriz da Costa in collaboration with other artists, homing pigeons, engineers and pigeon fanciers explores the knowledge
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politics of air quality within southern California. Pigeonblog was a grass-roots citizen science data gathering project involving pigeons set up with air quality sensors including global positioning system (GPS) capable of transmitting real-time air quality data to a website (da Costa 2008). This citizen driven approach stands in contrast to a fixed way of measuring air quality by the government via air monitoring stations spread through the city. The artwork questioned the knowledge politics inherent to specific scientific methods, and also the relationships and composition of matters of care. For, rather than simply critiquing the validity of the knowledge acquired by government monitoring practices, Pigeonblog shifted the question of ecological health from an accumulation of matters of fact to explore how various entities interact to produce air quality. Born and Barry (2010) argue that Pigeonblog “enacts a logic of ontology” as it reconfigures “air quality not as a property of air, but as a relation between pollution and those who are affected by it” (114). As with Nature’s Little Helpers; Embracing Animal and Coal Fired Computers the reconfiguring and re-imagining of social and material relations is articulated as being critical to manifesting, and caring for, alternative health ecologies. Rather than concentrating on the distinct properties of individual entities, these artworks employ an ecological aesthetics to sensitive publics to “patterns that connect” (see Kagan 2011). They each sensitise and engage publics in embodied, material and affective ways of knowing and re-imagining ecological health. Thereby, offering a means of exploring modes of engagement that illicit care by provoking curiosity and responsibility. What are the materialities, knowledges and more-than-discursive practices that result? It is towards these questions that I turn in my case studies.
2.7 Conclusion
The proposition within this exegesis is that a means to perform “ethical visions of change”, as suggested by Irwin (2008, 210), is through affective cosmopolitical practices that engage with matters of care. This chapter explores interconnections between practices of care, cosmopolitics,
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prospects and knowledge politics to provide a basis from which to examine ways in which contemporary art engages in enacting ecological health. Care is defined in this chapter as “an affective state, a material vital doing, and an ethico-political obligation” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011, 90). Central to this chapter, and wider exegesis, is the role of care in enacting ecological health. In particular, Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2011) extension of Latour’s (2004b) notion of matters of concern to matters of care is utilised to articulate how deeper affective notions of public engagement in science are needed in order to explore the complex ways in which ecological health is enacted in practice. This does not deny the importance of discourse in engagement, but contributes to an expansion of the possibilities of public engagement in science through investigating the role of materiality, affect, embodiment and enactment of care within art practice. Ecologically orientated artworks that instantiate care were discussed in order to explore ways in which art undoes matters of fact to develop affective matters of care and “engaged empathy” (Gruen 2009, 23). The following chapter on the methods and methodology used within this doctoral research takes up this point and describes the performative practice-led approach used to conduct this research.
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Research Design
3.1 Introduction: Politics of Method
This research was conducted within the humanities and social sciences at the University of New South Wales—I was affiliated with the Environmental Humanities Group and the Journalism and Media Research Centre—rather than within an art school. The choice to conduct practice- led doctoral research outside an art school context was driven by my desire to conduct an interdisciplinary project that drew on methods from both STS and creative arts to “develop more generative research pedagogies and methodologies beyond the discipline [of art]” (Barrett 2007, 2). Practice-led research is used to refer both to the artwork as a research outcome and as a means of research (Smith and Dean 2009). With recourse to recent reflections on politics of methods and practices of care in STS and art (see Asdal and Marres 2014; Harding 2005; Lury and Wakeford 2012; Puig de la Bellacasa 2011; Steinmetz 2005), this chapter develops a performative case study approach. This performative approach explores how values and materialities are enacted in specific practices and the world making effects of practices (Latour 2004a, 2004d; Law 2004, Law and Urry 2004; Mol 2002).
This chapter first draws on insights from STS to describe the performative practice-led case study approach used in this doctoral research. Second, three case studies are outlined in detail in relation to my role and
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responsibilities, the research setting and ethics: Jeremijenko’s The Environmental Health Clinic, Riley’s Windowfarms and a case study of my own artistic practice, Black-Noise and Carbon Valley. Third, I describe the different methods I used to conduct the case studies: semi-structured interviews; participant observation and visual diary; document, media and artefact analysis; photography, video and digital storytelling. Finally, this chapter ends with a discussion of the key concerns, challenges and critiques of this research.
Interdisciplinary engagement with environmental issues, at both a policy and research level, unsettles some of the methodological hierarchies of studying ecological health (Asdal and Marres 2014). This unsettling raises a range of questions: In contrast to so-called hard sciences, what methodologies do interdisciplinary arts and social science practices employ that offer inventive ways of contributing to and assisting in environmental change with regards to ecological health? What politics, ethics and knowledge practices do they engage in and enact in order to reimagine and improve ecological health? In interdisciplinary research on ecological health, how does methodology affect the epistemological, ontological and political questions asked? Do methods ensure objectivity, validity and accuracy; or do they oversimplify and clean up messy and complex issues? (see Law 2004).
3.2 A Performative Paradigm
Within the field of STS there is a range of scholars experimenting with how art and science methods, can engage with “important reality enactments” and respond to “the fleeting, distributed, multiple, sensory, emotional and the kinaesthetic” (Law and Urry 2004, 403; see also Back and Puwar 2012; Back, Lury and Zimmer 2013; Latour and Weibel 2005; Lury and Wakeford 2012; Marres 2012a; Michael 2012b, 2012c). Creative practice research is increasingly becoming a valued part of academic knowledge practices across a range of disciplines (Barrett and Bolt 2007; Biggs and Büchler 2007; Latour and Weibel 2005; Milech and Schilo 2004;
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Webb and Brien 2008). Although there is still some contention over the capacity of artistic research to meaningfully contribute to the production of empirically based knowledge due to its perceived lack of rigour (see Biggs and Büchler 2007), creative practice as research is gaining global acknowledgement for its innovative and rigorous research methodologies— in part this argument has been driven by international debate that aims to have creative works accepted as forms of research (Bolt 2004; Haseman 2006; Haseman and Mafe 2009; Krauth 2002; Lycouris 2000; Marshall and Newton 2000; Smith and Dean 2009). Creative practice as research is now widely established in universities, particularly in Australia where I conducted this research.
Carter (2004, 10) argues that “to conceive of the work of art as a detached datum is to internalize a scientific paradigm of knowledge production”, which is “wrong for science” and undermines the relational potential of art. This statement can be taken to mean that one of the values of art is its capacity to highlight material agency within practices; art brings attention to the performativity of materials, and therefore challenges positivist notions in “hard sciences” that the experimental device or instrument, such as a microscope, can be removed from the “facts” produced with that instrument (Mol 2002; see Guba and Lincoln 1994 on positivism). The device is both the means by which we generate knowledge about the world and the tool used to intervene in and create the world. Mol (2002) proposes that devices, such as microscopes, and the practices that go along with them enact different versions of reality. It is my contention that art has the potential not only to open new spaces for affective research, but also to engage with the performativity of research instruments and the relations they produce.
Writing on art, Haseman (2007) argues for the performative aspects of artistic research to be acknowledged; he states that practice-led research constitutes “an entirely new research paradigm” that he refers to as “performative research” (148). Haseman contends that although practice-led research shares similarities with some qualitative methods and research
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practices, such as participant observation and reflective practice (DeWalt and DeWalt 1998; Schön 1983), it “can not merely be subsumed under the qualitative research framework”, hence the need for its own “performative research” paradigm (Haseman 2007, 148; see also Haseman 2006). For, he asserts, “practice-led research employs its own distinctive research approach with its own strategies and methods, drawn from the long-standing and accepted working methods and practices of artists and practitioners across the arts and emerging creative disciplines” (148). The two distinctive features of Haseman’s concept are: (1) performative research is expressed “in forms of symbolic data … these include material forms of practice, of still and moving images, of music and sound of live action and digital code” and (2) it is “multi-method led by practice” (151). Bolt (2008) concurs with Haseman (2007) and suggests a “performative paradigm potentially offers the creative arts a radical new vision and a way of distinguishing its research from the dominant models of knowledge” (1).
The performative research approach outlined by Haseman builds on the qualitative tradition including, action research (Reason and Bradbury 2001), participant research (DeWalt and DeWalt 1998), and notions of the reflective practitioner in which reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action occurs (Schön 1983). These modes of inquiry, like practice-led research, respond to “the situations of practice—the complexity, uncertainty, instability, uniqueness and value conflict” (Schön 1983, 14). A performative paradigm acknowledges that methods intervene and adapt and change with the problem at hand. This sentiment is also expressed by the scholars Lury and Wakeford (2012): “It is not possible to apply a method as if it were indifferent or external to the problem it seeks to address, but … methods must rather be made specific and relevant to the problem” (2). Performative research offers a way of conducting research that acknowledges the embodied, material, affective and vital attributes of research practices.
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3.3 Performative Case Study Approach
A case study approach was chosen for its capacity to answer why and how questions in which control over the research events is limited (Yin 2009). Although Miles (1979) contends that case studies are only useful for the exploratory phase of research, Yin argues that case studies are only restricted by the researchers understanding of the applications, the research questions and the design of the case studies.
Within social sciences there is some contention over what a case study is: whether it is a method, methodology or simply a means of giving the researcher guidance over what to study. For example, for Willig (2008, 78) a case study is not a method because it is not a technique for collecting data; she asserts that case studies “are not characterized by the methods used to collect and analyse data”. Stake (2005) shares Willig’s point of view and refutes the claim that a case study is a method, nor does he view it as a methodology; rather, for Stake a case study is “a choice of what is to be studied” (438). Following Stake, my position is that a case study does not provide a theory of how to conduct research, such as which data collection methods to use, but provides guidance on what is to be studied; in other words, the unit of analysis delineates the case—the bounded system. Or, as Merriam (2009) writes, “a case study is an in-depth description and analysis of a bounded system” (40). The view that a case study is defined by its emphasis on a specific unit of analysis (in other words, a case) is shared by a variety of scholars who discuss case study approaches (Creswell 2009; Gillham 2000; Miles and Huberman 1994; Stake 1994, 2005; Willig 2008; Yin 2003, 2009, 2012).
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1. Contemporary problem to be studied
Creswell’s (2007) emphasis on a case study as a contemporary “problem to be studied” implies that a case study approach is a flexible tool to examine how ecological health is enacted within artistic interventions.
2. Multiple bounded systems studied over time
Three case studies were conducted, each with a particular art project as the bounded system for the case studied over time: The Environmental Health Clinic (xClinic) by Jeremijenko, Windowfarms by Riley and my own artworks, Black-Noise and Carbon Valley.
3. Involves detailed in-depth data collection using multiple sources
Creswell (2007) states that in case study design multiple sources of evidence can be used and a range of different methods can be applied to collect and analyse the data, or a “palette of methods” to use Stake’s (1995, xii) phrasing. The multiple sources of data I use are: • Semi-structured Interviews • Participant Observation and Visual Diary • Document, Media and Artefact Analysis • Photography, Video and Digital Storytelling
As a result, my body of data includes:
• Fourteen interviews • Over 500 photographs • Twelve hours of video • Visual Diary kept from June 2010 to May 2015 • An art installation • An art video
4. Reports case description and case themes
This exegesis and the accompanying artworks (accessible via USB or the website— carefulprospects.com—constitute my case description and themes.
Table 3.1: My performative case study research design.
Drawing on Creswell’s (2003, 2007) definition, the multiple case study approach used here can be explained in the table above (see table 3.1). Creswell (2007) states a case study “explores a bounded system (a case) or multiple bounded systems (cases) over time, through detailed, in-depth data collection involving multiple sources of information (e.g., observations, interviews, audio-visual material, and documents and reports), and reports a case description and case-based themes” (73). In each of the cases in this
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exegesis the artwork is the unit of analysis, and this provides a “bounded system” in that the artworks provide a way of delineating what to describe and analyse. Creswell (2003) also describes a case study as “a problem to be studied, which will reveal an in-depth understanding of a ‘case’ or bounded system, which involves understanding an event, activity, process, or one or more individuals” (61).
3.3.1 A Performative Case Study Paradigm
Contemporary case study approaches within the qualitative social sciences tradition vary widely due to the way case studies are strongly influenced by the research paradigm, design and choice of methods. This gives case study design flexibility as it allows methods to be tailored to, and evolve with, the research question and case or cases. Despite this flexibility, however, there are few descriptions of a case study approach for practice-led research that acknowledge the performativity of methods and incorporate qualitative case study design from the social sciences tradition. In social science, the dominant paradigms articulated in case study designs are post- positivism (Eisenhardt 1989; Yin 2009, 2012) and social constructivism (Merriam 2009; Stake 1994, 1995, 2005), neither of which adequately accounts for the performativity and politics of method. A handful of scholars are adapting post-positivist and social constructivist case study design for performative research approaches (see Hansen 2011). In the following table (see table 3.2), I contrast Hansen’s (2011) performative case study approach with a post-positivist case study paradigm (Eisenhardt 1989; Yin 2012) and a social constructivist paradigm (Merriam 2009; Stake 1994, 1995, 2005) in order to argue for a methodological approach grounded in practice. An approach that offers generative transformation rather than faithful unveiling, for as Latour (2010) argues, without the bifurcation of nature there is no singular true world to be uncovered or represented, only worlds to be performed.
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Post- Social Performative positivist Constructivist Case Study Yin (1994, 2003, Stake (1994, 1995, Hansen (2011) Scholars 2009; 2012) 2005)
Eisenhardt (1989, Merriam (2009) 1991)
Goal Analytic Extend experience of Political intervention generalisation particular case
Ontology One world: one One world with Many variable single objective multiple human worlds= reality not reliant perspectives on on human cosmos: reality is not observation singular but constituted through different perspectives
Table 3.2 Performative case study approach contrast to a post-positivist and social constructivist case study design.
Hansen (2011, 128) builds a performative case study approach that can be tailored to practice-led research, by contrasting post positivist (or what Hansen refers to as “ostensive”—“abstract patterns”) and performative approaches (“specific actions”). He compares Yin’s (2009) ostensive notion of case study design with a performative understanding of research practice developed by actor-network theory (ANT) scholars (see Latour 1987, 2005b; Callon 1986 and Law 2004). The ostensive approach contends that common abstract patterns—principles and properties—of the world can be discovered; in contrast, the performative approach contends that common properties can not be easily defined as there are variable worlds. Hansen articulates the relationships between ostensive and performative research to build a performative case study approach. In the following table he contrasts the ostensive position (Yin) and the performative position (ANT: Latour, Callon and Law), addressing: presumptions of reality, the world and the researcher, what is knowledge, what is theory and understanding of explanation between the two positions.
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Table 3.3 “Ontological and epistemological aspects of Yin and ANT” as articulated by Hansen (2011, 115).
Despite being directed at methodological debates in the field of accounting, Hansen’s (2011) performative case study approach provides a useful framework to build a performative case study approach for practice- led research as it acknowledges the performativity of methods and is in line with the performative, cosmopolitical paradigm I articulate in this exegesis. The following table by Hansen further clarifies methodological issues in conducting case studies within the two approaches.
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Table 3.4 “Conventional aspects of ostensive case study methodology,” ” as articulated by Hansen (2011, 120).
The different approaches in an ostensive and performative case study have implications for cross case analysis and identification of what enables comparability across case studies. The ostensive approach draws on the contention that theory can be built through cross-case analysis (Bourgeois and Eisenhardt 1988; Eisenhardt 1989). The ability to compare cases, is based on the premise that generalisation is possible, based on examining phenomenon in practice and discovering “causal links” (Yin 1984, 113). In contrast a performative approach proposes that “theory is not a cause of social action but an effect and it is rather the process of constructing relationships between heterogeneous elements that somehow
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constitutes what could be called a theoretical proposition” (Hansen 2011, 118). What this means for those conducting case studies from a performative research perspective is a focus on “how relations are made, how actors organize the world, and what the effects might be – or to use Latour’s (1987) own phrase: ‘things in the making’” (Hansen 2011, 119). The purpose is to highlight the relationships and contingencies that relate to the specific performance in practice, acknowledging that devices of observation simultaneously change the practice being analysed and the researcher conducting the analysis.
This performative approach makes it hard to distinguish method from theory. But, as Law (2015) argues, “in STS there is little or no theory/empirical divide. Instead it rolls theory and method and empirical practice together with social institutions (and sometimes objects) and insists that they are all part of the same weave and cannot be teased apart” (2). In this exegesis, a performative case study approach, informed by contrasting it to an ostensive approach, focuses on what it means to engage in specific practices and action with regards to engagement in ecological health through art.
3.4 The Cases: Access, Role and Research Settings
3.4.1 The Environmental Health Clinic (xClinic)
To set up access for researching the xClinic, I initially emailed Jeremijenko, the project’s artist, to ask if I could conduct a case study of the xClinic, including conducting interviews and participant observation. Following my initial email, I provided Jeremijenko with my curriculum vitae (CV) and a visual portfolio of my previous artwork and research experience, as she was interested in my art practice. The xClinic is based in New York, but Jeremijenko informed me that she would be in Sydney and Melbourne working on projects in conjunction with the Melbourne-based arts organisation, Carbon Arts, in November and December 2011. We then
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exchanged various emails and phone calls to set the dates that I would join her in Australia and in New York.
With regards to the research setting, the key physical locations at which I conducted participant observation were: Sydney, Melbourne and New York. While in New York I was based at The Environmental Health Clinic at New York University (NYU). Participant observation while in New York included first-hand observation of the everyday activities within the clinic, alongside attending project meetings, working on projects, participating in studio classes at NYU run by Jeremijenko as part of The Environmental Health Clinic, art site visits, viewing exhibitions, documenting art experiments and performing in staged experiments. I also studied articulations of The Environmental Health Clinic online, for example in TED Talks and through interviews with Jeremijenko (see Jeremijenko 2009). During my time in residence at the xClinic in New York I also worked with one of the other residents at the clinic, Gallardo, on an art project, xSpecies Drinking Fountain. This was entered into, and won, the Tap City art prize (2012), a competition to redesign a drinking fountain in New York City. In Sydney I participated in the production and staging of experiments as part of the “Curating Cities: Sydney–Copenhagen” Conference and Exhibition in Sydney (17 November–18 December, 2011), including participation in a workshop to create AgBags—the Become an uFarmer workshop. In Melbourne I participated in events produced in conjunction with Carbon Arts, including Drought and Flooding Rains dinner at Arc One Gallery (November 30, 2011); Culture, Climate Change and Cuisine Forum at Arena Project Space (November 28, 2011); and Wilderness Adventures for the Palate, edible cocktails and lecture, at the Melbourne Museum (December 1, 2011).
In my examination of the xClinic I performed multiple roles. Jeremijenko invited me to take up a position as a medic/artist in residence at the clinic in New York from the beginning of January to the end of February 2012 and, before that, would assist with, and document, work in Sydney and Melbourne (November 14 to December 6, 2011). My roles evolved during my time with Jeremijenko. I was a performer in staged art
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experiments; a documenter of the experiments through photographs and video; an artist working in collaboration with people within the clinic; and also a social researcher conducting interviews, participant observation and analysis of various human and non-human actors.
3.4.2 Windowfarms
The artist who created Windowfarms, Riley, was emailed to ask if I could conduct a case study on Windowfarms and interview her about the project. On February 23, 2012 I interviewed Riley and while in New York I attended a lecture by Riley on Windowfarms as part of an Internet of Things NYC meetup (January 12, 2012). As the Windowfarms art project predominantly existed online or in users’ homes, I examined the online Windowfarms social network and documented my experience of engaging with the project in my own home. While I was in New York there were no existing windowfarms in operation to which I could gain access; however, as the majority of the project was conducted online, I observed Riley’s interactions on the Windowfarms’ WordPress social network (our.Windowfarms.org) and how other people engaged with the artwork via online interactions. I also conducted participant observation on my experience of building a windowfarm and interacting with their online site: to build and care for my windowfarm, I used their instructions and community advice to build a windowfarm in Hong Kong. Locations for this case study included New York and Hong Kong.
With regards to bounding this case, I focused on our.Windowfarms, the DIY open source community, rather than the ready-made-kits that can now be bought through Windowfarms. The DIY community project was how Windowfarms began and was central to the way Windowfarms was conceived of as an art project, and at the time I started my research the manufactured version of Windowfarms was not yet available.
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3.4.3 Black-Noise and Carbon Valley
The case study of my own artworks, titled Black-Noise and Carbon Valley, describes my practice-led artistic contribution: the installation Black- Noise and the video work Carbon Valley I discuss the environmental health concerns of coal mining in the Hunter Valley, and how I addressed this concern through the production of artworks. As with the two previous cases, this case is driven by the question of how artists can enact healthier ecological prospects; in this instance, however, the production of my own artwork, as an artist-researcher, drives the case. This case articulates the production of the different artworks: my conceptualisation of the project, investigating the concern, collecting data, the production of the artworks and exhibition of the artworks. I created an experimental art video work based on interviews and documentation of the Hunter Valley and an installation, Black Noise, displayed at Kudos Gallery from June 18 –22, 2013.
My motivation for this project came from living in Sydney but having very little understanding of the impacts of coal mining on people, animals and ecologies at coal-mining sites. I knew that a significant amount of resources and infrastructure in Australia is being channelled into mining, rather than renewable energy, despite a decreasing demand from key importers such as China and mounting concerns over the impact of climate change. But I had several questions: What are the actual concerns of people living at the sites of these mines? What are the immediate health impacts of mining? How do these health impacts contrast to the distant threat of climate change? What are the impacts of mining on humans and non- humans? How can an understanding of these health impacts, and performance of them through an artwork, contribute to enacting healthier environmental prospects?
During March and April 2013, I conducted five semi-structured interviews with people from the Hunter Valley who were concerned about ecological health due to open-cut coal mining. The interviews were recorded on a zoom audio recorder and on a video camera. I also took over 150 photographs during the interviews and while visiting different sites within
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the Hunter Valley, such as Big Pond Habitat and the mines in the Upper Hunter Valley. As with my previous case studies, I also took field notes and kept a visual diary (see section 3.5.2).
3.4.4 Ethics
My research was conducted in accordance with the University of New South Wales’ (UNSW) Research Code of Conduct (UNSW 2009). Following these guidelines, I took care with the physiological, social and physical wellbeing of the people and entities I studied. My research proposal was reviewed by the Human Research Ethics Advisory (HREA) Panel for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (see Appendices).
3.5 Methods
3.5.1 Semi-structured Interviews
3.5.1.1 Questions
For the first two cases in which I describe other artists’ practice— xClinic and Windowfarms—I conducted semi-structured interviews with nine key people involved in the art experiments, including the artists. I used the interviews to gain an understanding about the artists motivations for creating the art experiments, how they developed the projects, people’s engagement with the artworks, how the artworks were received, technical details about the artworks, and terminology and context for the artworks. During the interviews I used an interview guide to help structure the conversation, tailored for each specific interview but structured around key topics to enable me to respond to the participant as they raised different ideas. The interviewees were chosen based on their relationship to the artworks, through their involvement in the socio-material construction of the artwork and/or their knowledge of the artwork. The interviews gave me an understanding of the historical context for the artworks, as told by that informant. From the interviews I also gained insights into the terminology used by the artists and others involved in the art experiments: for example,
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in the case of Windowfarms Riley’s development of the term “Research and Develop It Yourself” (R&D-I-Y). In the third case study, Black-Noise and Carbon Valley, I conducted five semi-structured interviews.
3.5.1.2 Recording and Transcribing
I recorded all the interviews on a digital sound recorder—a Zoom H4N. After each interview, the audio files were transferred to my computer as mp3 files and then deleted from the recorder. The audio files were stored securely on my computer to ensure security of my data. I also recorded videos of five interview subjects for my Black-Noise and Carbon Valley case; this information was stored in the same way as audio data.
Full transcriptions were generated for each of the interview recordings. In 2012, I engaged the services of a transcription company (Way With Words) to transcribe the nine interviews from the xClinic and Windowfarms cases. The five interviews from my Black-Noise and Carbon Valley project myself because I wanted to use these interviews to generate artworks and hence wished to immerse myself in the recordings. I wanted to engage with what people told me, but also with the background noises I heard and the other sensory information I captured in the video recordings, such as objects pointed out to me while recording. I first synced the high-quality audio recorded on the zoom recorder with the video, as the video recorder had a poorer quality audio, then I transcribed the interviews. I then listened to the interview a second time, this time noting down visual information and including noteworthy film stills and time markers into my transcripts. I also added comments into the transcripts that described the setting, or noises of interest such as those from mining sites, and different affective attributes such as the tone of the speaker.
3.5.1.3 Analysis
Thematic analysis, a process of “encoding qualitative information” was the method applied to analyse the interviews and look for patterns of meaning across the interviews within each case (Boyatzis 1998, vii; see also Braun and Clarke 2006; Owen 1984). I analysed the interviews in three
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different sets, each set pertaining to the relevant case study. It was also a recursive process (Braun and Clarke 2006) because once all the interviews were coded by applying words or phrases as labels for different elements of the data, I went back and forth between the different themes that emerged from the codes, connecting and modifying the themes from my interviews with themes that came out of my other methods and research practices.
Phase Description of the process
1. Familiarising yourself Transcribing data (if necessary), reading and rereading the with your data: data, noting down initial ideas. 2. Generating initial codes: Coding interesting features of the data in a systematic fashion across the entire data set, collating data relevant to each code. 3. Searching for themes: Collating codes into potential themes, gathering all data relevant to each potential theme. 4. Reviewing themes: Checking that the themes work in relation to the coded extracts (Level 1) and the entire data set (Level 2), generating a thematic “map” of the analysis. 5. Defining and naming Ongoing analysis to refine the specifics of each theme and themes: the overall story the analysis tells; generating clear definitions and names for each theme. 6. Producing the report: The final opportunity for analysis. Selection of vivid, compelling extract examples, final analysis of selected extracts, relating the analysis back to the research question and literature, producing a scholarly report of the analysis.
Table 3.5 Source: “Phases of thematic analysis” (Braun and Clarke 2006, 87).
Although my themes emerged iteratively over an extended period of time (Ely et al. 1997), the process was systematic because I adopted the six- phased technique of thematic analysis suggested by Braun and Clarke (2006) (see table 3.3). While reading through the interviews and familiarising myself with the data, I noted down initial codes that were salient to my research question. The approach I used to create the codes was inductive; the codes were not pre-determined but emerged out of the interviews in conjunction with my experiences as a participant observer, my background as an artist- researcher, and the other media and documents I collected and analysed.
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After familiarising myself with the data and producing codes, I sorted the codes into possible key themes. I used the notion that the “‘keyness’ of a theme is not necessarily dependent on quantifiable measures, but rather on whether it captures something important in relation to the overall research question” (Braun and Clarke 2006, 82). The themes that emerged from my interviews were reviewed and refined in relation to themes emerging from my other methods and were used to produce my exegesis and artworks. The phases are not meant to imply that this analytic process was a step-by-step tidy progression, rather the process involved going back and forth between different sets of data and between the six phases—at times these phases blurred together, in line with thematic analysis techniques (Braun and Clarke 2006).
3.5.2 Participant Observation and Visual Diary
Following a participant observation approach (DeWalt and DeWalt 1998); my observations were recorded in a visual diary—a daily journal in which I included textual observations, such as descriptions of settings, photographs, sketches, art experiments and personal reflections. Keeping a research diary is a well-established method within social science to record observations (Burgess 1981; Mills 1959) and, as Mills (1959, 196) states, to “try to get together what you are doing intellectually and what you are experiencing as a person”. In social sciences a research diary is typically a “written record of the researcher’s activities, thoughts and feelings throughout the research process from design, through data collection and analysis to writing and presenting the study” (Bloor and Wood 2006, 151). Although not as well documented in academic literature, the use of visual diaries by artists is also a valuable tool for observing and researching practice (see Newbury 2001). Like a textual diary, it is a place to record “activities, thoughts and feelings” during the research project, but emphasises visual forms of recording and analysis alongside written notes.
Seven A5 sized visual diaries were produced over the course of four years; the visual diaries were physical bound notebooks, as it was less
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obtrusive to have a sketchbook for taking notes rather than use a computer during observations. The decision to use a physical diary, rather than a blog or digital diary, was also largely due to my personal preference; I have actively used physical visual diaries for the last fifteen years because I prefer a sketchbook for jotting down ideas, diagraming, sketching and incorporating relevant material, such as photographs. I find working in this format allows me to link and refine ideas and track the progression of the research. In other words, keeping a physical visual diary allows me “personal and procedural reflexivity” (Prosser and Loxley 2008).
As a visual diary is well suited to integrating visual and textual observations and records (Newbury 2001), it was useful for my research on how artists are enacting ecological health. These artistic works required more than just textual means of observation, particularly the production of my own artworks for the case “Black-Noise and Carbon Valley”, Chapter 6, in which the visual components are not just observed for contextual significance but are the focus of my research. Combining multi-modal and textual elements in the diary also provided me with an opportunity to play and experiment with theoretical and methodological issues of how to research, document and present multi-sensory data (Cain 2010; Herivel 1997; Newbury 2001).
Although I have kept a visual diary for many years, I have mainly kept them for working through ideas to produce my own artworks. Keeping one that also documented, for example, observations, records and responses to interviews, and problems that arose during my research process, took considerably more time than anticipated. I originally intended to type up and reflect on my notes at the end of each week, to produce material that could be used within my exegesis. However, I found that I was not able to set aside enough time to do this consistently due to other commitments, especially while in residence at xClinic in New York. The major writing up of my observations in my visual diary tended to happen when I was analysing other data, such as while generating codes and themes from my interviews, and during the writing up of my case studies. Becker (1986, 17) suggests,
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“you have already made many choices when you sit down to write, but you probably don’t know what they are”. My visual diary allowed me to gain greater insight into the various choices I made during the research process.
3.5.3 Document/Media/Artefact Analysis
A central component for the empirical data collection was media and document analysis. As is typical of many art projects, both Windowfarms and the xClinic had a wide range of artefacts, documents and media produced in response to, and as part of, the art projects. The documents I analysed can be categorised in the following manner:
• artefacts/artworks/setting; • art statements and presentations by the artists, such as TED talks and slide presentations; • media articles about the artists’ work, including blog posts and media interviews with the artists; • websites/social media sites for the art project; • photographic and video documentation; and • academic articles, conference papers and books featuring the projects.
Most of the documents I analysed were in digital format, either sourced from the World Wide Web or given to me via email, DropboxTM or USB. For example, Jeremijenko provided me with access to The Environmental Health Clinic DropboxTM which included portable document format (PDF) files, word-processing files, photographs and slide presentations to assist with my research. Following a performative STS approach, I viewed these documents, not as representations but as entities involved in the enactment of the art experiment. The documents are inextricably tied to material practices (Latour 1999), and this influenced my analysis of these documents; rather than seeing the documents as historical records, I accounted for their continued liveliness in relation to performances of the artwork and practices.
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3.5.4 Photography, Video and Digital Storytelling
As part of my research, I took approximately 500 photographs and twelve hours of video. Due to the multi-modal nature of the art projects within my cases, photography and video footage were used as a means of gathering data, capturing observations alongside my sketches, and textual note taking. The subjects of my photographs and videos changed depending on the context of my research; however, I typically used photographs and video to capture different practices during the production of and engagement with the artworks. I found photographs to often be the best means of capturing practices, as I could create sequences and focus on significant moments in the practice, or specific tools used. In contrast, I found video footage more time consuming to analyse, and hence I favoured photographs to reduce the amount of data I needed to sort through during analysis. I found video better for capturing settings and atmosphere, a way of generating a multisensory context due to its capacity to capture movement and sound.
In my case studies and discussion, I used the photographs and videos to generate data, and incorporated select images into my case reports. However, not only did the photographs and video footage serve the purposes of my personal research, they were also used for documentation purposes by others. For example, the video I created on the making of the xClinic AgBags, is featured on the xClinic Flickr site, and a book resulting from the Creating Cities project titled Curating Sydney: Imagining the City’s Future (Bennett and Beudel 2014) has used my photographs. As these other uses demonstrate, when the “photo-image” is used in sociology it is “never merely a recording device”, as “photo-images not only represent but capture, they must be understood as intervening in the social world, circulating and partaking in its arrangements” (Bell 2012, 147). I interweave photographs in my exegesis with the understanding that these images do not just “reveal and represent”, but also “provoke or invite responses which they do not control” (Bell 2012, 161).
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For the third case study, I created the video artwork from photographs, video and audio I recorded while in the Hunter. This process was influenced by my prior experience with digital storytelling. From November 2007 to January 2009, I worked in Wales on a digital storytelling project with BBC Wales/BBC Cymru and The George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling, The University of Glamorgan, Cardiff. For this project, called A Public Voice: Access, Digital Story and Interactive Narrative, I both researched and assisted in facilitating the production of digital stories. The term digital storytelling can refer to a wide range of forms of using digital technology to tell stories, including online stories, stories produced with mobile phones and computer game narratives (Hartley and McWilliam 2009a). The form of digital storytelling that I learned in Wales was a workshop based model for public broadcast in which I assisted workshop participants, typically over three to four days, to create three-minute videos using photographs and an audio narrative (Meadows and Kidd 2009; see also Lambert 2006; Meadows 2003). The workshop model of digital storytelling used by BBC Wales originated in the 1990s out of the Center for Digital Storytelling, run by Joe Lambert in the San Francisco Bay Area (Lambert 2006). This workshop model, often referred to as the classical digital story or the CDS model (Hartley and McWilliam 2009b; Lambert 2006; Lundby 2008; Meadows 2003), has subsequently evolved and is now widely used within education (Hartley and McWilliam 2009b), particularly in the United States, and as a tool for empowerment (Lambert 2006). Since finishing the Public Voice project I have adapted digital storytelling processes into my own art practice. The video artwork I created—Carbon Valley— builds on this body of knowledge and experience.
3.6 Concerns, Limitations and Challenges
This research has a range of limitations and challenges. Firstly, I have not explored the way these artworks were influenced by different funding models and economic structures, nor have I focused on how identity politics plays out in enactments of ecological health. For example, in the
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case study, Carbon Valley, I could have interviewed a wider diversity of people to gain a greater understanding of the ecological health concerns and to incorporate a wider range of concerns within my art video. However, this case study is not intended to be a representative exploration of the ecological health concerns in relation to open-cut coal mining; rather, it is an exploration of how to enact specific concerns within my own art practice, an exploration of how art can develop methods for, and understandings of alternative knowledge politics that may assist in generating healthier ecologies.
Another methodological limitation of the research design is that, due in part to the limitations of scholarship funding and doctoral research timeframes, it did not allow for an extended, embedded, period of time in the field engaging with participants in the Hunter Valley. Therefore, the research design could be improved by employing an approach that fosters longer sustained engagement and research with the different communities, which has theoretical and methodological implications. One such approach would be to adopt a “co-creation” framework (Sanders and Stappers 2008). Co-creation can mean “any act of collective creativity, i.e. creativity that is shared by two or more people” (Sanders and Stappers, 2008, 6). The co- creation of research, in which collaborative design of research agendas, methods, governance approaches and creative artefacts is undertaken, is emerging as an social and environmentally just approach to engaging in research and creative practice (Trencher et al., 2014; Sanders and Stappers 2008, 2014). Co-creation can be seen as part of wider traditions of participatory research, such as Participatory Action-Research (PAR) (Madden et al., 2014; Edmunds et al., 2013). It contributes design-oriented approaches for facilitating collaborative efforts between people with different knowledges and experience. In the context of sustainability, co-creation aims to integrate scientific and lay knowledges and address ecological concerns and social injustices to produce sustainable transformation. A co-creation approach could generate knowledges and practices that can contribute to improving ecological health across different scales, adding further layers of
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engagement and care to the production of artwork for showing within galleries, or written research.
One of the key challenges of this research involved analysing my own creations. During the process of creating the artworks some decisions were made intuitively; when documenting the works in my visual diary and writing them up in the exegesis I at times experienced a desire to make the intuitive decisions fit with the research questions. Shaun McNiff (2008, 35) acknowledges “artistic knowing is not something that can always be reduced to language”, but he also argues that reflecting on, and translating experiences into written form, is part of the process of understanding which allows for “the unfolding of thought” (35). Keeping a visual diary, in which I articulated my process and reflections on the decisions made throughout my research and creative practice helped me to analyse the creative practice and research findings. However, as an artist and researcher analysing my own creations, it is important to acknowledge that there are limitations in my ability to differentiate between my intentions and what the creative works actually do for audience (other than myself), despite efforts to reflect on this with thorough documentation and analysis. One way to improve the analytical component of future research and practice would be to interview people who experienced the artwork and incorporate their responses into my research.
A further challenge relating to producing and analysing my own creations within the framework of doctoral research involved how to match the uncertainty of conducting creative practice—in the intuitive and flexible manner I am experienced with—with the certainties required of ethics applications, supervisors, and working with research participants. McNamara (2012) contends that this potential conflict between the original research question and the emergent needs of practice is one of the “the greatest challenges – and potentially greatest innovations” of research driven by creative practice (12). Innovations can, Macnamara sugggests, “spring from the discrepancy between the needs of the practice and the research question, rather than a pre-supposition of their harmonious
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correspondence” (12). With this research it became a practice of oscillating between experimenting with, and listening to, the materials within the installation – such as infrasound, water and coal and then returning to the conceptual questions driving the research and the interview narratives and data. It was also a matter of moving between perspectives of researcher and perspectives of artist. The process of documentation, photographic, video and through my reflective practice (Schön 1983)—writing and drawing in my visual diary assisted during these periods of oscillation. One response to the challenge of analysing my own creations was how to articulate the navigation of this uncertainty while still offering a coherent narrative within the exegesis. However, as Helga Nowotny (2010) points out, the struggle of uncertainty is not particular to creative practice. Speaking of science and creativity Nowotny states, “they thrive—and continuously struggle—in the zone of uncertainty where what is yet to be explored is at home. Uncertainty is therefore inherent in scientific research and in the artistic production of new knowledge alike” (xviii). Responding to uncertainty, including the uncertainty of if an artistic project will succeed or fail, became part of my understanding of the practice of care. Where care involves taking responsibility for the complex problems that might arise, rather than ignoring them or writing them out of the exegesis, which I articulate further in the discussion chapter.
One of the key challenges that arose in relation to my performative case study approach was selecting the parameters for my cases on how particular artworks enact ecological health—in other words, how to “bound” the cases. I wondered, if “things” are enacted and emergent, how does one account for this emergence in practical terms? This question raised further questions: How do I define the boundary of my empirical case studies? Where should I start the study, with what, with whom, and how does one decide when it is finished? If the artwork is understood to be entangled with different settings and relations, how does one trace what is enacted? What counts as the artwork? In practice I studied the activities, contexts and entities that became entangled in my interactions with the
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other actors (human and non-human) involved in the art practices. What I observed, recorded and enacted through my own participation was always driven by the research questions on how art can enact healthier ecological prospects. At times this was a “messy and heterogeneous” process (Law 2007, 595), but once notions of “care” emerged out of my cases and the literature, the practice-oriented focus of the research on care structured the exegesis.
This exegesis and related creative practice adopted a “compositionist” (Latour 2004b, 2010) theoretical and methodological approach rather than a modernist mode of critique. A compositionist approach, as advocated by Latour (2010, 475) attempts to avoid the “immense drawback of creating a massive gap between what [is] felt and what [is] real”, which occurs with critique. Latour (2010, 475) further explains, critique “has all the limits of utopia: it relies on the certainty of the world beyond this world. By contrast, for compositionism, there is no world of beyond. It is all about immanence”. One of the challenges of conducting this research is that there is a wide body of scholarship and tools to draw on which supports modernist critical modes of enquiry, but less that articulate a compositionist mode of research at the intersection of art, technoscience and ecological health. And, as Latour (2010, 475) states, “it is no more possible to compose with the paraphernalia of critique than it is to cook with a seesaw”. The contribution this exegesis makes is to expand the tools available for conducting compositionist creative practice and research via the ethical framework of “careful prospecting” (discussed in detail in chapter seven).
Additionally, alongside a lack of compositionist approaches, there are few accounts of artistic practice-led method practices within traditional social science methods research, such as Creswell’s (2009) Research Design. Research describing the methodological implications of, and methods for, conducting practice-led arts doctoral research in STS is relatively limited, albeit nascent. For example, Lury and Wakeford’s (2012, 2) edited collection of “inventive methods” offers a guide for using methods in an iterative
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manner, a manner that is “oriented towards an investigation of the open- endedness of the social world’’. It was a challenge to find work that would guide an artistic practice-led case study approach. However, building on Haseman’s (2007) practice-led performative paradigm in conjunction with traditional scholarship on case studies, such as Yin (2009), I employed a performative case study approach.
3.7 Conclusion
The aim of this chapter was to develop a performative, practice-led case study approach for studying other artists’ practices and for developing my own artwork. I combined ontological and epistemological approaches from STS, case study scholarship and practice-led research to develop a performative case study approach. This approach contrasts with a post- positivist case study design, such as Yin’s (2009); rather than only deducing a theoretical argument from the cases, as in post-positivist case studies, performative cases intervene and examine how different entities are enacted in different settings and through different practices. Thus, this performative case study approach is an empirical means of examining how artworks can enact ecological health prospects. This chapter also discussed the different methods I used in conducting case study research, the ethics involved, research limitations and the key concerns and challenges I faced. The three subsequent chapters feature my three case studies: Chapter 4 is a case study of the xClinic; Chapter 5, Windowfarms; and Chapter 6 consists of my practice-led case study, Black-Noise and Carbon Valley.
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The Environmental Health Clinic
4.1 Introduction
On January 9, 2012, the artist, or “thingker” as she prefers to call herself, Jeremijenko greeted me at The Environmental Health Clinic (hereafter xClinic) at New York University (NYU), New York, where she is Associate Professor in Visual Arts. Jeremijenko established the art project xClinic in 2007. It adopts the familiar structure of a (Western) university health clinic, but rather than facilitating a space for people to discuss and gain treatment for their personal, genetic or disease-focused health concerns, Jeremijenko invites people to come to the clinic with their environmental health concerns. These concerns may include, for example, fears about toxic metals in waterways, air pollution from fossil-fuel consumption or loss of biodiversity in urban areas. In this way, the xClinic moves away from a traditional Western-style clinical medical model of health that focuses on symptoms of disease and poor health towards engaging with health as an ecological health issue.
This case study focuses on the experimental practices used within the xClinic, addressing in particular how this multifaceted art project engages people in practices of care by staging public experiments. To develop this
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argument, I first explore how Jeremijenko positions the xClinic as a tool for responding to the “crisis of agency” that people experience in the face of mounting ecological crises (Jeremijenko 2012, pers. comm.). Next, I describe how the xClinic uses public experiments to reframe health concerns and ecological crises. Third, notions of public experimentation are further explored through an attention to how public experiments operate as spectacles that visualise and affectively problematize concerns. Finally, I explore how matters of care are manifested through public experiments by focusing on the ways in which experiments require tending.
4.2 A Crisis of Agency in the Face of Mounting Ecological Crises
Jeremijenko established the xClinic as a means of responding to ecological crises and the existential crises they induce—the overwhelming sense of “what can I do?” and resulting “crisis of agency” that can occur in the face of mounting ecological concerns (Jeremijenko 2012, pers. comm.). For example, writing on climate change, Klein (2014, 42) argues that it has “become an existential crisis for the human species”. Jeremijenko argues that actions like replacing an old light bulb with one that is more ecofriendly is a “radically insufficient” means of responding to issues such as climate change, and proposes that this sense of insufficiency is a “shared cultural feeling” that creates a sense of crisis of ”what to do? As an individual, as a collective?” (2012, pers. comm.).
The approach taken by the xClinic is provocative for it challenges prevailing notions that to be more “environmentally friendly” one must reduce, reuse, recycle to minimise one’s environmental footprint. In scenarios where reusing shopping bags or changing to ecofriendly light bulbs is encouraged, emphasis is placed on individual consumption and reduction— reducing plastic, reducing energy use, reducing waste—not on what one can do creatively to contribute to improving both human and environmental health. In other words, this reductive ecological approach implies that people are bad but asks how people can be less bad. In contrast, the xClinic
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emphasises ways of creatively and playfully contributing to human and non- human health; rather than looking for ways to reduce personal impact, it provides “prescriptions”—public experiments—for composing healthier ecologies.
One example of the way the xClinic emphasises an additive “compositionist” (Latour 2010) practice rather than a subtractive mode of engaging with ecological health is through a reformatting of what it means to be a patient: people who come to the xClinic with their environmental health concerns are referred to as “im-patients”, because they are “too impatient for legislative change” (Jeremijenko 2012, pers. comm.). Through this reframing of the concept of “patients”, the xClinic transforms patient—the practices of people who patiently waits for someone to tell them what to do—to im-patient—people who engage in collective action rather than waiting for legislative changes to ecological health.
Another example is the way the xClinic reappropriates the doctor’s medical consultation and invites people to come to the clinic with their environmental health concerns—what they care about. By twisting a familiar concept, the health clinic, to create a space for people to question and engage with contemporary ecological issues, the xClinic attempts to counter dilemmas involving a crisis of agency by working with im-patients to devise a treatment plan or “prescriptions” for their environmental health concerns (Jeremijenko 2012, pers. comm.). Prescriptions have included planting sunflowers to remove lead from soil, installing houseplants to improve indoor air quality and a range of other designed interventions that I will discuss in more detail in this chapter.
A further means by which the xClinic facilitates engagement in ecological health issues and attempts to counter a crisis of agency is by expanding people’s vocabulary of ecological health in a way that helps them articulate the problem or concern in more detail. In discussing the xClinic im-patient visit, Jeremijenko told me:
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It’s like people going to a doctor, you know. “I’ve got a sore knee”, but they don’t say I’ve got a ligament that is torn. They don’t yet have a vocabulary with which to work and develop a set of strategies, but they do have resources. (Jeremijenko 2012 pers. comm.)
As Jeremijenko explains in the statement above, people “do have resources”, such as experiences, concerns, cares, hence the expansion of vocabulary is not undertaken on the presumption that publics lack understanding (see Trench 2008), nor is the expansion of vocabulary simply discursive; rather, the intention is that the xClinic also intervenes in the vocabulary of practices to do with ecological health. It thus reframes healthcare practices in order to intervene in ecological health concerns and the “crisis of agency” that some people experience in contemplating “what to do” when faced with the enormity of the problem that is ecological health. The xClinic starts with the vocabulary of a Western medical clinic, familiar to the intended audience for these works, but then detours it, twists it, to introduce different forms of engagement in ecological health conversations and practices. The transformation of the material practices and discursive vocabulary of healthcare by the xClinic is a key component of how it intervenes in ecological health—aesthetically, materially and conceptually. Central to my argument in this chapter is how the xClinic reframes and reimagines practices of healthcare using public experiments; in what follows I discuss notions of reframing and examine the types of public experiments the xClinic stages.
4.3 Reframing Health-Care with Public Experiments
4.3.1 Creative Public Experiments
xClinic interventions can be considered to be “experiments in living”, a “‘protocol’ for exploring and testing forms of life” (Marres 2012b, 76). Jeremijenko herself describes the xClinic as “facilitating public and lifestyle experiments that can aggregate into significant human and environmental
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health benefits” (Jeremijenko 2014 par. 3). Marres (2009, 2012a, 2012b) writes that experiments in living that are performed in public, such as using smart electricity meters to reduce energy consumption, serve a number of functions, including incorporating new objects into political practices, the conduct of social research and publicising different practices (see also Barry 2013; Latour 1988; Shaffer and Shapin 1989). A creative public experiment can be considered to be “a performance that is artificial, oriented to political action, and the outcome of which is uncertain” (Born and Barry 2010, 116). Drawing on art to contrast models of engagement Born and Barry (2010, 116) argue that “public experiments”, in contrast to public understanding projects, “do not so much present existing scientific knowledge to the public, as forge relations between new knowledge, things, locations and persons that did not exist before”.
Creative experiments such as xClinic prescriptions can be said to “forge relations” thus “producing truth, public, and their relation at the same time” (Born and Barry 2010, 116), rather than merely representing scientific knowledge. For example, the xClinic transforms conventional Western practices of health in which a doctor prescribes pharmaceutical treatment into public experiments whereby design interventions are developed to intervene in ecological concerns that the person visiting the clinic, the im-patient, cares for. Hence, through practices of experimentation the xClinic forges relations, composing different knowledges, publics and ways of relating to, and enacting, ecological health.
4.3.2 The xClinic as a Framing Device
Jeremijenko told me that she uses the xClinic as a “framing device” for many of the ecologically engaged art projects she creates (Jeremijenko 2012, pers. comm.)—it holds together disparate projects that reframe human health issues as ecological health concerns. I draw on Latour’s (2005b) articulation of the term “frame”, which emphasises the materiality of framing and does not pose framing as exclusively symbolic or discursive (see also Bok and Jensen 2012). Latour’s (2005b) notion of “frame” meshes
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with the way the term was originally proposed by Bateson (1972), an anthropologist, to describe settings in which interactions occur, particularly contexts for non-verbal interactions. Goffman (1974), a sociologist, subsequently developed the concept in his theory of frame analysis to include both non-verbal and verbal interactions. This contrasts with a linguistic notion of framing, such as that developed by Lakoff (2004, 2010), the cognitive linguist, in which he looks at how people use particular conceptual frames, or linguistic constructions, such as metaphors, to make sense of discourse. Latour’s (2005b) usage emphasises the role entities, things, play in shaping human and non-human interactions. Latour’s (2005b) notion of framing in which material, discursive, semiotic and affective elements shape interactions aligns with Bateson’s (1972) and Goffman’s (1974) original attention to the link between frames (settings) and behaviour. This stands in contrast to scholars, particularly linguists, who use framing to solely explore the construction of cognitive structures of reality through discourse (for a discussion of the differences between Goffman (1974) and Latour (2005b) see Vakhshtayn [2014]). Drawing on these notions of framing, the xClinic as a framing device is understood not just as a means of conceptually interpreting health, or discursively representing health, but as a way of materially enacting health in particular settings.
Take, for instance, the xClinic branding. The home page of the xClinic website opens with an animation of a red cross (+), an emblem associated with healthcare, in the animation the red cross rotates clockwise until it settles at the x position—twisting the familiar sign of health (+), to an x (see figure 4.1). In presentations, Jeremijenko will playfully introduce the xClinic with this twisting animation of the cross, and puns that the xClinic offers a “twist on health” (2012, pers. com.). She consistently introduces the xClinic in this way, in presentations I have attended and viewed in Sydney, Melbourne, New York and online. This technique of adopting a familiar symbol, practice or structure, such as the Red Cross, and hijacking it, by adapting it or twisting it, to indicate an altered understanding of health, is a
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technique used regularly within the xClinic. It is used as a means of playfully reframing individual human health issues as ecological issues.
Figure 4.1: xClinic website home page (Environmental Health Clinic 2014e).
4.3.3 Farmacy and AgBag Clinical Trials
Farmacy is a “distributed urban farming project that seeks to enhance ecological health and re-imagine food systems” (Environmental Health Clinic 2013b). It is the ecological healthcare option offered by the xClinic for growing “nutrient dense foods with powerful antioxidants, and high value nutraceuticals”, it is also designed to improve air quality and increase biodiversity in the city (Next Top Makers 2015). Farmacy, as the name implies, twists the medical dispensary model of a pharmacy; in contrast to going to a pharmacy for medical pills and treatments it provides an option for growing beneficial, nutrient-rich plants—nutraceuticals. It also twists the medical notion of a “clinical trial” by involving people in public experiments to grow their own food thus improving their health and improving biodiversity and air quality.
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Figure 4.2: AgBag demonstration at Curating Cities Conference, Sydney, Australia, November 22, 2011.
A key aspect of the clinical trials are AgBags (see figure 4.2), agricultural bags designed by Jeremijenko for growing nutrient-dense plants in urban locations where soil is sparse, the bags can be hung over existing structures, such as railings, balconies and windows. In Sydney on November 21, 2011, before visiting the xClinic in New York, I participated in an AgBag workshop and clinical trial demonstration run by Jeremijenko. Everyone in the workshop was provided with an AgBag to assemble then fill with soil to grow nutrients and a range of edible plants. AgBags are made of the strong, high-tensile, synthetic material, Tyvek, and filled with soil, nutrients to support plant growth and, of course, the plants—what Jeremijenko refers to as “U-foods” (Urban-foods). In the workshop she explained U-foods are edibles with high nutrient and antioxidant benefit, such as alpha-carotenes and polyphenols found in edible flowers (2011 pers. comm.).
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Figure 4.3: Demonstration of how to assemble an AgBag, Curating Cities Conference, Sydney, Australia, November 22, 2011.
During the workshop we were asked where we were thinking of hanging our AgBag, and what our environmental concerns or interests were. Over half of the participants in the workshop in Sydney lived in locations where they had access to backyards and soil, however they wanted to grow plants indoors or supplement their existing garden. The AgBags were originally designed for dense urban areas, such as New York, where soil is sparse and where increases in leaf area index (the ratio of leaf area to ground area) are more greatly needed. Structuring this art intervention as a clinical trial directly involves people in reimagining and acting on their health and
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the health of their urban environment—improving their nutrient intake, the air quality of the city and biodiversity:
The issue of little or no access to soil, little or no space, compromised air and water quality among other challenges. Further than improving air and water quality, [their] value lies in improving the quality of life for humans and non-human organisms alike in the urban environment—aiming for a resilient and healthy BiodiverCITY. (Environmental Health Clinic 2013d)
Part of the AgBag clinical trial involves recording and monitoring the AgBag, for example, with a time-lapse photography camera to create a timelapsed video that can be uploaded to the xClinic Farmacy site. The monitoring is to “evaluate the growth responses of various plants in different urban situations (at different heights, exposure, windstress, care condition etc.)” (Environmental Health Clinic 2013c). During the workshop around the edges of the red cross on the AgBag (see figure 4.2 and 4.3) we were instructed by Jeremijenko to draw a phonological clock—a circular timeline by months indicating blossoming, growth and other factors that participants felt were relevant. The clock encourages participants to be attentive to ecological events, for example, the blooming of flowers or when bees, butterflies or other insects visit the AgBag, and mark these events on the clock. The xClinic reframes observational studies and evidence-based practice used in traditional medical clinical trials, twisting them to experiment in urban agriculture and ecological health, even mimicking clinical trial “informed consent” forms (see figure 4.4).
Exhibitions of AgBags, like AgBag public demonstrations, create a public spectacle that invites people to imagine alternative uses for existing infrastructure. For example, during one clinical trial of the AgBags the façade of the gallery, Postmasters, was converted into a vertical urban farm consisting of suspended AgBags. By turning the façade of the building into an urban farm, Jeremijenko aimed to highlight and promote the potential for urban spaces to be modified to produce food, to improve biodiversity and to improve air quality due to the air-filtering potential of plants. These
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spectacles are intended to help promote the idea that “people who may never have farmed can install AgBags … using their window or a railing” (Environmental Health Clinic 2013b, par. 4).
Figure 4.4: Farmacy AgBag Clinical Trial information sheet (Environmental Health Clinic, 2013c).
One participant involved in the clinical trial during the installation at Postmasters was Doanie Vo. She was walking past the gallery as Jeremijenko was installing the AgBags and inquired about the project, as a result of this chance encounter Vo installed an AgBag on her Manhattan balcony and became part of the public experiment (see figure 4.5). According to Vo (2012, pers. comm., 5 February) after installing the AgBag it “became sort of like a filter for me, for my apartment”. She said “the city has terrible air quality” and the AgBag became a provocation for her to engage in and attend to her concerns about air quality, alongside growing food to eat.
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Figure 4.5: An AgBag on Vo’s balcony (Courtesy of Vo).
Law (2010, 67) states, “care depends not so much on a formula as a repertoire that allows action”. The AgBags facilitate a repertoire of practices of care specific to the plants and locations in which they are installed, such as at home or at work. They encourage people to be attentive to what dies and what flourishes—to care. In what follows, I further explore how the xClinic performs public experiments in ecological health and how this pertains to care: (1) public experiment as spectacle (rendering visible concerns) and (2) tending to experiments (actively caring for ecologies).
4.4 Public Experiment as Spectacle
The argument within this section is that xClinic interventions produce spectacles that may bring attention to, and care for, ways in which existing structures could be modified and reframed with ecological health in mind. Public spectacle is entangled with the history of scientific experiments, the production of knowledge and concepts of truth (Schaffer 1983). Stewart (2008, 11) describes eighteenth-century experiments as “epistemological dramas” which “served, in the early-modern world, to provide authority to an exercise that was, at its heart, one of translating the burden of truth away
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from faith and authority to evidence, through experimental observation”. Spectacular experiments continued into the nineteenth-century and generated a “public taste for science (goût public des sciences)” which helped to legitimate scientific forms of research in the early nineteenth century (Bensaude-Vincent and Christine Blondel 2008, 9).
Within art, notions of spectacle are also present. The founding member of the Situationist International (Internationale Situationnistes),1 Guy Debord (1999), developed a notion of “spectacle” as a means of critiquing consumer culture and mass media. He argued, “the spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (1999, 2). Building on this notion of spectacle the argument in this exegesis is that the xClinic creates spectacles, not to critique the use of mass media and consumer culture with regards to ecological health concerns (see Debord 1999), but to highlight the way existing material and discursive practices and relations shape our engagement with ecological health. Notions of reframing used within this exegesis also draw on the notion of détournement (French for rerouting or hijacking), a method of appropriation developed by the Letterist International and subsequently modified and popularised by Situationist International (Knabb 2006). Détournement—“the reuse of pre-existing artistic elements in a new ensemble” (Knabb 2006, 67)—is a way of working that does not just comment on or satirise media but takes entities/images on a detour, twisting them to generate different meanings, often oppositional meanings, that question artistic production and operate as a political intervention.
4.4.1 Mobile xClinic Offices
The xClinic has a permanent New York office but also offers mobile offices for clinical appointments. These mobile offices, like the prescriptions, are tailored to the specific concerns, worries, cares of im-patients, and create a spectacle by situating themselves within the site of the im-patient’s
1 An international organisation of artists, political theorists and intellectuals, also referred to as the Situationists.
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particular environmental health concern. For example, an im-patient who indicates a concern with the water quality of the Hudson River may be invited to a floating mobile clinic on the river or an im-patient who cares about air quality in their neighbourhood may be invited to a mobile clinic in the middle of a traffic roundabout. The first mobile xClinic office was launched on the Hudson River, New York, in 2007 (see figure 4.6); the launch of the mobile office and subsequent appointments were recorded on video by GOOD Magazine (2007).
Figure 4.6: Clinic appointment on the Floating Mobile xClinic (GOOD Magazine 2007).
The entry below is my account of one of the xClinic appointments on the floating clinic, recorded in my field diary after watching the video:
Jeremijenko, wearing a white doctor’s coat, sits opposite an xClinic (im)patient on a raft constructed out of empty plastic bottles, the raft floats on an urban waterway—the Hudson River, a yellow rope tethers the raft to the shore. This vessel is also fitted out with a desk and two chairs. “There is a source of fresh water, but it’s along a lot of industrial sites”, says the im- patient. Across from the im-patient Jeremijenko holds a glass vessel, from the perspective of the shore the glass vessel appears to be a teapot with two tadpoles swimming in it. “I’m pretty sure that any tadpole that is placed in there would not survive very long”, says the patient. The scene cuts to the lab coat wearer;
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she is now relocated back on shore. “The environment, in particular the shared water system, is a commons, it’s an environmental commons—who gets to inhabit it? These small unusual uses of the river generate many more ideas about how people could inhabit, could use, could reimagine their relationship to the local water system”, she says. (Pratt 2013, February 12, field diary)
As this description of the floating mobile clinic illustrates, the mobile offices experiment with alternative ways of conducting a doctor’s consultation: rather than locating the consultation indoors, the consultation is situated at the site of the im-patient’s environmental health concern. The consultation thus also becomes public, and because of the unusual arrangement of elements—a raft made of plastic bottles, a person in a white doctor’s coat, tadpoles in teapots, the Hudson River—it becomes a spectacle. In my field note I quote Jeremijenko speaking on the floating office and the prescriptions she offers: “[t]hese small unusual uses of the river generate many more ideas about how people could inhabit, could use, could reimagine their relationship to the local water system” (GOOD Magazine 2007). Her statement implies that the intention of creating these “unusual” spectacles is to encourage people to notice ecological health issues and to reimagine relationships to different, specific, situated, ecologies.
4.4.2 Solar Awning
During my residency at the xClinic, Jeremijenko was exhibiting in the two-part exhibition “Civic Action: A Vision for Long Island City” (2011–12) (see Environmental Health Clinic 2013a).2 The artists in the show were invited to propose “alternative visions and an imaginative future” for a neighbourhood in Long Island City, Queens (Socrates Sculpture Park 2014, par. 2). One of the xClinic works exhibited in the show, Solar Awning— designed by Jeremijenko, Kavesh and Amon—was a system that functions as an awning on windows and simultaneously provides energy for light- emitting diode (LED). lights via photovoltaics. The awnings are designed to
2 The project was first exhibited in Noguchi Museum (October 13, 2011 to April 22, 2012) and then at Socrates Sculpture Park (May 13 to August 5, 2012), Long Island City.
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fuel another xClinic product, Green Light—a six-watt LED light that has plants growing around it to assist in chlorophyll absorption to remove pollutants from the air. Solar Awning playfully casts shadows onto the ground, patterning the pavement with statements such as “no now like now”, causing people to look up and see how the window awnings have been reframed.
On February 12, 2012, I discussed the exhibition, and Solar Awning, with Amy Hau, the Noguchi Museum’s Director of Administrative and External Affairs, who was involved in programming Civic Action. Hau said:
In the case of Natalie’s project, I mean, I had not realised that there were so many awnings already out there in the neighbourhood, until I saw what she hung in there. I’m like, oh yes, of course, that makes so much sense. Immediately, it just gravitates one to “we could do better”. (Hau 2012, pers. comm.)
For Hau (2012 pers. comm.), Solar Awning rendered visible the multiple awnings in the neighbourhood and the potential to use this infrastructure in different ways to improve ecological health, for example by providing solar energy. By turning a sunshade into a suntrap to harness solar energy, Solar Awning proposes a way of intervening in existing systems and opens up ways of “making what we want matter” (Hau 2012, pers. comm.). Hau expressed that projects, like xClinic, which introduce “even the smallest interventions, can really help us open up our participatory conversations, whether it’s with an artist or with our neighbours, or with a public official”. Solar Awning drew her attention to awnings, and now she is “looking at the neighbourhood in a whole new way”. Hau told me the project is “not solving one issue, it’s not solving one block, it’s not approaching it in this very dogmatic way, but just really looking at what’s out there in the real world”. One way to interpret this statement by Hau is that the xClinic public experiments, such as Solar Awning, do not provide dogmatic solutions to ecological health issues; they experiment with what is possible in specific settings.
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4.4.3 Hula Hoop Exercise Prescription
Figure 4.7: xClinic hula hoop exercise documentation as part of material for xClinic exercise program for “Civic Action” (2012).
One of the prescriptions I was involved in developing at the xClinic in my research capacity as a participant observer and artist, was material for the xClinic exercise program (see figure 4.7). One of the exercises was a hula hoop challenge that distributes wildflower seeds as you spin; the hoop is designed with holes strategically placed around the edge that are filled with native wildflower seeds; as one exercises with the hula hoop, wildflower seeds get dispersed over the exercise area—improving both biodiversity and abdominals. Jeremijenko was planning the exercise program for a show at Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, called Civic Action: A Vision for Long Island City (May 13 to August 5, 2012). She told me that the exercise program uses existing practices and paradigms—personal training programs—to improve ecological health:
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We take the paradigm of the exercise program where we do personal training for people who are interested in improving their own health… and then in fact helping to design exercises or a program that also addresses their environmental health concerns. (Jeremijenko 2012, pers. comm.)
As the above quote illustrates, Jeremijenko takes the exercise program “paradigm” for enhancing one’s own health and reframes it to also consider the health of the environment. In figure 4.7, I am featured performing the hula hoop exercise; the photos were created as part of demonstration material for the hula hoop exercise. Figure 4.8 is a still from a video taken at Socrates Sculpture Park during the Civic Action exhibition in which people performed the hula hoop exercise. Both these figures illustrate the engaging and affective modalities of the experimental practices of the xClinic. I raise the affective component of these prescriptions to introduce the idea that these interventions, or public experiments, are practices of care. Rather than considering these xClinic interventions as responding to and generating matters of concern, the hula hoop challenge and other xClinic interventions employ sensory and affective modalities to produce matters of care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011).
The affective forms of engagement used by the xClinic, such as the hula hoop exercise challenge experiment with and reframe existing practices, like exercise programs, to incorporate environmental health benefits. The hula hoop exercise is a ludic spectacle to provoke reflection on means of engaging in and reimagining ecological health issues, such as biodiversity. It goes beyond “talk and text”, and is part of the wider xClinic interventions that explore affective registers that question both the subjects and objects of health and research.
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Figure 4.8: Video still of xClinic hula hoop exercise performed during “Civic Action” (Jeremijenko, 2012).
4.4.4 xSpecies Drinking Fountain
While I was in residence at the xClinic I collaborated with another artist working there, Gallardo, to create a proposal for the “Tap City Drinking Fountain Competition” (Audeh 2011)—a competition to redesign the disused Duncan Dunbar Memorial Fountain in Greenwich Village, New York City. The fountain was originally designed for both horses and humans; Gallardo and I took this interspecies drinking fountain concept further and designed one for multiple species. We proposed the xSpecies Drinking Fountain (2012; xSpecies standing for cross/interdependent species; see figures 4.9 and 4.10). The aim of this proposal was to rethink existing devices in order to create services for, and care for, non-humans, including horses, dogs, pigeons, bats and salamander in urban environments. Our design won the competition, but unfortunately we were not able to raise enough funds to make the proposal an actuality (see Bustler 2012).
The different species, represented in the diagram below (see figure 4.9), each access water in unique ways due to their size, biology and particular drinking preferences. For example, some birds can only sip and then have to raise their heads, while others have an osmotic straw-like biological structure. The scale on the diagram represents the height at which these species typically inhabit an urban space. The coloured lines, like a
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subway map, depict the approximate location and the path the drinker will travel in order to access the drinking fountain; the light-blue lines represent the water flow path of the drinking fountain. The illustration on the next page (see figure 4.10) depicts our design for the actual fountain. The fountain includes wind turbines to create power to ensure that water is elevated and flows along the pipe infrastructure. Each drinking vessel (tap and sink) is specifically designed to meet the drinking needs of different species. Attached to the fountain are cameras that are triggered each time a “drinker” uses the fountain, the camera is linked to a twitter account that sends tweets out each time the fountain is used.
Figure 4.9: xSpecies Drinking Fountain map (Gallardo and Pratt 2012).
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Figure 4.10: xSpecies Drinking Fountain structure (Gallardo and Pratt 2012).
The different public experiments—clinical trials, workshops, prescriptions and exhibitions—all experiment with health practices to test scalable means of improving ecological health. As I have discussed, a key aspect of these experiments is the way they detour and reframe existing infrastructure and practices to highlight alternative practices that may improve, and better care for, ecological health.
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4.5 Tending to One’s Experiments
The public experiments staged by xClinic evolve over time through practices of tending to and caring for the entities within the experiment. This section discusses one prescription, noPARK, in relation to matters of care and notions of tending.
4.5.1 noPARK
The art intervention, noPARK, is prescribed to people visiting the xClinic who care about about water quality (see figure 4.11). It involves instructions to repurpose no-parking zones, such as fire hydrant no-parking sites. On these spaces, xClinic participants (im-patients) are encouraged to install microparks to filter pollutants and oil runoff from roads, in order to reduce the amount of toxins in stormwater before this water heads to rivers and/or the sea. Despite the vegetation growing in the no-parking zone, the noPARK sites still enable access to fire hydrants or other facilities because fire trucks can drive over the vegetation and the vegetation springs back up once the truck has gone. In this way, the noPARK performs the no-parking zone differently: the parking space is shifted from a permanent empty space to a temporary micropark that improves ecological health.
Figure 4.11: noPARK installation (Jeremijenko 2009).
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Part of what is involved in a public experiment such as noPARK is that it requires maintenance and tending to. Jeremijenko said the different plants that are used in the noPARKs “need tending, they need attending to”. She explained that “in that tending and in that maintenance and attention you learn”: this is what interests Jeremijenko, “how to learn” from that tending and how to “create an ongoing context in which we look at the plants and notice how they’re doing” (Jeremijenko 2012, pers. comm.). Hence the xClinic public experiments such as noPARK could be said to be about creating an ongoing context and spectacle for tending, performing care, in order to learn about different ecologies and ultimately gain a greater understanding of human and non-human health.
This emphasis on experimentation as a form of care, of tending to entities, such as plants in a noPARK, stems from the way that Jeremijenko positions the role of experimentation, and science, within the xClinic and her art practice more generally. While discussing noPARK, she told me:
So I think this idea that science is certain, and then you just…you prove the facts…to pretend it’s certain is to not understand that science is an ongoing process of experimenting with and developing an understanding of these complex, in this case very small, little, ecosystems—making them work, making them thrive…but no one’s trying to say we have a proven system that is going to perform in this predictable way. That’s just not what you can do. (Jeremijenko 2012, pers. comm.)
In providing an xClinic prescription, such as noPARK, Jeremijenko is not providing a proven, predictable system; rather, like the process of scientific experimentation, people learn to understand the complexity of the system and interactions by tending to the experiment. This notion of tending to complex interactions as they emerge echoes French philosopher Deleuze’s (1989, 193) contention that we need to be “attentive to the unknown knocking at our door”. Puig de la Bellacasa (2011, 212) writes, “though we do not know in advance what world is knocking, inquiring into how we can care will be required in how we will relate to the new”. Although we can not know at the beginning of the experiment what world is
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knocking, what types of health might emerge, we can investigate how to care. As Jeremijenko says, it is in the tending to and maintenance of the noPARK that one learns.
noPARK shares similarities with other artists’ public experiments involving parking spaces, such as the San Francisco Design Group, Rebar’s, 2005 project, PARK(ing). In PARK(ing) Rebar paid for the use of a two-hour car parking spot, but rather than parking a vehicle they temporarily installed a park in the parking spot, replete with turf and park bench and tree (Rebar 2013).3 Both PARK(ing) and noPARK turn city infrastructure into a spectacle, and invite passers-by to imagine alternative ways of creating environments. But, in contrast to PARK(ing), the xClinic prescription noPARK focuses specifically on how to reframe urban space to enhance individual and communal health, rather than just creating places for leisure. Thus, rather than acting as solely a leisure activity, xClinic prescriptions aim to engage people (participants and bystanders) in tending to the relation between infrastructure and health, inviting people to care for structural environmental health issues.
Not only does noPARK interrogate infrastructure by pointing to other potential uses of public space, as I describe above, it also reveals the restrictions that make environmental action and improvement to health difficult. In contrast to Rebar’s PARK(ing), which operates within the city infrastructure (i.e. the parking space can be hired for two hours by participants engaged with the PARK(ing) project and then returned back to its standard use), noPARK seeks to rip up the asphalt and create permanent change across the city. But, as yet, Jeremijenko has not been able to gain approval from the NYC Department of Transportation (DOT) to dig up the asphalt and install noPARKs throughout the city.
3 Their action has now turned into a global movement—PARK(ing), what they refer to as an “open-source” model “to challenge existing notions of public urban space and empower people to help redefine space to suit specific community needs” (Rebar 2013).
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What arises from this discussion of noPARK is the way in which xClinic public experiments facilitate tending to the entities involved in the experiment, such as plants, and how one learns about interdependent relations and needs of humans and non-humans through these acts of care, including structures that limit ways of caring. This is a type of care that— following STS notions of care—”enacts a critical attention to the materiality of practices and the agency of non-humans” (Metzger 2014, 1003). But practices of tending—practices of care—in noPARK are also, as Mol (2008, 49) suggests, about treating different interventions as “yet another experiment” and to “again and again, be attentive to whatever it is that emerges”. For, she states, “in the logic of care uncertainty is chronic… You doctor, but you have no control” (2008, 78), hence to intervene is to experiment but also to tend to one’s experiment, to care.
4.6 Conclusion
In this chapter I have argued that the xClinic prescriptions and interventions enact practices of experimentation. xClinic aims to reframe health through a number of creative public experiments, such as noPARK, and Farmacy, to shift health from a disease- or genetic-focused model towards health as an interconnected ecological, human and non-human issue. For example, in the experiment (prescription), noPARK, a no-parking zone, plants and toxic wastewater are brought together to position health as something that emerges through public experimentation and constant tending—through practices of care. noPARK, like the other xClinic prescriptions I discuss, is a form of rescripting engagement with health; the mundane activity of parking, and the structures that enact those activities, are brought into playful association with the different actors (human and non-human) that contribute to human health and ecological health.
When we think about experiments, typically we envisage a lab and a scientist in a white coat. However, Jeremijenko’s artworks offer a different type of experiment --- creative experiments. The artworks take the symbols
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and structures of scientific experiments, such as lab coats and clinical trials and use them to generate an alternative approach to experimentation that is designed to shift power from the scientist to the public, involve the public in defining the problem and co-producing potential solutions. This shift has potential to open up possibilities for rethinking public engagement in ecological health. Eighteenth-century scientific experiments utilised elements of public spectacle, staging “epistemological dramas” (Stewart 2008, 11), which helped to convey authority. Likewise, Jeremijenko uses the spectacular elements of public experiments, to legitimate public concerns, knowledges and practices. Often science communication around complex environmental concerns, such as climate change, concentrate on apocalyptic, or fatalistic narratives, which have typically been used to inspire fear, concern and motivate. However, empirical research on climate change representations has shown that although fear and shock can capture attention, “they are also likely to distance or disengage individuals from climate change, tending to render them feeling helpless and overwhelmed when they try to comprehend their own relationship with the issue” (O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole 2009, 375). Or other ecologically oriented narratives and public engagement campaigns, such as not using plastic bags, emphasises what people, as consumers, should not do, or do less of. This negative framing doesn’t open space for more productive engagement with environmental issues. However, in contrast, Jeremijenko’s experiments provide a form of engagement that allows for the collective reframing of environmental health concerns to probelmatise existing approaches and similtaenously enable people to take responsibility and take charge of issues they care about.
However, there are limitations to the ways in which these experiments might be scaled up to incorporate a wider audience and to which audiences they appeal too. For example, the AgBags are priced in a way that makes them inaccessible to lower-socio economic audiences. Alongside price exclusions, the AgBag workshop I attended was promoted towards an academic and art school audience. In contrast, the visibility of
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the AgBags in public spaces creates a spectacle that can be visible to a broader public than when AgBags are displayed at conferences or inside galleries. And as my interview with Doannie Vo demonstrated, people did stumble on it and changed their interactions with growing edibles in the urban spaces. However, Doannie is an exception, take up of the AgBags by participants is low, due to price, the volume of AgBags Jeremijenko can produce and other motivating factors that go beyond the scope of my research. The scalability of artistic interventions and the infrastructure and methodological tools that might assist in scaling up experiments is an area of research that needs closer attention.
The argument within this chapter is that public creative experiments can be used as a means to creatively intervene in issues of environmental health through three key modes: fostering attention by encouraing people to attend to concerns that they care about; creating spectacles, for example, by hijacking and twisting familiar imagery and practices such as the red health cross; and re-framing health repertoires (repertoires understood as a stock of skills and items, such as clinical trials) that provide scope for action. Using these modes xClinic creative experiments are located in, and respond to, specific concerns to compose and reimagine alternative, more careful, practices. Puig de la Bellacasa (2010, 167) suggests, “care is embedded in the practices that maintain the webs of relationality that we form”. She argues that living in ecologies “requires a perspective on the personal-collective that, without forgetting human individual bodies, doesn’t start from these bodies but from awareness of their interdependency” (2010, 167). Using public creative experiments the xClinic invites people to attend to the relationality of environmental health through spectacular interventions that enact practices of care, not just in the present but as a mechanism for speculating on and implementing possible futures. However, the different artworks discussed in this case study don’t dictate one single future, rather they use creative experiments to speculate on how different possible futures could be, inviting people to discuss environmental health and the world they would like to live in. The experiments conducted within the xClinic, can be seen as modes of
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care that invite people to collectively re-imagine, and enact, environmental health futures—conceptually and materially.
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Windowfarms
5.1 Introduction
In this chapter I examine Windowfarms, a project that experiments with collaborative ways of indoor-farming using vertical hydroponic growing systems. It began as an art project in New York in 2009, co-created by the artists Riley and Bray (Bray has since left). Windowfarms was inspired by a New York Times Magazine article by the American journalist, activist and author Michael Pollan (2008). Pollan wrote, “the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle” (2008, par. 8) and “the single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and … we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world” (par. 28). Pollan’s argument in the article is that growing food is a lifestyle choice that connects us to ways of engaging with the world that contribute to the health of ecologies rather than “diminishing the world” (2008, par. 28). Riley wanted to create an art project that would engage people in reimagining ecological values, and Pollan’s article prompted her to develop a project that concentrated on growing food indoors as a means of responding to climate change and other ecological concerns.
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The first windowfarm prototype was cobbled together out of recycled drinking bottles, a cheap aquarium air pump and plastic tubing for installation in Riley’s Brooklyn, New York apartment window. The design allowed Riley to grow plants in her apartment using a cheap hydroponic system. From its beginnings as a prototype artwork in Riley’s apartment, the project, Windowfarms, has evolved into an online community, our.Windowfarms (our.windowfarms.org), with over 45, 000 members (our.Windowfarms 2012). 4 Members of our.Windowfarms share ideas and designs for urban gardening using hydroponic systems. Windowfarms systems are still typically made of drinking bottles, an aquarium pump and plastic tubing. The water, with added nutrients, is pumped up from a large container of water at the bottom of the system. The water slowly runs down the system, through each of the bottles that the plants sit in. Windowfarms systems have been shown in a number of exhibitions, Eyebeam, New York; Whitney Museum, New York; and Ars Electronica Center, Linz, Austria.
Figure 5.1: Images taken while assembling my windowfarm, 2014, Hong Kong.
4 As of 2010, Windowfarms became a social enterprise. I have limited this case study to Windowfarms art installations and the associated online community, rather than addressing how Windowfarms evolved into a social enterprise, as this goes beyond the scope of my research.
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For clarity, the different parts of the project are referred to in the following manner:
• Windowfarms: the name of the project • our.Windowfarms: the online network (our.windowfarms.org) • windowfarm or windowfarms: the hydroponic device • windowfarmers: people who create windowfarms and/or are part of our.Windowfarms
In contrast to the xClinic case study, this case study of Windowfarms is an opportunity to explore a collaborative, community-building artistic intervention into ecological health. In this chapter, I describe the origins of Windowfarms. Second, I define the term “curation” and how it pertains to practices of care in this case. Third, I discuss my experience of building a windowfarm in Hong Kong and reflect on the practices of care this involved. In the final section my key argument is that curating ecologies, as a practice of care, is a form of artistic engagement that explores the gathering together and enactment of relations. Curation reveals the competing demands of care and the tension between transformation and control that emerges when one cares for other entities.
5.2 Windowfarms
In April 2009, Riley and Bray invited people to participate in a Windowfarms workshop at Eyebeam art gallery in New York to “pioneer” research and design on hydroponic indoor systems—fifteen people came to Eyebeam to “hack” windowfarm designs. During the workshop Riley and Bray observed how people communicated to each other and how they developed their windowfarm designs. Riley explains:
We would watch what people wanted to do; they wanted to draw pictures for each other, and they wanted to go on the internet or, even better, they wanted to go to a store together, like a hardware store, to find parts, and talk to one another about how those parts could be used to achieve certain, different
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goals. So we actually took all fifteen of those people, we rented a van and we drove to Home Depot, which is our big hardware store over here, and we just, we were like, “Everyone. Let’s go look for stuff for windowfarms” … We have a bunch of pictures of everybody at Home Depot holding up things that they found: “I’m going to design mine around this part”—this little thing that was maybe a replacement part for an air conditioner or something like that. (Riley 2012, pers. comm.)
After observing the participants during the workshops and residency, Riley and Bray had a greater understanding of how people engaged with researching, developing and curating windowfarms. Riley and Bray took those insights into building the Windowfarms online social network. They held another workshop at Eyebeam in July 2009, with around twenty people, and then launched our.Windowfarms in August 2009, and engaged workshop participants as “pioneers” in using and curating the website. Riley (2012, pers. comm.) described the approach of developing Windowfarms with participants as an “iterative approach”:
To launch something, and then learn from it, and then rebuild it, and then launch it again, and learn what you’re doing wrong. So it’s this constant failure, but learning from your failure. So we were taking that approach, the iterative approach. (Riley 2012, pers. comm.)
In this chapter it is argued that the material and discursive practices that emerge as part of Windowfarms can be seen as practices of curation. In running the workshops, establishing the website, and working with participants, Riley and Bray developed and engaged in practices of “iterative” collective curation, in which people tinkered with windowfarm designs, sharing, collaborating and improving on different versions on the online platform our.Windowfarms. Central to the development of Windowfarms is Riley’s framework, R&D-I-Y (Research and Develop It Yourself), which combines principles from R&D (Research and Development—used in expert-driven corporate and government product and design innovation) and D-I-Y (Do It Yourself), amateur practices of building, tinkering with and maintaining things. On her personal website, Riley explains that “R&D-I-Y operates on a collaboration framework as simple as: propose >
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implement tests > report > propose tweaks > assess solutions > publish instructions” (Riley 2010b, par. 2).
5.3 Curating as a Practice of Care
The term “curate” is currently used in reference to a wide variety of multifaceted professional roles and personal activities: from referring to an art curator, museum curator, biocurator or digital content curator to practices of organising and maintaining online identities. Traditionally the term “curate” was used in reference to a person who was assigned to care for something—from the Latin cura, meaning care, and curare, “to take care of” (Strauss 2006). However, the noun has more recently taken on additional meaning through the verb “to curate”, which the Oxford English Dictionary (online version) defines as: “to act as curator of (a museum, exhibits, etc.); to look after and preserve”; and, in extended use: “to select the performers or performances to be included in (a festival, album, programme, etc.); (also) to select, organize, and present (content), as on a web site”. Farquharson (2003, 10) points out that this shift from noun to verb “may also suggest a shift in the conception of what curators do, from a person who works at some remove from the processes of artistic production, to one actively ‘in the thick of it’”. O’Neill (2007, 15) suggests that the shift from noun to verb changes what it means to be a curator, arguing that there is a “changing perception of the curator as carer to a curator who has a more creative and active part to play within the production of art itself”. A curator and the act of curation is simultaneously a means of caring for artefacts/entities and a means of creative production (O’Neill 2007), it is this sense of curation that is used in this chapter.
In recent discussions on curating digital media art, which account for changing affordances of digital media, the act of curation has evolved in a way that challenges the distinction between artistic production and caring for artefacts (Dietz 1998; Krysa 2006). For example, networked art projects and performative digital practices challenge the traditional distance between
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curator and artist with regards to artistic production (Dietz 1998, 2004; Graham and Cook 2010; Krysa 2006). One approach has been to view curating as “filtering” material (Krysa 2006; Paul 2006; Schleiner 2003), whereby the curator is not simply an administrator or context provider but a manipulator of flows of information in networks (Vishmidt 2006). Paul describes such a networked curator as a “filter feeder” (2006, 88); she borrows the term from Schleiner (2003) and explains that filtering is a continuous process of creating and developing contexts for engaging with the artwork. However, returning to the relationship between curation and care, I propose that practices of curation used in Windowfarms are more than “filter feeding”.
Galloway and Thacker (2007, 107) extend discussions of care and curation in their exploration of curating computer viruses. They connect curation back to its etymological roots in care to examine curation in relation to tensions between caring for “stillness” and unexpected happenings of “excess” that they suggest are always a part of curating (2007, 107). They equate “stillness” to the idea that “care in curating conceptually tends toward the presentation of the static: collecting, archiving, and preserving” (2007, 107). In tension with stillness, they argue that curating always has an excess, “an opening, however wide or narrow, through which the unexpected happens” (2007, 107), for example, the different interpretations and interactions a visitor might have to how the curator intended the curated exhibit to be experienced. Galloway and Thacker equate this tension between stillness and excess—with regards to curatorial practices as acts of care—to a tension between “control and transformation” (2007, 109). For them, curation, or curare, “presupposes a certain duplicitous relation to transformation. It enframes, contextualizes, bounds, manages, regulates, and controls. In doing so, it also opens up, unbridles, and undoes the very control it seeks to establish” (2007, 108–109). Drawing on Galloway and Thacker (2007), curation can be considered as both a practice of care and creative production that engages in forms of control and transformation.
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The tension between control and transformation—stillness and excess—is evident in Windowfarms. Although the project is constantly evolving (plants are continuously growing and designs constantly evolve), the point of the online community is in some ways to control and archive “static” moments (Galloway and Thacker 2007, 107) in order to open up ways for others to build on, improve and transform Windowfarms systems. An iterative mode of curation, of practices of care, involves learning from failure. This iterative aspect of curation in Windowfarms emphasises the way curation involves managing tensions between control and transformation, such as attempting to manage the way participants engage with building a hydroponic system, or with tending to the way a plant grows. Curation is thus a process that involves failure and transformation, a process that “undoes the very control it seeks to establish” (Galloway and Thacker 2007, 109). Not only arranging, organising and filtering material, but actively involved in the creative production of works, not simply filtering material.
5.4 Dehydrated Lettuces
Figure 5.2: Lettuces growing in my windowfarm, 2014, Hong Kong.
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Figure 5.3: Dead lettuces.
While living in Hong Kong in 2014 I built the “3-plant airlift system”, following instructions from the our.Windowfarms (2012). After more than three weeks of growing my lettuces in the windowfarm, they were looking healthy (see figure 5.2); then tragedy struck. One morning, as humidity was increasing in Hong Kong I turned on my dehumidifier and left the apartment, when I came back in the evening my lettuces had completely shrivelled (see figure 5.3). When the reservoir lost water, due to the dehumidifier, the system did not have enough pressure to pump water around, which led to the failure of the pumping system and the death of my lettuces. I realised I needed to be constantly caring for the windowfarm, in order to tune it to the environment—the humidity and heat of Hong Kong. Following the death of my lettuces, I learnt that my windowfarm needed constant attention. On reflection, I had assumed that the design meant the windowfarm could largely take care of itself, particularly with regards to watering, but this was clearly not the case.
It highlighted for me the competing demands of care, for in order for the place I was renting to not accumulate mould during the humid summer weather, with humidity reaching 90 per cent or more, I had to run a dehumidifier. I had not considered that this would cause the water to drop
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in the windowfarm system. Puig de la Bellacasa (2011, 100) describes how “care eschews easy categorization”, and notes that “a way of caring over here could kill over there”. In tending to the property, ensuring that mould did not grow, I killed my lettuces. Puig de la Bellacasa (2011, 100) argues that tensions in care means “we need to ask ‘how to care’ in each situation”.
Although I knew there were changes occurring in the windowfarm system—the plants were growing, and I enjoyed watching their transformation—once I established the system I conceived of it as a stable system, capable of running by itself. In contrast, in order for the lettuces to flourish, I needed to be constantly caring for it, curating the system, in order to be open to the transformation of the entire system, not just the plants. When the water pressure dropped due to the humidifier, it created an opening for the unexpected (see Galloway and Thacker 2007). The situation was in excess of my controlled attempts at growing plants, which is, as I have argued drawing on Galloway and Thacker (2007), one of the tensions of curation. Lettuces might seem a banal object to discuss in relation to issues of care, but this failure on my part, to care for my lettuces, highlights that caring is a complex “material vital doing” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011, 90). In writing on animal conservation practices van Dooren (2014, 292) contends “time and again I have witnessed how care for some individuals and species translates into suffering and death for others”. An attention to care, to what gets neglected, or harmed, helps to highlight interdependent modes of existence.
5.5 Curating Ecologies
In previous sections of this chapter, I used concepts of curation in art, drawing in particular on Galloway and Thacker (2007), to establish thinking of curating as a tension between control and transformation. I will now explore Windowfarms focusing on the curation of ecologies. I examine practices of care within Windowfarms in relation to practices of curation, which is not to say that all forms of care I observed within Windowfarms were
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forms of curation. However, for the argument of artistic engagement in ecological health, curation emerged as a means by which Riley, and people engaged with Windowfarms, enacted concerns around how to engage in politics surrounding food, such as energy costs of transportation and wider ecological concerns such as climate change.
One ecology is the actual our.Windowfarms site. While using our.Windowfarms to research and create a windowfarm, I noticed little in the way of derogatory commentary, online attacks or inflammatory posts, particularly within more recent posts. The majority of comments on people’s posts consisted of positive comments or specific questions. Riley (pers. comm. 2012) said she had curated the site, and her interactions with other media and events associated with Windowfarms, to emphasise building on other people’s designs and collaborative testing. At the start of launching the online social network, she observed that within the online communication on the our.Windowfarms site some people would say things like, “Oh, that idea is dumb and my idea is better” (Riley 2012, pers. comm.). Riley feels this mode of communication is “really disempowering” and she worked to move the Windowfarms online community “away from being an idea-based community to being a practice-based community, an implementation-based community”.
Throughout the development of the online community Riley has used a number of curatorial strategies to encourage collective and implementation-based practices. At the beginning she actively wrote blog posts, commented on others posts, uploaded and organised images, and curated other peoples content, for example by encouraging people to use hashtags to label and curate the work items they were posting. However, Riley attributes a talk she gave at TED (a global conference platform), “A Garden in My Apartment” (2011), as one of the key factors that drove the development of Windowfarms as an implementation-based community (Riley 2012, pers. comm.). The talk was recorded and placed online as a TED Talk video. Riley (2012, pers. comm.) explained: “In that TED Talk, I talked a lot about the spirit of R&D-I-Y, and so once people started coming
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to the site from the TED Talk, they were prepared with the culture that we wanted to instigate”. Riley said that people who had watched the TED Talk came to the our.Windowfarms site and practised different forms of managing and organising relationships, they emphasised a R&D-I-Y approach— building on and tinkering with other people’s practices rather than critiquing ideas.
Curation, and associated practices of maintaining, tinkering, organising and filtering, can be seen as a way of developing an ecology that people care for and feel aligned with, an ecology they wish to nurture in a certain way. New types of ecological health and ways of curating health emerge out of these curated relations, both political (cosmopolitical) and affective. The windowfarm, and my inability to care for my lettuces, my lapsed care, exposed my obligations and responsibilities. I established the windowfarm but neglected to consider the setting and relationships that surrounded this system, prompting me to reflect on what else is neglected or “overspills” engagement (see Michael 2012b, 546n5).
Riley (2012 pers. comm.) expressed a sense of obligation she felt in developing Windowfarms. Initially she took on stronger curatorial control of the our.Windowfarms site and physical exhibitions of windowfarms, in part because she originally approached Windowfarms as her art project and felt concern for the people involved. She felt “responsible for people’s success or failure”, therefore she felt she needed to be actively commenting on people’s posts, iteratively developing ways of facilitating engagement. She was also “nervous about it being too hard work for people to build a windowfarm”; the whole process of building a windowfarm can involve many hours of effort over weeks, spending time locating parts and constructing and assembling everything. I can attest to the time involved in just the initial set up—it took me a whole day of traipsing through sports stores in Hong Kong just to locate air needles for the airlift system on my windowfarm. At the start of Windowfarms in 2009 there were few windowfarms in operation, but as more people began to make their own systems and become enthusiastic about the project and competent, Riley (2012, pers. comm.) realised that she
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needed to “create space for them to be the ones who were going and giving advice to the new person”, voicing a need to “let it go a little bit”. This can be seen as relinquishing some of the control in her curatorial practices.
For Riley, relinquishing elements of control and developing and empowering people to utilise their creativity for a collective endeavour became a core component of R&D-I-Y and the Windowfarms project. In the initial stages she hoped the project would mean “everyone could be following their passion within the environmental movement and their particular thing that they like to nerd out on, and they could connect with other people who like to nerd out on that same kind of thing” (2012, pers. comm.). She was interested in how affective engagement in the project could open up sites of transformation for ecological health, and hoped Windowfarms could build “towards a set of ideas and practices that could actually, start to … basically get us all excited again about this major overhaul that we’re going to have to make to our entire lifestyles for the rest of our existence on planet Earth”. However, during the evolution of the project Riley’s relationship to it changed:
I basically had to let go of it as my art project… [that] was the moment at which it was like: “what is this now, and what responsibility do I have towards it?” I was still so inspired by it, so any sadness that I felt about it not being my art project anymore was replaced by this sense of awe, in a way, that it was a total experiment and it worked. But it wasn’t mine anymore, and I can’t really control it, so at that point it was more like, how can I support this thing and have it get its own legs, so that it can keep going, and so that I can focus on different parts of it? (Riley 2012, pers. comm.)
Riley did not point to a particular moment where her relationship to it changed, but as the Windowfarms community grew, and her relationship to it evolved it no longer functioned as “her” artwork. Rather than controlling the project and positioning it as her art, she now views it as a collaborative creative experiment, which is open to others to contribute, curate, tend and use as a tool for making their own urban farms and art. For example, in keeping with the expanded sense of authorship Riley expressed, people using
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the Windowfarms instructions have staged exhibitions in which they are positioned as the artists, such as an exhibition at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; The Science Barge, Yonkers, New York; and Kulturhuset, Stockholm, Sweden.
To understand in more detail how Riley conceptualised this sense of letting go of it as her art project I asked her how she defined art. She said she “struggles” with the term: “I wish I could just make another word instead of that one [art], because it just feels like it’s been appropriated in certain ways” (2012, pers. comm.). But, she went on to say “the thing that I do love about art is the premise of authorship”, reflecting that art implies “the deepest sense of authorship”. Riley explained that “authorship” is “the core idea around which all of this [Windowfarms] is built”. In particular, for her, “R&D-I-Y is all about authorship and being authorised”—about building and curating tools and platforms that enable (authorise) others to create artefacts, in other words supporting people to become authors. So, I think that’s another aspect of the whole foundation of where we’re coming from. I think that if it had been some other form of organisation, or had gotten its start in, say, business school or something like that, it would never have worked”.
Curating communities of practice, through facilitating authorship, can also be seen in a range of ways that the our.Windowfarms site has been curated. Take for example the terms of service on our.Windowfarms (2014) (see figure 5.4) the language used is geared towards a collaborative “open” approach, through the use of first-person inclusive pronouns like “our” and “we”, particularly in statements such as “we are standing on one another’s shoulders”. This sense of collective effort is framed around contributing to “our health, society, & the environment”.
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Figure 5.4: Section of the our.Windowfarms Terms of Service (our.Windowfarms 2014).
The Windowfarms terms of service demonstrate how care is developed through an emphasis on collective curation, particularly through the seven core principles of the terms of service (under the heading “What the community asks of you in return”). These principles highlight sharing “innovations”, testing “other people’s good ideas” and building on conversations by describing “the value in the approach and specific challenges” rather than criticising other’s ideas. Hence, within the terms of Windowfarms aims to cultivate curation, in a collective manner. Statements such as: (1) “sharing is active and ongoing”, (2) “we need to explore as many different approaches as possible and people have different conditions” and (3) “report on the method you used, the outcome, and your discoveries along the way. Talk about both the strengths and weaknesses and suggest a next course of action” are further examples of Windowfarms’ emphasis on curating—collaborative, iterative forms of caring for ecological health.
Performing the act of installing and maintaining a windowfarm in one’s home is also to curate one’s home in a different way. One windowfarmer spoke of growing mint: “The mint we are growing could not
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be happier! And it makes the whole apartment smell nice. No more chemical fresheners!” (Rama 2010). For this windowfarmer, it was the smell they curated into their environment; other windowfarmers attended to the visual appearance of the windowfarm. Many windowfarmers expressed curating the “look” of the windowfarm in their window, curating the plants for people viewing from the outside and also for their own internal viewing. They then curated images of their windowfarm on the our.Windowfarms site, progressively adding and updating the images as the farm evolved.
Curating environments does not just relate to the practices directly involved in developing, maintaining and curating a windowfarm system. The windowfarm highlights the impacts of wider practices of care on food production and ecological health. After my own system failed and I abandoned caring for it—I dismantled it and stored it in a cupboard—I started noticing different arrangements of plants within the city (see figure 5.5). I also noticed ways the objects were curated in the city due to food demands, particularly the multiple ways polystyrene boxes in which food was delivered in Hong Kong would pile up on the sides of roads (see figure 5.5)—accidental sculptures that are placeholders for the food chains and food production systems with which I was entangled while living in Hong Kong.
Figure 5.5: Plant strung up in Hong Kong and polystyrene boxes in Hong Kong.
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The need for forms of iterative curation was also expressed by windowfarmers in relation to curating the online environment. Without constant maintenance, the BuddyPress platform (the WordPress plugin to run a social network) can get overrun with spam, creating tensions between control and transformation: desire for control of the site by windowfarmers and perceived lapse of care, or control, by Riley and those responsible for maintaining the site. Thus the spam exposed and opened up problems in the modes of care and curation of the our.Windowfarms site and the levels of access and freedom windowfarmers (users) had to transform the site. Posts from windowfarmers on the site indicated their frustration with the spam and their desire for the site to be cared for differently, as this post intended for windowfarm administrators—titled “no more spam please!” (Martin 2011)—exemplifies:
JOIN THIS IF YOU CARE ABOUT WINDOWFARMS AND SUPPORT THIS:
dear windowfarm-admins! theres so much spam/unwanted advertising going on in this forum, where are the mods? if this project is taken serious, and you are out of capacity for caring about the forum, please do as other forums do and make some of the older/active posters to mods and let them delete the stuff thats going on here. it makes it way easier for people who are new here to find useful information and will keep your outstanding platform in the state-of-the-art-form it deserves to be.
Figure 5.6: User comment from our.Windowfarms (Martin 2011).
But as Riley and comments on the site indicate, curation of the website can lead to issues of lapsed care, where attention is focused on certain areas such as new posts, rather than on caring for and maintaining older posts to ensure they are free of spam.
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5.6 Conclusion
The online community and project Windowfarms was established to engage people in developing food systems that differ from part of a growing community of industrial, corporate, agriculture. The network of windowfarmers create vertical hydroponic systems to grow food indoors, primarily at a small-scale, with the potential to scale up agricultural production across different sites. Although established as an art project, the project has evolved and Riley, no longer identifies it as her art project. What its origins as an art project offers is forms of aesthetic practice and public engagement that I have articulated in terms of curation—a practice of care
Within this case study I have explored how practices of care are performed through collective acts of curation in relation to ecological health concerns. This case began by developing a notion of curation via the term’s etymological roots in care, or “cura”. Drawing on Galloway and Thacker (2007) and recent discussions of curating digital media, curation—as a particular practice of care—was highlighted as a useful tool for examining tensions between control and transformation. Curation as a selective practice of organising what is deemed useful, highlights tensions between desires to archive, organise and maintain and the excess or overspill that arises in the gap between intention and practice. It raises questions of who has the power to define what counts and what should be cared for? In this way WindowFarms is not just a community for creating different hydroponic systems and growing food, but is also a project that highlight the political dimensions of curating food systems.
Drawing on my own experience of building a windowfarm in Hong Kong, and the death of my lettuces, I argued that a focus on care, via practices of curation, helps to highlight the negative aspects of care. In the case study I examined how care is a selective process, and hence there are limits of care, particularly when care for one thing, leads to death of another, or what Puig de la Bellacasa (2012, 199) refers to as the “inescapable troubles of interdependent existences”. This argument builds on a growing
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body of research on the politics of care in technoscience (Haraway 2011; Martin et al. 2015; Mol 2008; Mol et al. 2010; Puig de la Bellacasa 2012). In particular, it contributes to discussions of “care’s darker side: its lack of innocence and the violence committed in its name” (Martin et al. 2015, 627), in which care is articulated as a practice of nurturing, and simultaneously a practice that excludes other entities and ways of being in the world.
Central to the notion of curation developed in this chapter are three core components: re-imagining ecological values, co-creation and practicality. In the process of tending to a windowfarms system and engaging in the collaborative online website, participants can be seen to be involved in re- imagining ecological values through practices of care, obligation and responsibility—as was evidenced by own experience of growing plants in a windowfarms system. The ways in which people curated their home differently due to the needs of the windowfarm, and how they then extended these acts of curation to their profiles on the online forum, also demonstrated a re-imagining of ecological values and relationships to food production. The aspects of food production questioned by windowfarmers included, political concerns about the industrialisation of food, standardisation and homogenisation of food, and environmental justice concerns over unethical labour practices and use of pesticides. Imagining and curating ones relationship to food production differently also involved processes of co-creation, as the collaborative approach emphasised the role art can play in authorising people to engage in environmental issues, such as food production. Co-creation was fostered through a DIY approach of providing tools, networks and instructions for shared authorship, and was explored in this chapter by drawing on the broader understanding of curation as a process of creative collaborative production and iterative care. This collaborative approach challenges the emphasis on corporate ownership that exists in large-scale industrial agriculture, which can foster a lack of care and lack of resonsibility. A third feature of curation, seen in this case study, was an emphasis on practicality—Windowfarms was positioned as a practice-based community, not an ideas-based community. Practicality
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involves attention, care, tinkering, and being attuned to what occurs in practice—an iterative movement between a desire to control and being open to being transformed by having to respond to “the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part” (Barad 2007, 393).
In sum, via the mode of curation, I explored how engaging in Windowfarms can lead to practices of care for, and curiosity about, one’s environment. Care was articulated as a social and material practice that requires attentiveness to interdependent situated relations. Curation also highlights that knowledge and ethics emerges out of tensions between transformation and control, by being attuned to, and responsible for, what emerges in practice.
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Black-Noise and Carbon Valley
6.1 Introduction
This case study and the corresponding artworks I created—the installation Black-Noise and the experimental art video Carbon Valley— comprise my practice-led artistic investigation into environmental health concerns.5 The artworks, and this case study, explore matters of care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011) related to coal-mining expansion in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales, Australia.
In March 2013, I investigated the environmental health impacts of mining coal in the Hunter Valley and interviewed five people living near open-cut coalmines. I selected the Hunter Valley as my field site because it has the greatest concentration of coal mining and coal combustion in Australia (Colagiuri, Cochrane and Girgis 2012). The Hunter Valley— historically renowned since white settlement for horse breeding, dairy farming, agricultural produce and wine making—now contains over 50 open-cut and underground coalmines (Hydrocology Consulting 2014). It is
5 To see video documentation of the installation Black-Noise and to view the experimental video Carbon Valley please refer to the USB accompanying this exegesis or visit the website: carefulprospects.com.
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also currently home to the world’s largest coal-export terminal (Kelly 2014). People I interviewed spoke of the clouds of dust that descend on the Hunter Valley due to open-cut coal mining. The tongue-in-check renaming of the Hunter Valley to “Carbon Valley” in local media reflects the propensity of the region to become thick with carbon, and concern over the change in landscape (Ray 2005).
Before conducting research in the Hunter I had been living in Australia for five years but I had little previous understanding of the everyday impacts of coal mining on the Australian communities that live surrounded by mining sites. I am personally entangled in the use of coal, although I try to reduce my use via the green choices offered by energy providers. However, as I previously mentioned, the throb of coal is felt wide and deep in Australia. For example, the University of New South Wales, Australia (UNSW)—the university where I conducted this doctoral research and through which I received my doctoral scholarship—has approximately $50 million worth of investments in coal and other fossil fuels (Hilmer 2014). Despite recent campaigns driven by students and staff for UNSW to de- invest, it continues to invest in fossil fuels (Hannam 2014). I initiated this research into concerns over open-cut coal mining in the Hunter Valley because I wanted to explore what living with mines means. I wanted to understand what it means to be encroached on by mines, both in terms of the health of people living in the Hunter Valley and the health of the environment with which they co-exist. To develop the artworks, the main questions I asked were: What are people’s ecological health concerns about coal mining? What do they care for and how do they care? How can I understand and practice care for ecological health through practice-led research?
In this chapter, I reflect on the bodily burdens of coal and the resulting matters of care that emerged from my practice-led research: the burdens on the bodies of humans, the bodies of the non-humans and the bodies of water, air and land that make up the environment. This case study responds to waves of apathy and mourning I feel daily—feelings that surge
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with each news report of increasing fire risks brought on by changes in climate, the blackening of skies from smog pollution, or stories of toxic tailings leaching into waterways. Living in Australia, I am complicit with the burden of coal and black-noise throbbing through the financial veins of this country I call home. I care about where I live, but how can I respond? How can I practice care in this time of blackening?
Based on an analysis of my artworks, the aim of this case study is to explore how care emerges in the artworks through actions of listening, and how listening pertains to matters of care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011). In what follows, I start with a description of the installation Black-Noise and the video Carbon Valley. I then extend discussions of listening as “haptic”, drawing in particular on Nancy’s (2007) research on listening and Marks’ (2000) notion of “haptic visuality”, through discussions of care. I apply this notion of haptic listening to my installation and video and discuss how haptic listening can act as, and perform, focused attention and care.
Figure 6.1: Installation view of Black-Noise at Kudos Gallery, Sydney (Pratt 2013).
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6.2 Making Things Public: Matters of Care in Carbon Valley
6.2.1 Carbon Valley
In the video, Carbon Valley, I wove the stories of people I interviewed from the Hunter Valley around the moments of care and concern that I observed: Wendy Bowman wiping the dust off a picture frame in her living room and talking to me about the dust in her lungs; Tom Clarke worrying about the “poor critters” and ecosystems loosing their “oomph” due to a lack of connection; Deidre Olofsson staring out over a landscape she calls home, mourning its destruction and spending sleepless nights due to dust and infrasound—infrasound is noise that is inaudible to human hearing, sounds at very low frequencies, or by definition any sound below a frequency of 20 Hz (Hertz); Mick Roderick expressing concern about the declines in migratory birds and keeping records as evidence to fight for changes in legislation; and Sharyn Munro angry at the callousness of people in governance who are unwilling to “join the dots” and connect rapid coal- mining expansion with ill health. They all care for the future health of the Hunter Valley, expressing it in different ways: concern expressed for grandchildren, future generations, birdlife and ecosystems.
The poet and cultural historian Schwartz (2014) speaks of the ways in which societies all have their emergency calls to sound alarm for listeners in harm’s way. My video emerges out of the concerns expressed by the people I interviewed and through a reflection on what alarms to sound out in this time of environmental emergency. I selected the “anecdotes” that I felt best represented what the people I interviewed were most alarmed about and what they cared for the most (see Michael 2012a). In the video I folded these anecdotes into a material and discursive noise: dust on the lens, images blurring across each other in faded overlays and transitions, entangled visual and aural noise. The intention of this video is to enact the importance of paying attention to the interdependency of entities, tuning in to different
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connections to avoid ecologies composed of humans and non-humans from losing their “oomph”, to borrow Clarke’s (2012, pers. comm.) expression.
Figure 6.2: Video still from Carbon Valley.
6.2.2 Black-Noise
The installation Black-Noise was shown at Kudos Gallery, Sydney, in 2013. It consisted of aluminium trays filled with coal dust and water. The trays were positioned on top of subwoofer speakers that blasted noise, including infrasound, into the water and coal-dust slurry. The sounds emitted from the speakers were generated from recordings that I collected from open-cut coal-mining sites in the Hunter Valley.
Figure 6.3: Installation view of Black-Noise, Kudos Gallery, Sydney (Pratt 2013).
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The coal-dust slurry in the trays operated as intermediary, as interface; the trays placed material weight between the sound of mining and the bodies of people who experienced the installation. Real-time fluctuations in noise level interacted with the material on the trays, shifting the coal and water; the noise constantly changed the coal-dust patterns on the floor of the tray, a means of live recording and aesthetically transcribing the turbulent impacts of coal. The metal at the bottom of the tray glistened through to create a mirror of sorts overlaid with the noise of coal mining turned into material patterns. The patterns on the trays emerged as new topologies; they resembled topological grey-scale images of estuaries, or the coal sludge that collects on tin roofs of houses near mine sites before running off into household water tanks (see figure 6.4 and 6.5 for images of patterns on trays in my installation).
Figure 6.4: Close-up of coal-dust patterns caused by noise vibrations (Pratt 2013).
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Figure 6.5: Installation view of trays (Pratt 2013).
I titled the work Black-Noise because I wanted to allude to the blackening of environmental health that is caused by the expansion of open- cut coal mining in Australia. The invitation to my installation Black-Noise provides a description of how I used the idea of black-noise to frame my installation:
Due to the dominance of coal within our energy systems there is a blackening: a blackening of stock markets, a blackening of landscapes, a blackening of the air. Drilling, blasting, heavy trucks, dozers, excavators, crushers, coal trains, bulldozers, front-end loaders, and the throb of machinery all create a black noise. For those living by coal mining sites, these are the dark vibrations of night and the infrasound of day. But, for the large majority of us—an “us” removed from the immediate proximity of the extraction and manufacturing of coal—these are distant noises. Yet, even though the mining may be out of hearing range, we still feel these noises and vibrations in other ways; the practices that generate these disturbances are impacting the climate in chaotic ways that we do see and feel. (Pratt 2013, exhibition invitation)
The term black-noise also refers to a particular variant of noise within financial markets—a noise that is at a frequency that is almost impossible to measure or hear but nonetheless affects events and environments in different
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ways. The physicist Manfred R. Schroeder (1991, 122) writes about how black-noise governs danger: “black-noise phenomena govern natural and unnatural catastrophes, like floods, droughts, bear markets, and various outrageous outages, such as those of electrical energy. Because of their black spectra, such disasters often come in clusters.” Drawing on Schroeder’s (1991) description, the title Black-Noise is inextricably linked to disaster and the notion that the impacts of coal, and its financial markets, are often beyond frequencies that we can hear, although they still affect our environment and us.
Black-noise within financial markets also indicates disagreements about future prospects—albeit disagreements that are hard to measure. For black-noise is a variant of economic noise. The term “noise” was originally proposed by the economist Fischer Black (1986) as an economic theory for understanding pricing, in which interferences in pricing are accounted for by the interferences in information (i.e., the opposite of noise). Noise or, in other words, disagreement over what is determined to be accurate information, is thus necessary for speculative trading because disagreements drive trade: if everyone agreed on the potential financial worth of a particular entity, no one would want to trade.
The noises I recorded from coal-mining sites and parts of the Hunter Valley affected by the impacts of coal mining are intended as a form of noise that represents a disagreement with future prospects. However, rather than disagreements about financial worth, the disagreements are about future prospects of environmental health. The installation was a form of noise that explored absences, silences, what is being destroyed, most significantly the loss of connections within, and between, different ecologies due to the expansion of coal mining, such as the destruction of wetlands. I used infrasound, sound beyond human hearing, and the materials coal and water as a way to speak of the environmental health impacts of coal mining that concerned the people I interviewed, such as noise, contamination of air through coal dust and negative impacts on water. In particular, I was interested in the affective modalities of infrasound, sound below 20 Hz, its
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ability to cause anxiety and the notion of sympathetic resonance—a phenomenon whereby materials and people vibrate in response, with harmonic likeness, to another entity emitting vibrations. In the remainder of this chapter, I discuss the artworks in relation to listening as a practice of care.
Figure 6.6: Installation view (Pratt 2013).
Figure 6.7: Close-up of water resonating, due to noise emanating from speakers beneath trays (Pratt, 2013).
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6.3 Sympathetic Resonance: Grieving and Connecting
During my time spent in the Hunter Valley, I recorded the noises that my interview subjects pointed out to me as causes for concern: the trains, the blasts, the trucks, the dozers. I recorded these sounds at the sides of the road, at mining sites, at train stations and at homes. I wanted to build up a textured auditory experience to match the visceral stories I heard. But I also wanted to make this noise tangible, to show how it shifted and moved material; noise was not just something that happened in the background without material consequences. I wanted to show its affective qualities and to explore how coal and health resonate. How might acts of listening activate care for the environment and attention to the impacts of mining? In this section, I describe how the installation and video endeavoured to build affect through listening, and how this relates to care, in particular how the act of listening may cultivate a sense of care.
It was through the practice of listening, with my entire body, that I began to understand and care for the environmental health concerns within the Hunter Valley. But what does it mean to care within the context of coal mining? Clarke (2013, pers. comm.), one of the interviewees, eloquently said: “It seems peculiar that we need to finally feel the pain of losing something before we’ll see how precious it is”. Clarke alludes to a tension, or irony, within care, one echoed by the word’s etymological origins of grief, the tension being that we often care for something the most as we are losing it, as we grieve it. This tension within care is reflected on in the discussion of my artworks, but first the concept of embodied listening is explored.
6.3.1 Embodied Listening
To listen, I argue, is to carefully tend to the matter at hand. The term listening, as I use it here, refers to a form of sensing that is more than just understanding what one hears, and is rather a mode of focused attention (Nancy 2007). For Nancy (2007), listening is both an auditory experience and a metaphor with affective and resonant properties. He employs
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resonance in relation to listening as a metaphor for affect; in other words, he positions listening as a practice that allows matters to resonate. He explains, the practice of listening involves “an intensification and a concern, a curiosity or an anxiety” (2007, 5). In contrast to the experiential practice of listening, hearing, for Nancy (2007, 7), concentrates on meaning and content, whereas to listen is “to be on the edge of meaning, or in an edgy meaning of extremity”. He proposes that to listen is to engage in “resonant meaning, a meaning whose sense is supposed to be found in resonance, and only in resonance” (2007, 7).
To extend Nancy’s (2007) emphasis on the resonant properties of listening, its bodily properties, and to develop my notion of haptic listening, I draw on haptics research within media and cultural studies. In these fields haptics has moved from meaning touching an object to the way that other senses are entangled with touch, both metaphorically and physically (Kassabian 2013; Marks 2002; Massumi 2002). In particular I draw on Marks’ (2002, 2) formulation of “haptic visuality” to develop a notion of “haptic listening”. Marks draws on Deleuze’s work on cinema and “optical images” to develop haptic visuality. She proposes that “while optical perception privileges the representational power of the image, haptic perception privileges the material presence of the image … haptic visuality involves the body more than is the case with optical visuality” (2000, 163). In applying this concept to cinema, Marks (2000, 2002) highlights particular features of moving images that enact haptic visuality, as Totaro (2002), writing on Marks, summarises:
Grainy, unclear images; sensuous imagery that evokes memory of the senses (i.e. water, nature) … changes in focus, under- and overexposure, decaying film and video imagery … densely textured images. … The haptic image is in a sense, “less complete”, requiring the viewer to contemplate the image as a material presence rather than an easily identifiable representational cog in a narrative wheel. (Totaro 2002, par. 8)
Although Marks (2002) uses haptics in reference to visuality, within my two artworks I relate her concept of haptic visuality to listening. She
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contends that focusing on the surface and materiality of entities by highlighting texture, grain and noise and using sensuous depictions emphasises the active materiality of the actors (human and non-human). In Carbon Valley, both aural and visual noise add texture to the images and sound; I overlay different imagery and sounds, intersecting and entangling different concerns (for example, see figure 6.8). Marks’ (2002) notion of haptic visuality has been extended to sound by a number of scholars, particularly within cinema and media studies. For example, Coulthard (2012, 18) uses haptics to foreground the aural attentiveness within the films of Haneke and develops the concept, “haptic aurality”, to emphasise the tactile, material and corporeal aural elements of Haneke’s films. However, rather than concentrating on aurality and listening to provoke ethical contemplation resulting from listening to silence in film as Coulthard does, I focus on noise and emergent material interferences.
Marks (2002) argues for collapsing the distance between a thing and its representations, collapsing distance between subject and object, and implicitly society and nature. But she also warns not to set up an opposition between the haptic and the optical, arguing that regimes in which tacticity reigns would lead to other false dichotomies. Instead, she invites us to enter into dialogue with both tactile and optical visuality, not to privilege one or the other. Equally Black-Noise and Carbon Valley as a provocation for embodied, careful listening collapses distance, without attempting to create a hierarchy of sensing.
In the following section, I continue to explore haptic listening and the relationship of grief to care in relation to my video and installation. In this discussion I concentrate on the use of noise, in particular infrasound, within my installation and how it enacts haptic listening.
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Figure 6.8: Close-up of coal-dust patterns in tray due to noise emanating from speakers beneath tray (Pratt 2013).
6.3.2 Sympathising with Solastalgia
Albrecht (2005) observed the grief of people living in the Hunter Valley as they saw and felt the impacts of mining. Based on his research, he coined the term “solastalgia”. Solastalgia combines notions of nostalgia with “lack of solace”, and it links “ecosystem distress and human distress” (2005, 41). Albrecht writes that solastalgia is “the pain or sickness caused by the loss or lack of solace and the sense of isolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory” (2005, 45). In both my installation and video I hoped to evoke and enact this notion of solastalgia, in an attempt— paraphrasing one of the people I interviewed, Clarke—to enact the pain of losing something in order to see how precious it is (Clarke 2013). For example, in Black-Noise my intention was to generate affective states of grief through the use of infrasound, in the hope of attuning people not familiar with the impacts of coal mining to the sense of loss and anxiety people in the Hunter Valley experienced.
Black-Noise explored how noise, particularly infrasound, can cause both affects and effects by making materials and people resonate with the audio vibrations—as I will explain, infrasound causes resonance. My
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intention, in the first instance, was to highlight the way noise from mining sites is a significant concern and source of ill health for the neighbouring occupants I interviewed. I had not considered noise as an issue before visiting the Hunter; I thought that the dust and its impact on air and water quality would be the primary concerns that people would raise with me. In the second instance, noise acted as a metaphor for other forces that are impossible to fully quantify—black noises that nonetheless have significant material effects, such as on stock markets and climate change; tuning into the noise to find patterns and connections between human and non-human entities and practices with regards to environmental health.
During my interview with Wendy Bowman, she explained to me that organs and blood vessels in bodies living near mining sites thicken due to the constant vibration caused by infrasound. Provoked by Olofsson’s and Bowman’s reflections on infrasound, I investigated this phenomenon further. The health effect of technological sources of infrasound and low- frequency noise is a contentious issue (Carlsen 2013). Literature on this topic tends to focus on noise from wind turbines, more so than coal mining, but due to limited literature on either, the two have been combined—as they are deemed comparable—in order to assess the health impacts of infrasound (Leventhall, Pelmear and Benton 2003). One review of the literature that looked at the health effects of infrasound from wind turbines concluded that audible noise and infrasound can cause annoyance, for example due to sleep disturbance, but infrasound does not cause significant physiological impacts on health, such as nausea as a direct result of infrasound; rather, the stress and annoyance is due to unwanted exposure to noise (Knopper and Ollson 2011). However, a more recent review stated that “there is some evidence of symptoms in patients exposed to wind turbine noise”, symptoms such as vertigo and ear pain (Farboud, Crunkhorn and Trinidade 2013, 222). The authors concluded that further research is required.
Although there is inconclusive and insufficient peer-reviewed literature on the topic, particularly longer-term health effects of infrasound (Farboud, Crunkhorn and Trinidade 2013, Health Protection Agency
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2010), laboratory tests have demonstrated that people exposed to infrasound suffer physical and mental effects, such as feeling unwell (Bruel and Olesen 1973), feeling headachy and fretful (Qibai and Shi 2004), experiencing a decline in mental performance (Pawlaczyk-Luszczyńiska et al. 2005), and activation of the auditory cortex, which could lead to negative health effects (Dommes et al. 2009). Branco and Alves-Pereira (2004) have shown that long-term exposure to high intensities of low-frequency sound and infrasound can lead to vibroacoustic disease. People with this disease develop abnormally high levels of collagen and elastin, and their blood vessels can thicken resulting in a greater risk of depression and tachycardia. WHO has also identified low-frequency sound as an environmental health concern (Berglund, Lindvall, and Schwela 1999). I include these references not to argue that exposure to infrasound due to mining is a definitive cause of ill health, but to acknowledge that infrasound is a complex issue and to emphasise the importance of listening and attending to people’s particular concerns.
There is a range of reports in newspapers from individuals who feel that infrasound from mining, particularly from large mining blasts and use of heavy diesel machinery, has caused negative health effects, such as headaches and nausea (Frew 2007; Quigley 2011). As noted in a ABC News article on July 4, 2011, Lance Beatty, who lives near a coal mine in the vicinity of Mudgee, NSW, described infrasound as: “That hum that’s inside the head is what you will be aware as infrasound … that hum cannot be eradicated. You can’t insulate against it. There’s nothing you can do to your room, your house. You can put a pillow over your head, earplugs in your ears, and nothing will stop it”. The “hum that’s inside the head” to which Beatty refers is caused by the capacity of infrasound to cause resonance. In physics, resonance describes the event when a formerly still body responds to a vibrating body with movement. According to the Oxford Dictionary (online version), “resonance” (physics) is defined as “the reinforcement or prolongation of sound by reflection from a surface or by the synchronous vibration of a neighbouring object”.
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6.3.2.1 Infrasound as Sympathetic Resonance with Grief
Drawing on the experiences of people I encountered in the Hunter Valley, I experimented with the use of infrasound and resonance within my art, which resulted in the installation Black-Noise. I hoped to bring attention to the environmental health concerns regarding noise pollution caused by open-cut coal mining. Although not specifically related to mining, nor environmental health, a range of artists have used infrasound to create affective states. For example, the artist Anish Kapoor utilised infrasound to create an affective experience in his installation Anxious, 2012 at the Lisson Gallery. This installation consisted of a room that featured a spotlight and sound played at low frequency and changes of intensity, intended to make people feel anxious. One viewer, Anna McNay (2012), commenting on the show on her blog, stated: “As I stood and moved about the space, feeling the slight changes in intensity, my chest tightened, my heart began to thump, and I found myself gasping for air.”
Another art project, Infrasonic (2003), also explored the anxiety- inducing and affective states that infrasound can generate. I mention the example of Infrasonic because, unlike Kapoor’s work Anxious, Infrasonic was used as an art experiment in which empirical data was gathered about people’s responses to the artwork. The project was initiated and led by Sarah Angliss and involved the staging of two concerts, one after the other. However, using a blind testing model, the pieces that contained infrasound in the first performance did not contain infrasound in the second performance so that Angliss and colleagues could compare results between the two performances (Angliss 2013). The people listening to the performances were not aware that some of the pieces contained infrasound; after the second performance they were asked about their emotional experience to the music. They listed nervousness, fear, sorrow and revulsion as responses. In response to these results, Wiseman, a psychologist involved in the project, said that the “results suggest that low frequency sound can cause people to have unusual experiences even though they cannot consciously detect infrasound” (Reaney 2003).
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Infrasonic was also in part materially inspired by Parreno’s work Water Lilies (2012) at the Beyeler Foundation, Basel, Switzerland, in which he used small speakers at the bottom of a pond to generate sonic water lilies—the sonic vibrations causing ripples reminiscent of the shape of water lilies on the water’s surface (Fondation Beyeler 2015). Like Water Lilies, an auditory sympathetic resonance also played out in Black-Noise on the materials of the tray: the coal and water resonated with the sound emanating from the speakers underneath the tray, causing patterns to form on the bottom of the tray. Black Noise also drew on experiments with resonance performed within the field of cymatics. Cymatics studies wave phenomena, particularly the way sound is made visible through material mediums, such as sand on a metal plate (Jenny 2001; Lauterwasser 2006).
Figure 6.9: Water rippling due to infrasound (Pratt 2013).
Based on my interviews and research in the Hunter Valley, and through an exploration of infrasound in science and art, I attuned myself to this form of noise in order to use the installation to evoke grief and anxiety about the impacts of coal mining on environmental health—a process I have referred to as haptic listening. Drawing on John-David Dewsbury (2003), haptic listening can be considered as a form of witnessing. Dewsbury
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proposes that witnessing is “to be in tune to the vitality of the world as it unfolds” (1923). He asks “how does our mode and focus of attention witness the world into being in quite different, and hence political, ways?” (1908). I used a range of noises from mining sites within the installation Black-Noise, I also used infrasound to create an emotional response from viewers, similar to the anxiety-evoking responses experienced by those who took part in the Infrasonic performance (2003) or who experienced Kapoor’s artwork Anxious (2012). The aim was to invite others to witness, to listen, to tune into, feelings of nervousness, anxiety, dread, sorrow and loss, to evoke the sense of grief people from the Hunter described to me. I wanted to replicate, through the installation, a sense of listening into the soundscapes of coal, to create sympathetic resonance with what is being lost in the Hunter Valley and the environmental health concerns people are facing. I hoped to evoke care, in the sense of “grief”, a “burdened state of mind” and “serious attention” (Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, online ed.).
Figure 6.10: Coal dust patterns on trays (Pratt 2013).
So far I have mainly concentrated on discussion of the installation and the materiality of the film, via haptic listening. I now explore the video in more detail by providing anecdotal sketches (Michael 2012a) of each of
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the people I interviewed. In doing so, I extend my discussion of haptic listening and describe how their concerns over coal mining emerged within my video and installation.
6.4 Residents of Carbon Valley: Listening for Patterns of Shared Vulnerability
The people I interviewed drew my attention to the entangled connections between health and coal mining expansion in the Hunter Valley. I became attuned to listening: listening while waiting for trains to take me to different parts of the Hunter Valley, hearing the difference between coal trains and passenger trains; listening to the sounds of the birds in the Hunter Estuary Wetlands; listening to the emotion in people’s voices as they told me their stories; listening in order to attend to the concerns and connections, or diminishing connections, which people expressed to me.
My intention with the video and installation was to enact anxiety and the pain of loss expressed by the people I interviewed through practices of listening. I wanted to hold this in tension with what remains, what can be celebrated and encouraged to flourish. This tension between solastalgia— caring greatly for something as you are losing it—and being deeply connected by celebrating the beauty and capacities of ecologies emerged as a tension within this case study and my practice-led research. At the same time, I wanted to position this in relation to my own tension: as a user of energy systems in Australia which are dominated by a reliance on coal with detrimental effects to human and more-than-human health (Colagiuri et al. 2012), how can I respond? How am I to care and to act in this context? Leem (2016, 48) suggests that by “starting from anxiety as a shared vulnerability between different actors, we can begin to care without knowing who the subject or the object of care is, who has the power to care, who and what determines whom to care and what kind of care are needed.” In what follows, I introduce each of the people I interviewed and relate the anecdotes that informed my video and led to Black-Noise.
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6.4.1 Sharyn Munro: Joining the Dots and Putting Coal and Health Together
On February 18, 2013, I attended a talk by the author and Hunter Valley resident Sharyn Munro at the Newtown Town Hall, Sydney. Munro’s talk centred on her recent book Rich Land, Wasteland: How Coal is Killing Australia (2012), which describes her journey across rural Australia exploring the impact of coal mining—both in terms of coal and coal seam gas. In her talk, Munro told stories of the different communities and people she met, particularly the impact on health of living near coal mines: stories of rising occurrences of heart attacks, cancer, mental health issues and asthma. After Munro’s talk I emailed her, describing my research investigating concerns about the impact of coal mining on environmental health in Australia and asking her if I could interview her for my research. In my email I indicated that the interview would involve the creation of artwork—as I did with all participants for this case study.
During my interview with Munro (2013, pers. comm., 15 April), she expressed concern about the rising levels of dust in the Hunter Valley and the lack of public “alarm bells” going off in response. She told me of her concern about the levels of fine dust particulates being measured in the air around Singleton, with recordings of over 35 000 times the norm. She explained:
Singleton [a shire, local government area, in the Hunter Valley] had 13 mines, not in the east but everywhere else; they’ve got less now because they’ve merged [wry laugh]. They call it less, but the amount of dust coming from the west, where the prevailing winds come from… [pauses] it was just so bleeding obvious [that the dust is coming from the mines]. That’s when I started getting concerned. (Munro 2013, pers. comm.)
In my video, Carbon Valley, I begin with accounts from Munro of her concern and disillusionment. I take up her notion of “alarm bells” and present her concerns, performing alarm at what is happening to the Hunter due to coal-mining expansion, inviting people to pay attention, to care. Munro (2013) told me how her concern escalated when she saw how the
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health impacts from mining were not being taken into account by the government: “As I learnt more and more the degrees of blindness the government was going to maintain, I started going to more meetings.” The following quote expresses her sentiments towards the government more extensively:
Nobody [in government] wants to join the dots and put the two [coal and health] together and I just found that so callous, so negligent, I couldn’t believe it. That’s when I felt like I really didn’t know where this society was going and any naivety I had about the government looking after their people went right out the window. And I got really angry, you know, that my grandchildren’s futures, their current health, and god knows what legacy of ill health they are inviting. (Munro 2013)
In our interview she positioned the Australian government as uncaring—“they really don’t care”—and questioned “how people can be like that and sleep at night” (Munro 2013). She emphasised the disillusionment that arises when people wait for government legislation to demonstrate care for people—in this instance, a lack of consideration over how health and mining are connected issues with entangled effects. In response to this lack of care, Munro said: “[b]ut I have been led to the point of really issuing a call to arms and calls to people to defy and break these bad [mining] laws until they change them” (Munro 2013). Her concern over environmental health drove her to write the book Rich Land, Wasteland and go on tour describing what she witnessed. She told me: “I can see that this is a point in our history, anyway, where the long-term repercussions are going to be so bad if we don’t stop it” (Munro 2013). She is not alone in her disillusionment over the current Australian government: “I’m seeing thousands of people who even a year ago were waiting maybe for the changes of government in the states, especially in Queensland, looking for some common sense and future planning from the liberal–national coalitions, and they are just so disillusioned too” (Munro 2013).
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6.4.2 Deidre Olofsson: The “Lucky Country” of Infrasound and Bottled Water
Deidre Olofsson is an electrician who grew up in Camberwell, a small village in the Upper Hunter Valley. On March 26, 2013, Olofsson met me at the train station and took me for a drive around the different mining sites surrounding her home. Before meeting her I’d looked at her home in Camberwell on Google Maps, zooming in to her house and the surrounding mining sites; but standing beside the sites was another experience entirely. The mines appeared to almost merge into each other at points; the sounds blurred the edges of the mine sites and I could hear the rumble of the machines. I attempt to show the blurred expansion of mining in my video with maps of the area, to situate the concerns in the Hunter, to show how mining is eating away at the landscape.
For Olofsson, the sounds of mining constantly circled our conversation. “Can you hear that?”, she would ask at different points along our journey around the various mine sites. She spoke of how the sounds travel at night, the constant rumble, and then the blasts—some of the blasts were so strong they would cause cracks in her house. Many of these noises from mining are a form of infrasound. Thunder, icebergs calving and waves on a beach all produce infrasound—so do trucks, trains and bulldozers. Although the sounds are below human hearing, I learnt that the vibrations are viscerally felt.
After talking to Olofsson and being shown around Singleton by her, I was struck by her concern over noise, particularly infrasound, in part because I had not thought that infrasound would be a health concern for people. Olofsson described her and her family’s disturbed sleep patterns and feelings of anxiety, which she attributes to the mining noises. She emphasised that, from her perspective, coal-mining companies within the Hunter Valley do not adequately take into account the impact they are having on the health of residents of the Hunter. In a sentiment that echoes Munro’s feeling of a lack of care, Olofsson told me: “It seems to me that health has very little importance to the structure of mining, they don’t care.”
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Speaking further on the lack of care, Olofsson said: “They don’t care, they would rather see the economic gain of 100 people for work. Destroy an area which has no return of a land use, just for seven years [of mining], leave a mess, wipe out a whole community.” She reiterated her concern that people living in the Hunter are not going to have anything left after mining: “If you think you can make a future in the Hunter after mining you’re joking, there is not going to be anything left here.” Her sentiment was that mining “takes away everything, mining takes away your freedom, of actually going outside and yelling and screaming and doing whatever you want, ‘cause all you got, all you got is that hum, covered in dust, so you actually become a prisoner in your own home, and that’s not what rural people are about”.
Figure 6.11: Close-up of bottle of water propping up the side of the tray (Pratt, 2013).
Olofsson also spoke about how the mining companies took away fresh water and about the unknown impacts of mining: “How many aquifers have they cut? How much seepage is coming down? Will that form toxicity in the water? Will that reach the underwater table?” She now buys bottled water because she fears that her tap water is contaminated. In the installation, I wanted to explicate water. To highlight the fact that coal
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mining leads to a lowering of the water table in Australia, the water in the trays in the installation vibrates and resonates with the sounds of mining. I also placed bottled water under the trays to temporarily hold the coal-water slurry in place (see figure 6.11). These bottles acted as a symbolic aid, a representation of the environmental costs of mining—usually at the expense of the humans and non-humans that dwell beside the expanding mines. Based on my interviews with Olofsson and others, I intended the bottles to highlight an exchange of ecosystems—trading tap water for bottled water.
Olofsson, said that the mining companies “don’t care because in the end they can leave”. In contrast, Olofsson calls the Hunter home, and would like her grandchildren to have the possibility of calling it home. But she is not sure about what the future holds when she feels the government is so entangled and compliant with the demands of mining. With a nostalgic tone, infused with anger, she said to me: “Talk about Australia being a lucky country, I don’t know anymore. Talk about being controlled by the mining industry; our government are just puppets to them, they can’t do anything and that’s the issue.”
6.4.3 Wendy Bowman: Dust in the Lungs
Also in Camberwell, I interviewed the farmer Wendy Bowman at Rosedale, her 190-hectare farm. Her property stands in the way of the proposed Ashton South East open-cut mine, owned by Chinese-owned coal miner Yancoal—unless she sells they cannot go ahead. Bowman has been part of family farming in the Hunter for decades, she has been living at Rosedale since 2005, as she was pressured to sell her previous property in the Hunter to allow for an open-cut mine—Rixs Creek open-cut mine. But she is determined not to sell Rosedale to Yancoal, despite the substantial financial offers she has been offered. Bowman has been known to say to these offers that they can “stick it up their jumper” (Neales 2014). Bowman wants to protect the nourishing soil of the alluvial flats in Camberwell and the water sources, such as Glennies Creek, which she believes are vital to the environmental health of the Hunter and could be damaged by mining.
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I conducted the interview with Bowman in her living room; it was full of antique furniture and paintings on the walls. One of the key environmental health concerns that Bowman spoke to me about was the dust; she often goes into her living room to dust, once a week or so, but each time she picks up thick layers of black sooty dust. To air out the room she will open the windows, but whenever she leaves the windows open dust accumulates. At one point in the interview she got up out of her chair and took a tissue and wiped it along the top edge of a picture frame. “What is it? What is contained in that?” she asked, as she rubbed her thumb over the black soot she had collected off the picture frame.
Earlier Bowman had been telling me about her lungs, and the medical scans she had had done, she told me: “I have had an MRI scan, I’ve been to a lung surgeon, I’ve got dust in my lungs—you can see it in the MRI scan and the X-ray” (2013). Bowman was not so concerned for her own health, but for the health of children growing up in the Hunter Valley. On receiving the scans, she described to me her reaction and what she told her doctor: “At my age it doesn’t matter a darn. I’ve lost 20 per cent of my lung function. What is it doing to the little children who are grown up here? What is the cost going to be to the health department later on…?” (Bowman 2013). Like Olofsson and Munro, one of her greatest concerns is for the health and prospects of children in the region.
After our interview, I asked Bowman to repeat the gesture of wiping up coal dust with the tissue so that I could film it as I continued to ask her about her concern over the dust. This scene of Bowman wiping the coal dust is featured in my video. As I filmed her, she asked: “The big thing is what exactly is it, what is it, it’s [thumb moves over tissue] slightly greasy, so, this is what we want to know, what is it, what is contained in that, what heavy metals, or what is it?” (Bowman 2013, pers. comm.). She was expressing concern about the fact that it is not just dust from coal mining; trucks operating in the mines are not required to meet the same emissions restrictions that are regulated in larger urban areas such as Sydney. Bowman said there is speculation that toxins from the diesel emissions cling
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to the coal-mining dust that fills the air of the Hunter Valley and then get breathed in. She explained:
And just recently we have realised that all these big enormous onsite vehicles, you know your drag lines and your big trucks, everything, they all use that very cheap diesel… All these mines have got these humungous vehicles, and the trucks that are on the mines all the time, your water trucks, your graders, they all use this bad diesel. That’s going up in the atmosphere, that’s a grease, it adheres to any dust that is in the atmosphere, what’s that doing? … Why is everybody so sick? What is it doing to the children? If you get certain heavy metals in your lungs, which then go to your bloodstream, well good-bye. (Bowman 2013)
In my video, I juxtapose Bowman speaking of her concern about coal dust, while performing the material gesture of her wiping down the paintings, with images of lungs damaged by long-term exposure to dust, a disease known as coal workers pneumoconiosis, or black lung. Bowman is not a smoker, but she has lost 20 per cent of her lung function and believes this damage to her lungs has been caused by coal mining. In the video, I flickered the images between Bowman wiping down the dust and the dust in the lungs on MRI scans, in an attempt to encourage haptic listening. In other words, it is my intention that the blurred, grainy, flickering images in the video sequence of Bowman wiping the frame (see figure 6.12) encourages a mode of bodily listening that enacts focused attention. This is a mode of listening that does not lead to easy understanding, but tends to the complexity and performativity of material interferences, such as the drift of coal dust into lungs, coal morphing with the body.
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Figure 6.12: Video still from Carbon Valley of Bowman wiping dust off her picture frame (Pratt 2014).
6.4.4 Mick Roderick: Shore Birds Have Really Got It Tough
Alongside people living in close proximity to the mining sites in the Hunter Valley, I wanted to understand the impact on wetland areas and the different ecologies throughout the Hunter Valley. On March 24, 2013, I spoke to Mick Roderick, President of the Hunter Bird Observers Club, to gain an understanding of the environmental health of birdlife within the Hunter Valley. 6 Birds are unique bioindicators, meaning they can be monitored to understand the relative health of an environment (Padoa- Schioppa et al. 2006; Reed, Reid and Venables 2000). They also serve as a symbol for human health and wider ecosystem health, like the well-known example of a canary in a coal mine—once actually used by miners but now a means of alluding to something that can act as a warning of coming danger.
Roderick drove me around the Hunter Estuary Wetlands, a collection of wetlands fed by the Hunter River in Newcastle. These wetlands are of both national and international importance. Within these wetlands, the areas Kooragang and Hunter Wetlands Centre Australia have been recognised for their significance by the Ramsar Convention—an
6 Roderick is also NSW Project Officer for the Woodland Birds for Biodiversity project.
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international treaty for caring for critical wetlands (Department of the Environment 2011). “More than 250 bird species have been identified as visiting this site, both seasonal populations and migrants (Department of the Environment 2011). In his role as president of the Hunter Bird Observers Club, Roderick has been involved in collecting data on bird populations and lobbying government for changes in legislation to mitigate declines in bird populations. Roderick (2013, pers. comm.) refers to this collection of data as “by far the most important thing we’ve done”. In reference to this data on bird populations, he spoke about the losses of birdlife it shows: “In the time that we’ve been collecting this information—since the early seventies when some ground base data was collected—there has been declines in virtually every migratory shore bird coming here.” He explained that declines in bird populations cannot be attributed to coal mining and loss of habitat in Australia alone, but that roosting habitat is also an issue “elsewhere in the flyway, specially what’s happened in China and Korea; loss of habitat there for the birds to stop over has had a huge impact.”
In our interview, Roderick also emphasised that mining in the Hunter Valley is a significant issue that connects different affected and concerned communities, such as people concerned about bird biodiversity and other biodiversity issues as well as those worried about public health. He said: “It’s one of those issues that brings everyone in, really, from as little as impacting a small swamp over there where there might be a few crakes, to affecting climate change and bigger issues such as that and public health” (2013, pers. comm.). He went on to discuss the important role of “lobbying and making people aware, and educating people [through them] being part of the different education and information days that happen and becoming involved with the anti T4 movement [a movement to block a new (fourth) coal terminal (T4) being built in Newcastle port]. He spoke to me repeatedly about the importance of paying attention to the data, focused listening and attending to the declining habitats by making others aware of the issue.
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6.4.5 Tom Clarke: The Pain of Losing Something
I interviewed Tom Clarke, also a member of the Hunter Bird Observers Club, at his home in Newcastle on March 25, 2013. While we had tea on his balcony, he spoke to me of his background and why he came to do the activities he does—caring for birds and regeneration work.
Clarke was particularly concerned about how much the birds are impacted due to the expansion of coal mining. He explained: “The woodland birds are just copping it like mad, certainly in the Lower Hunter, sorry in the Hunter, and in the wetter slopes they’ve copped it, that’s why woodlands are in a dire straits” (2013, pers. comm.). He linked “copping it” to connection when he said that once you loose part of an ecosystem, for example when wetlands diminish, part of the connection goes and thus part of the vitality of the ecosystem goes:
Every time you lose a value, the bush that you’re looking at, the natural environment that you’re looking at, loses some of its oomph, some of its ability, and it puts pressure on a particular species, and the species becomes endangered. Couple of years ago they invented “critically endangered”, ‘cause that’s how it is, like with the regent honeyeater, critically endangered, now, and with some predictions, ten years, extinct. That’s how it is, the poor things. (Clarke 2013, pers. comm.).
Clarke (2013, pers. comm.) went on to add, “if you had the connectivity across the landscape right, they could renew themselves”. But, based on current directions in coal mining, he mused: “I guess what we’ll have in the future, we’ll have these tiny little things that are so precious we’ve got to basically nurse them so that they can still function as an ecosystem”. Clarke believes that “the sustainable things that nature can give to us aren’t celebrated enough”. He reveals an irony, or tension, here, in that he wonders why at times we do not treasure entities, like the regent honeyeater, until they are lost: “it seems peculiar that we need to finally feel the pain of losing something before we’ll see how precious it is”. Based on Clarke’s concerns and anecdotes, one could say that he feels that the better scenario is not to nurse sick ecosystems as a means of care, but rather to
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celebrate healthy environments: “You want to be able to rejoice in knowing that you’ve got healthy ecosystems because you’ve already regarded them in such high esteem and you’re living with them, not beating them up. That’s where we need to be, I don’t know, legislation is never going to be there” (Clarke 2013, pers. comm.).
I end the video, Carbon Valley, with Clarke and his reflection on celebrating ecosystems and living with birds and other non-humans, rather than beating them up to open up a tension within care—a form of haptic listening, or focused attention, on practising care as celebrating the connectivity within ecosystems and rejoicing at what one has, in contrast to care as mourning or grief and nursing what one is loosing, such as mourning the prospect of near extinction of the regent honeyeater. Although Clarke believes that generating connection can enhancing concern and care for ecosystems, as he explains: “if we can have a connection with the natural values of what’s around us, then we’ll be … more concerned about its demise, or more concerned about its upkeep and looking after it” (2013, pers. comm.).
6.5 Conclusion
For this practice-led case study, I began my inquiry by learning how people and ecologies are being affected by the expansion of coal mining in the Hunter Valley. I translated their, and my, experiences of becoming affected by coal mining into an installation and video and developed the notion of haptic listening as a modality of care. In focusing on haptic listening, I explored care in both the content of research (impacts of coal mining in the Hunter Valley) and the practice of research using a performative practice-based case study approach (articulated in Chapter 3). This involved exploring how care travels across sites of research and concern, rather than a hierarchical notion of how care travels down from researcher to researched subject. Three key components of haptic listening, as a form of care, emerged: witnessing and tuning into the ways in which
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entities are mutually transformed—a process I referred to as sympathetic resonance; second, “making things public” (Latour and Wiebel 2005) by affectively articulating the embodiment of ecological health impacts and third, tracing patterns of shared vulnerability.
Sympathetic resonance, the phenomenon of vibrating in response to another entity, can be considered as a form of witnessing and a means of tuning into modes of existence as they emerge (Dewsbury 2003). For the video, Carbon Valley, I edited together moments that articulated the different ways people have become attuned to coal, how bodies and coal proposition each other in the making of environmental health, demonstrating how bodies and ecologies are affected in ever-increasing ways—coal dust in the lungs, grief at damaged homes and ecosystems, and declining ecological health. In the installation Black-Noise I explored concerns about noise pollution, coal dust and degradation of water ecosystems due to coal mining. Infrasound, affectively and materially enacted sympathetic resonance— infrasound resonating through the body causing affects such as grief. I explore noise, aural and material, in both the video and installation in relation to haptic listening as a practice of care. These artistic (re)enactments of concerns over coal mining and environmental health acted as a provocation to witness the environmental health issues in the Hunter Valley: to listen and resonate with turbulence, to create connections and broaden connections—to open up ways of caring. Haptic listening, involving sympathetic resonance, is not a passive affair; it is a means of touching, and being touched, an act of care that goes both ways, and shapes the world.
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Figure 6.13: Close-up of turbulent water and coal dust resonating due to noise emanating from speakers beneath tray (Pratt 2013).
In this case study, the artwork began with a concern and an anxiety, my anxiety of what to do in the face of mounting ecological change. In the artwork and video, haptic listening emerged as a means of understanding and engaging with “shared vulnerabilities” (Leem 2016, 48). It is a starting point that allows different emotions, such as grief, to emerge without fixing what the problem is or what the solution should be. In my artworks, turbulent patterns were used as a means of focusing attention on the material impacts of coal mining; for example, the dust as a visual noise (see figure 6.12) or the infrasound causing resonance (see figure 6.13). These patterns referenced the tension between caring deeply for something as you are losing it—solastalgia, and the rich capacities of ecologies. It’s aim was to draw attention to the different embodied ways in which humans and non- humans—such as coal, bird life and human residents of the Hunter—relate to each other. As Schrader (2015, 685) writes “learning to listen to trouble means beginning to care. An active listening requires a withdrawal of the self, an exercise in passivity and engagement at the same time”. Withdrawal, in this context, is hence not an act of disappearing, but of making space to dwell on shared vulnerabilities.
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In the next chapter, I draw together my three case studies to develop the ethos careful prospecting and respond to questions raised here about the role of care and function of art for ecological well-being at a macro and micro-political level.
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Careful Prospecting
7.1 Introduction
This chapter aims to make a series of theoretical contributions to the complex problem of “how to care” for ecological health. Drawing upon a critical analysis of the three preceding case studies—xClinic, Windowfarms and Black-Noise and Carbon Valley—a conceptual framework is developed that offers an ethos of care for composing ecological health prospects and intervening in contemporary knowledge politics. The framework has been titled careful prospecting to signify the development of curiosity and movement towards responsibility that is driven by artistic practices of care. The particular practices of care identified and articulated in the careful prospecting are creative experimenting, curating and listening. However, careful prospecting is not limited to these practices, rather they are used conceptually for a more general and in-depth discussion of the five primary research questions that underpin this research:
1. How is ecological health enacted in contemporary art, and how might these enactments help to compose healthier ecological prospects?
2. What knowledge politics are involved in improving ecological health?
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3. How can art develop methods for, and understandings of, alternative knowledge politics that may assist in generating healthier ecologies?
4. What role does care have in enacting healthier ecological prospects?
5. How, as both a researcher and an artist, do I care, for what and for whom?
Careful prospecting is offered as a framework (figure 7.1) for learning how to care—a cosmopolitical practice that is about carefully tending to, and tuning into, concerns; a means of becoming curious about and responsible for ways in which healthy ecologies are understood and composed. This ethos operates at the intersection of art, technoscience and ecological health and provides a framework for creatively negotiating a response to contemporary environmental health concerns. The careful prospecting framework provides alternative possibilities for thinking through how art might help to compose healthier ecological prospects through movement from curiosity to responsibility. It therefore contributes to a growing body of work, emerging predominantly from feminist scholarship and Science and Technology Studies (STS), that investigates and calls for closer attention to matters of care in research practices and knowledge production (Martin et al. 2015; Mol 2008; Mol et al. 2010; Puig de la Bellacasa 2011, 2012, 2015).
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Figure 7.1: Careful prospecting conceptual framework.
Each dimension of the framework for careful prospecting is discussed in detail in this chapter. I demonstrate how practices of care move participants from curiosity to responsibility by: 1) encouraging tending to existing concerns, discussed via means of experiments to foster attention, curating as a practice of practicality and listening to generate sympathetic resonance; 2) processes of public inventive problem-making, explored through experiments as a form of spectacle, curating to re-imagine ecological values and listening as a means of making things public; and 3) facilitating caring relations driven by experiments as a tool for reframing health repertoires and relations, curating as a form of co-creation, and listening to trace shared vulnerabilities. Central to this move from curiosity to obligation is a process of “learning to be affected” in which one learns to care about and for ecological health.
In practice, this movement is not a smooth progression from curiosity to responsibility, rather curiosity and responsibility are entangled processes, and so to is the process of learning to be affected by different
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matters. A smooth step-by-step model and one-size-fits-all prescription is not offered, as this would be both an unrealistic and unethical proposition that denies the situated complexity of the issue at hand. Instead, what this framework aims to do is to highlight care-full practices that can be used to question, respond to and enhance situated ecological health concerns, with curiosity and responsibility.
7.2 Learning to be affected: moving from curiosity to responsibility
The careful prospecting framework involves the development of responsibility out of curiosity. This process of developing responsibility is enacted through different care practices via a process of “learning to be affected” (Latour 2004c, 209). Hence, in the careful prospecting framework diagram (figure 1) the practices of care are referred to as modes of learning to be affected. Latour (2004c), building on Despret (2004), proposes that learning to be affected involves “a dynamic trajectory by which we learn to register and come sensitive to what the world is made of” (206). Drawing on this conceptualisation of learning to be affected, careful prospecting involves learning how to register subtle differences, to attune oneself to other entities, to become curious about, and obligated to, human and non-human others (see Haraway 2008; Latour 2004c). Attuning, here, is not a matter of generating a greater understanding of an already existing world, but an acknowledgement of how different entities co-create each other through different practices, such as experimenting, listening and curating. In becoming curious through artistic interventions my argument is that this can also lead to a sense of obligation, not just as the participant, but also as the artist and/or researcher, through a process of learning to become affected. For learning to be affected is about attuning oneself to difference while still maintaining connection. Hustak and Myers (2012) explain, “those who invest their energies in attuning themselves to others can learn over time to discriminate increasingly subtle differences in one another’s utterances” (105). Analogous to Barad’s (2007) notion of “ethics”, careful prospecting is
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“not about [the] right response to a radically exterior/ized other, but about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part” (393). It is towards these notions of attuning, openness and differentiation that this section addresses, through tending to concerns, inventive problem making and facilitating community connections.
7.2.1 Tending to Concerns
Careful prospecting involves tending to concerns through focused attention; it starts with the facilitation of curiosity and builds into situated and negotiated relationships of obligation. Drawing on Plumwood (2002), careful prospecting advocates “openness and attentiveness” as a means to “allow us to be receptive to the unanticipated possibilities and aspects of the non- human other” (195). This stands in contrast to a moral standing approach to ethics, in which the moral status of humans and non-humans is determined and categorised based on a perceived rational process. Instead, it adopts an open-ended approach in which “we struggle for our own values without being closed to the values and hopes of others” (Weston 1985, 339). I will now explain how experimenting, curating and listening each operate as attention enhancing practices, each enacting forms of care within the different cases.
The xClinic uses creative experiments to foster embodied modes of attention around existing concerns. Im-patients are invited to the clinic to generate a prescription for their concern, hence the xClinic responds to existing concerns, and offers mechanisms for staging creative experiments to enable the im-patient to tend to the concern, and also to make others curious, to care. Social Practice art has a legacy of making space for embodied modes of attention (Bourriaud 2002; Kester 2004), for making time to look, hear, feel, touch and smell. Winterson (1995) argues that “art takes time” (7); art challenges us to pay attention and look in a way that differs to everyday practices, she asks, “when was the last time you looked at anything, solely, and concentratedly, and for its own sake?” (8). Jeremijenko draws on arts legacy to propel forced concentration. For example, as part of
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Farmacy AgBag trial participants are invited to draw phenological clocks on the sides of the AgBags to record different life-cycle events, such as when plants bloom, weather patterns, growth rates or when a butterfly visits. By using documentation conventions of experiments combined with affective conventions of aesthetics, Jeremijenko fosters embodied forms of participation and attention. By engaging people to note down phenological events while caring for their plants, the project invites participants to pay attention to and record differences, to explore and experiment with modes of care and develop curiosity about the various human and non-human interactions that occur. The striking red x on the sides of the AgBags also visually disrupts the street view when hung from people’s balconies, particularly when hung on mass. They invite people to pay attention to the ways in which our urban environments are composed, provoking engagement in how existing infrastructure can be retrofitted or re- engineered to foster greater bio-diversity.
Second, in Windowfarms, attention to ecological health concerns emerges through curation as a form of practicality, or practical labour. Central to the philosophy driving Windowfarms is that it is a practice-based, rather than an ideas-based, community. This is articulated through Riley’s development of the concept of Research and Develop it Yourself (R&D-I-Y). Through the practices of curating—in which making and responding is an iterative process that Riley and other windowfarmers also refer to as tinkering—attentiveness to the needs of the plants, context and other windowfarmers emerges. Windowfarmers display curiosity, enquiring about and commenting on other members tinkered with artefacts. From my own experience of caring for a windowfarm, I found it defamiliarised my living space, making me curious about the different assumptions I had made about what I needed to make my living space habitable, for the plants and me. Through the labour of care, or not enough care, it encouraged the witnessing of change and an acknowledgement of my obligations to support the plant life and technical system.
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In the project Carbon Valley, listening operated as a mechanism for resonating with other entities; it was an affective mode of attention, a form of sympathetic resonance. Plumwood (2002) describes, “listening to the other” as an “attentiveness stance” (206). She argues that listening “help[s] to counter the deafness and backgrounding which obscures and denies what the non-human other contributes to our lives and collaborative ventures” (206). Through the installation I endeavoured to re-enact material disturbances caused by infrasound; I wanted to create an embodied, visceral engagement with and understanding of the impacts of coal mining in order to attune people to the concerns of living by open cut coal mines. For example, in the installation the water and coal dust vibrating in the trays resonated and rippled in response to the noises I recorded from mining sites. However, it also caused vibrations in human bodies, not just the bodies of water in the trays, thus emphasising the way non-human entities, such as dust and water, and human bodies resonate with, and are affected by mining. Listening, as a practice of careful prospecting, facilitates an embodied state of attention, an act of “giving the other’s needs and agency attention, being open to unanticipated possibilities and aspects of the other” (Plumwood 2002, 206). It can therefore be seen as a process of “recognising agency”, through sympathetic resonance, which is vital for developing responsibility and ethical practices (Plumwood 2002, 206).
7.2.2 Public (Inventive) Problem Making
Careful prospecting contributes to how problems of ecological health are publically positioned and inventively made. To develop this aspect of the careful prospecting ethical framework Horst and Michel’s (2011) “model of emergence” (286) of science communication is employed in which they outline “inventive problem-making” (287). Horst and Michael, drawing on Fraser (2010), state that “in the model of emergence the event of science communication is understood in terms of the coming together of different elements through which novel relations and identities can emerge” (2011, 286). Building on Fraser’s articulation of the event as more than simply
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“being-together” but as also an act of “becoming-together” Horst and Michael propose:
Rather than seek solutions to the problems of communication (by asking questions about how science might be better communicated and how we can interest the uninterested), we can begin to rethink communication itself (and investigate what communication means in such an event and how the audience, including the uninterested, shape the communicator). (287)
As an artist-researcher my emphasis is not on how to accurately represent the ecological health event, as this closes off the parameters of the event (Fraser 2010). Instead, through a process of inventive problem-making the particular ecological health problem is transformed to provoke new questions and drive new modes of ethical practice. Therefore, the art intervention “becomes less a case of answering a pre-known research question… than a process of asking inventive, that is, more provocative questions where intervention stimulates latent social realities, and thus facilitate the emergence of different questions” (Wilkie, Michael and Plummer-Fernandez 2015, 82). In rethinking communication in this way the ethos of careful prospecting involves increasing the sensitivity of participants, and the researcher, (through modes of attention) to learn how entities mutually affect ecological health.
Inventive problem-making occurs in the xClinic through the staging of public creative experiments that act as provocative spectacles for sparking curiosity and entertaining responsibilities. In contrast to top down modes of public engagement or science communication, in which the problems are pre-defined before engagement (Rogers 1995), the xClinic invites people to share their ecological health concerns during clinic consultations and then co-creates modes of intervention to respond to that specific, located, concern. It also provides adaptable prescriptions, such as noPARK, which turns “no parking zone” spaces into ecosystems capable of mitigating toxic water runoff from the road. noPARK problematizes the conception of parking sites as sites composed of impervious surfaces such as asphalt by turning no parking zones into spectacles, with a large red cross at the centre
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of a mini wetland. This intervention into the city infrastructure publically questions the types of city infrastructure that enable toxic substances to be carried into waterways by runoff waters—toxins as wide ranging as car exhaust particles, tire and brake pad debris and spilled gas; the experiment demonstrates how plants can trap, bury and filter these toxic substances to improve ecological health. When witnessing this creative experiment publics are invited to ask: why are cities structured around hidden sewer networks that ferry toxic runoff into river systems and the sea? Why does the car, and space for parking the car, dominant cities? What alternative street infrastructure would allow for healthier relationships to emerge, in which toxins from one place aren’t carted out of site through sewers to other sites. noPARK interventions, staged as xClinic creative experiments, recast parking space as wetland to raise questions about toxic flows, opening space for alternate action around city design and planning.
A core principle driving Windowfarms is the re-imagining of ecological values, which question contemporary industrial agriculture (intensive farming) through collective action. On the our.Windowfarms online site the welcome page states, “together, we are continually getting better at growing food in the local conditions of our own homes. We are contributing to the ‘green revolution’ as non-experts” (2012). During the iterative curation of windowfarm systems, plants and online profiles and interactions with other windowfarmers problems constantly arise, or rather are co-developed between human and nonhuman actors. I encountered the problem of my windowfarm failing due to the dehumidifier sucking out the water from my system, to the point where water could no longer be pumped around the system, resulting in the lettuces dying. This death raised the issue of competing interests within my home. It was, in part, a practice of learning “how to become sensitive to the contrary requirements, to the exigencies, to the pressures of conflicting agencies where none of them is really in command. Especially not the ‘maker’ who spends nights and days trying to live up to his or her responsibility” (Latour 2003, 33). Re-imagining ecological values, within Careful Prospecting, arises through being open to
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“conflicting agencies”, it is a mode of re-orienting oneself to problem- making rather than searching for one true solution. It is, as Michael (2012a, 33) states a process of learning “how fruitfully to remain sensitive to… those and that which is excluded in the process of research”.
In Carbon Valley, the focus on infrasound, through the practice of listening, was a way for me to make public, to problematize, the under- examined implications of noise from coal mining and its effects on health of people, non-human animals and the environment. The performative practice-based methodology used to develop this case involved asking inventive questions of dwellers of Carbon Valley but also of the materials linked to the issue, such as coal, noise and water, that were, in turn, used to create the artworks to materialise this place remote from my daily life. Plumwood (2008) poetically refers to out of sight, denied, places as “shadow places”—“places remote from self, that we don’t have to know about but whose degradation we as commodity consumers are indirectly responsible for, are the shadow places of the consumer self” (147). The impetus for Carbon Valley was driven by my desire to explore one of the shadow places that supports my existence and to attempt to make public the places that provide “material support of self” (2008, 146). During my field research of one of the shadow places of mining in the Hunter, I witnessed the impact of coal dust and infrasound on ecological health by listening to the stories and noises of coal. Deborah Bird Rose (2004) states, “to listen with attentiveness is to take a first step in witnessing” (30). Witness is defined as “a mode of responding to the other’s plight that exceeds an epistemological determination and becomes an ethical involvement” (Hatley 2000, 3). Rose suggests, that witnessing and exploring the past and the present, “searching out the hidden histories and the local possibilities” (24), offers a means to not overcome, but light up alternative pathways for ethical careful relating. Drawing on Rose, the art of listening, in the Carbon Valley case study, operates as a means for “illuminat[ing] alternatives to our embeddedness in violence” by making public problems inherent to existing practices (24). The video highlights some of the contested ways in which infrasound and coal
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dust are made visible, known—or not—and by whom, it raises questions about noise and silence, about who is and isn’t listening to the experiences of both human and non-human life in the Hunter Valley under its regimes of coal mining. The contested ways in which different realities are made public, or erased, is analogous with Annemarie Mol’s notion of “ontological politics” (2002). Mol articulates the ways in which different practices enact different realities, and the political reasons that contribute to the valuation of one dominant reality over multiple realities. By poetically making public, or illuminating, the varying impacts of infrasound, the hope is that the harmful elements of mining that are invisible to many of the users of coal generated products are made present and contribute to the debate on alternative avenues of energy production.
Within the creative prospecting ethical framework inventive problem making provokes curiosity and engages people in learning modes of being affected, which lures obligations. Through opening space for the articulation of different problems, rather than by only providing solutions, careful prospecting opens up different ways of relating with the aim of generating healthier multiple ecologies.
7.2.3 Facilitating Caring Relations
The third aspect of “learning to become affected” identified in the careful prospecting framework is the facilitation of caring relations, this is not a form of assimilation into a singular community, but rather practices of care (experimenting, curating and listening) confirm and support difference. Hinchliffe (2007, 147) argues “care is produced with and as others, and is neither selfless nor only about the self”; he contends that care “is an ecology that is not oriented to securing an inside (an us) nor oriented to everything outside, but a gathering together that is not too tight and can thereby work to confirm rather than to assimilate others” (147). However, care as a form of confirmation is not always desirable or possible, there are always tensions in the formation of relations and gathering of community within artistic practice, as Claire Bishop (2012) explains: “The artist relies upon the
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participants’ creative exploitation of the situation that he/she offers – just as participants require the artists’ cue and direction. The relationship between artist/participant is a continual play of mutual tension, recognition and dependency” (279).
Through creative experiments Jeremijenko reframes health repertoires by shifting health from an individual concern to a collective ecological health concern to facilitate caring relations. Reframing health repertoires is particularly evident in Farmacy; Jeremijenko uses the language of a clinical trial to invite people to experiment with ways of producing (and consuming) fresh nutrient-rich edibles while simultaneously improving the city’s air quality through an increase of foliage. Using different reframing strategies, of which Farmacy clinical trial is indicative, the xClinic co-opts the western human-centred clinical model of health and flips this to explore how both humans and the environment co-constitute health. In doing so, Jeremijenko draws people into alternative practices of health-care and proposes different community relations for enacting health. The action can be considered as a minor practice, after Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986) articulation of “minor literature” which is “written by members of the minority but using and corrupting the language of the majority” (Lind 2012, 55). Her capacity and investment in scaling these practices is minimal, but what is suggested in these aggregated gestures in Farmacy, noPARK and the larger project, The Environmental Health Clinic (xClinic), is a way of carefully experimenting with, and prospecting for, alternative models and methods to support ecological health. This minor component of these practices will be developed further in section 7.4.1 on micro and macro-politics.
Within Windowfarms, curation was shown to be a practice of co- creation; a practice cultivated with others and enacted collectively in the caring for and tending to of windowfarm hydroponic systems. Co-creation refers to the ways in which the art and research is designed collaboratively with the participants (Sanders and Stappers 2008). Curation involves bringing different relations together, for example curating an art exhibition entails displaying objects alongside each other to generate new meanings or
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multiple modes of sense-making. Iterative co-creative curation is hence a means of responding to the ways in which various relationships emerge and thus requires collective openness to multiple possibilities. For Riley (2011), the reliance on multiple distribution chains to support her urban lifestyle causes anxiety, but, she states “interdependence is actually an extremely powerful social infrastructure that we can actually harness to help heal some of our deepest civic issues, if we apply open source collaboration” (00:11- 00:55). The collaborative dimension of Windowfarms also arose as a response to the privatisation of agriculture by large corporations, such as Monsanto. As Riley explains, “instead of creating a product, what I was going to do was open this up to a whole bunch of co-developers” (02:55- 03:30). This is not a practice of top down information transfer, rather those with concerns about where and how their food is grown can contribute to the questions asked, and interventions offered, building a shared knowledge community.
Listening in Carbon Valley was a means to create a greater understanding of my relationships and dependencies on coal and in turn became a process of tracing shared vulnerabilities. My anxiety about my reliance on shadow places (Plumwood 2008), such as the Hunter, for energy was an acknowledgement of what Leem (2016, 48) refers to as a “shared vulnerability” as a starting point for beginning “to care without knowing who the subject or the object of care is”. Tracing shared vulnerabilities through listening, through forms of witnessing patterns and connections, is a means of observing and understanding that “the well-being of one is enmeshed in the well-being of others” and hence “to care for others is to care for one’s self” (Rose 2011a, 27). The video traces the interconnections of human and non-human health, highlighting the vulnerability of those not in legislative or financial positions of power. Rose suggests that witnessing the loss of place “opens a gateway to conflict and to further moral dilemma” and “it also opens further one’s own vulnerability to suffering through the vulnerability of others to suffer” (51). The intention of both the video and the sound installation was to open vulnerability, through affective means
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such as infrasound. It was a means of conveying solastalgia, and the suffering of both human and non-human life. Careful prospecting, contributes to highlighting connections and responsibilities, as Rose (2011b) points out, “to understand one’s self as part of a community of life is to accept responsibilities, and also to accept vulnerability” (133).
7.2.4 Learning to be Affected, Curiosity to obligation
In the process of learning to be affected, discriminating differences and caring for difference, there is the potential to understand and engage in composing healthier ecological prospects. When considered as modes of careful prospecting, experimenting, curating and listening demonstrate that to prospect carefully is not an attempt to seek closure; rather, it is a process of continual exploration and differentiation, moving towards more and more ways of discerning affects and learning to distinguish differences, in other words learning how to care. Hence, the modalities of care that arose from my case studies were not simply a way of constructing solutions for improving ecological health, but can instead be seen as a way to pay closer attention to knowledge practices (both material and social), by tending to concerns, inventive public problem making and facilitating caring relations. These different modes of approaching ecological issues each activate curiosity as a means to approach the ecological health problem differently— not merely as a definitive closing down of the situation, but as an opening up of how to care in a specific context (see Gabrys and Yusoff 2012).
Rather than merely representing or describing ecological health, I have demonstrated how careful prospecting, as a practice-led mode of research, is engaged in enacting ecological health prospects through creative experiments, curation and listening. As a researcher one does not know which experiments, which modes of listening nor which curations will generate healthier prospects, but one can attempt to do so with care, with obligation to and for the entities one interacts with and creates. With the ethical framework now laid out, what is the status and range of careful prospecting?
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7.3 Status and Range of Careful Prospecting
As a conceptual framework for engaging in art practice at the intersection of technoscience and ecological health what should Careful Prospecting do? Many of the questions driving the production of this framework, are questions that are also pivotal to 20th century art’s engagement with social and environmental concerns (Bourriaud 2002; Kester 2004; Bishop 2011): “Should art mobilize the world or continually question the reality principles behind its formation? Should art unsettle the bonds of social life or seek to bind social beings to each other? Acts of aesthetic affirmation coincide with equally necessary acts of aesthetic refusal” (Jackson 2011, 90). Many of these questions centre on discussions of micro and macro-politics.
Careful prospecting is critical of individualist notions of consumption, arguing that an emphasis on individual responsibility for environmental issues, such as changing to more efficient light bulbs or not using plastic bags, is not a sufficient. However, the global dimension of ecological health, such as the impacts of climate change, cannot be ignored. In order to move beyond criticism and compose a fuller account of the status and range of careful prospecting, it is necessary to explore the relationship between micro and micro politics. In particular, examining the relationship between small-scale art projects and ecological challenges at the global level. How does the production of care at the individual level impact collective and political decisions at the macro level? Is careful prospecting primarily an instrument for local/regional ecological health issues?
7.3.1 Macro and Micro-politics: Small-scale and global interventions
Careful prospecting is formulated out of a micro-political analysis to explore connection and care in response to the question: How is ecological health enacted in contemporary art, and how might these enactments help to compose healthier ecological prospects? Each of the practices (experimenting, curating and listening) explore questions of how people, as individuals in interdependent relations with other humans and non-humans,
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wish to live—the kinds of ecological health and knowledge politics they oppose and the kinds they wish to enact, such as opposition to dust and infrasound from mining. By emphasizing performativity, and the materiality of ecological engagement, the research has attempted to avoid the pitfalls of a consumptive, individualistic-orientated approach.
A critique that often gets played out in relation to art that operates predominantly at the local, or micro, level is “so what”? What is the significance for the types of social and political change necessary to respond to global (macro) ecological health concerns, such as climate change? These critiques shouldn’t be dismissed, but central to a range of these critiques is a narrow understanding of the political in which social material participation is not given weight, in contrast to democratic, governmental politics (see Marres 2012a). In contrast, the practices articulated in Careful Prospecting take an expanded notion of politics, drawing on work on material participation (Latour 2005a; Marres 2012a), which articulates politics as more than the macro-level assemblages of state or global governance. Practices of creative experimentation, curating and listening were explored in the case studies at the micro-political level, “at the level of detail, desire, feeling, perception, and sensibility” (Connolly 1999, 149). It explores “how weighty problems of knowledge, politics, and the real acquire their significance in specific settings” (Marres 2010, 156); an approach that takes into account the affective, embodied and material dimensions of participation at both a practical and theoretical level.
However, micro-politics is not positioned against macro-politics, or placed on a higher level within this framework, rather, “politics becomes most intensive and most fateful at those junctures where micropolitics and macropolitics intersect” (Connolly 1999, 149). Connolly (1999) argues that macro-political proposals are not “likely to be made or to get very far unless and until micropolitical receptivity to it has been nurtured across several registers and constituencies” (149). For example, Windowfarms offers instructions and a collaborative network to support the development of local food production, nurturing a shift in how people relate to and produce food.
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Micro-political habits of curating a windowfarm in one’s home, offers preparation for wider macro-political proposals, which can be seen in the growth of the online community to different parts of the world—a “molecular movement” (Connolly 1999, 149) of plants and farmers towards open, collaborative engagement in re-imagining food politics from large scale industrial models to locally produced alternatives.
7.3.2 Artist as researcher
As both and artist and researcher part of what care meant across the various practices of engaging with participants, creating artworks and writing up the exegesis was a process of staying with the various affective states and overspills that were in excess of what my original intentions of what the art and research would be. This aligns with recent discussion of practices of care in research practices by STS scholars: “For us ‘the politics of care in technoscience’ is not about knowing, but of questioning, opening-up, and attuning. It does not produce epistemological or ethical certainties – it is a ‘politics without guarantees’” (Atkinson-Graham et al. 2015, 746). Part of how I enacted care within this research was by situating myself in the research and art, demonstrating how and why I care. In the various different research phases, such as conducting the interviews, participant observation and field research at mining sites were a process of “learning to be affected” by infra-sound (Latour 2004c, 209), which was a process of becoming vulnerable, of questioning my own practices, and opening myself up to the ways in which others, and myself are affected.
The careful prospecting ethical framework is not a step-by-step methodological or theoretical toolkit for conducting creative practice at the intersection of art, technoscience and ecological health. Rather, careful prospecting offers emergent, affective and aesthetic ways of thinking about the role of care, as it pertains to ecological health. Careful prospecting is not merely a way of engaging with ecological health by offering critiques or simply providing representations, instead careful prospecting allows engagement with ecological health through a curious tending to
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uncertainties and learning to be affected by what emerges. It is an opportunity to ask and enact “what ought to be done?” (Latour 2004a, 125), and functions as an ethos for learning how to care, an ethos for becoming curious and obligated in specific situations.
7.3.3 Limitations:
Although curiosity may lead to responsibility, through a process of learning to be affected, there are many other reactions that may occur, which have not been explored within this framework, such as ridicule and rejection of engagement. It is outside the scope of this research to explore and discuss the range of responses that reject curiosity and responsibility, other than to say this occurs, and to accept as a researcher how to responsibly respond to these rejections. Using the figure of “the idiot” Horst and Michael (2011) have highlighted the importance of the researcher in taking responsibility for the framing of science communication events:
No matter how open and inclusive organisers try to be, they frame the event of science communication and they have to take responsibility for this framing. Whenever organisers of engagement exercises assume the role of sanitisers (as they have to) of the event of science communication, then they also must accept the responsibility for their creation of a particular form of public voice(s). (302)
A further limitation of the artworks discussed in this research, in relation to the development of the careful prospecting framework, is the question of “for whom”. Do Windowfarms, the xClinic and Carbon Valley really reach beyond those already engaged in ecological health concerns? Further audience-based research would need to be undertaken to explore this question, which lies outside the scope of this research. This research has focused on modes of engagement employed by artists, rather than addressing the reasons for why people choose to engage and their current practices and understanding of ecological health concerns. As each of the cases demonstrated, central to each of the artistic projects was a concern for ecological health and the provision of tools or knowledges in order to
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respond to these concerns, with care. For example, within the xClinic, im- patients, people impatient for legislative change, were invited to attend the clinic to develop a practical means of responding, of taking responsibility, for their concern, such as soil contamination or toxic water runoff polluting waterways. I focused on different practices used by artists engaged in ecological health concerns, as it is not always necessary to “convert” publics, equally important is how artists respond to a site of concern and mobilise existing concerns through the facilitation of a diversity of practices of response-ability. And, as Bishop (2012) argues, “at a certain point, art has to hand over to other institutions if social change is to be achieved: it is not enough to keep producing activist art” (283). Nor have I addressed the contexts which enable these artist’s practices, although the economic, institutional and labour practices are a vital area of research within the arts, this too fell largely outside the scope of my research.
Acknowledging these limitations highlights that this framework operates as an abstraction with inclusions and exclusions. However, as Fraser (2009, 65) states, “abstractions have a price but they are also… lures for experience”. My hope is that Careful Prospecting functions as a lure to assist in careful modes of practice-based research. At the same time I acknowledge, via Stengers (2012), the “ambivalence” of lures: “Alluring, suggesting, specious, inducing, capturing, mesmerizing—all our words express the ambivalence of lure. Whatever lures us or animates us may also enslave, and all the more so if taken for granted” (para. 56).
7.4 Contribution
The key contribution to knowledge this doctoral research makes is the development of the conceptual framework, Careful Prospecting, for enacting ecological health. The framework was developed through a performative, practice-led approach in order to explore: how can art enact healthier ecological prospects? Alongside this question the research was also driven by
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an exploration of the role of care in art and an investigation of how my own art practice might contribute to the production of healthier ecologies.
The theoretical framework Careful Prospecting proposes that through practices of care—experimenting, curating and listening—art can cultivate curiosity and produce opportunities for learning to be affected in order to cultivate responsibilities, leading to the enacting of healthier ecological prospects. I described how practices of care inspire curiosity and encourage responsibility across three modes of intervention: 1) tending to existing concerns, explored through means of experiments to foster attention, curating as a practice of practicality and listening to generate sympathetic resonance; 2) processes of public inventive problem making, discussed via experiments as a form of spectacle, curating to re-imagine ecological values and listening as a means of making things public; and 3) facilitating care relations driven by experiments as a tool for reframing health repertoires and relations, curating as a form of co-creation, and listening to trace shared vulnerabilities.
With its emphasis on practice, careful prospecting provides a means of questioning research practices, particularly practice-led research. It is a way for me to ask what types of knowledge politics do my research methods enact and it gives me scope to attend to the ecological health matters I have come to care for and the ways in which I care. An ideal example of an art project that engages with the Careful Prospecting framework would tend to, and cultivate, matters of care to compose prospects that those affected by the matters of care care about.
7.5 Future Directions
This practice-led research process has entailed a radical re-evaluation of the type of work I do and future directions lie in what I have developed here as an ethos of careful prospecting. Through my analysis of other art projects, and reflecting on my own practice in relation to the notion of careful prospecting. I have traditionally worked in the frame of video, installation and painting—typically staged within gallery contexts. In
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contrast, both Windowfarms and xClinic operate across different disciplinary settings and contexts, and they have a strong interventionist, and compositionist, approach. Building on the affective modalities of engagement I explored in Black-Noise and Carbon Valley and drawing inspiration from Riley’s and Jeremijenko’s approaches I wish to develop a stronger interventionist practice of care. In addition to voicing concerns, sounding alarms or pointing out damaging practices such as coal-mining expansion, how can I generate greater curiosity and ways of learning to be affected through my art practice; what can I compose to generate healthier ecological prospects?
Careful prospecting may seem like wishful thinking, but what are we to do in the face of mounting ecological crises? We could keep “voluntarily sleepwalking toward catastrophe” (Latour 2014a, 1), or, as I have proposed, we could investigate “prospects”, the “shape of things to come” (Latour 2010, 486), and we could do so with care, in a manner that uses, and responds to, things with full affect, with curiosity, a sense of obligation and in a way that allows for opportunities to learn to be affected. Careful prospecting, as an artistic practice-led ethos, questions progress as usual; it is a means of intervening in technoscientific practice to ask: “What ought to be done?” (Latour 2004a, 125).
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A
Appendices
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Appendix A: Ethics Approval Letter (2011/12)
Human Research Ethics Advisory Panel B Arts, Humanities & Law
Date: 24.05.2011
Investigators: Ms Susie Pratt
Supervisors: Professor Judith Motion
Centre: Journalism and Media Research Centre
Re: Re-imagining ethical and sustainable action at the intersection of art and science
Reference Number: 11 043
The Human Research Ethics Advisory Panel B for the Arts, Humanities & Law is satisfied that this project is of minimal ethical impact and meets the requirements as set out in the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research*. Having taken into account the advice of the Panel, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) has approved the project to proceed.
Your Head of School/Unit/Centre will be informed of this decision.
This approval is valid for 12 months from the date stated above.
Yours sincerely
Associate Professor Annie Cossins Panel Convenor HREA Panel B for the Arts, Humanities & Law
Cc: Professor Catherine Lumby Director Journalism and Media Research Centre
* http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/
225
Appendix B: Ethics Approval Letter (2013/14)
Human Research Ethics Advisory Panel B Arts, Humanities & Law
Date: 05.03.2013
Investigators: Ms Susie Pratt
Supervisors: Professor Judith Motion
School: Journalism and Media Research Centre
Re: Re-imagining ethical and sustainable action at the intersection of art and science
Reference Number: 12 171
The Human Research Ethics Advisory Panel B for the Arts, Humanities & Law is satisfied that this project is of minimal ethical impact and meets the requirements as set out in the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research*. Having taken into account the advice of the Panel, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) has approved the project to proceed.
Your Head of School/Unit/Centre will be informed of this decision.
This approval is valid for 12 months from the date stated above.
Yours sincerely
Associate Professor Anne Cossins Panel Convenor Human Research Ethics Advisory Panel B
Cc: Associate Professor Jane Mills Director Journalism and Media Research Centre
* http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/
226
Appendix C: Participant Information Statement and Consent Form (Artist)
Journalism and Media Research Centre
Approval No (12 171)
THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES
PARTICIPANT INFORMATION STATEMENT AND CONSENT FORM
Re-imagining sustainable action through art and science
Purpose of the study You are invited to participate in a PhD project that investigates how innovative practice at the intersection of art and science can inspire people to re-imagine ethical and sustainable action. I hope to learn about the conditions that enable projects operating at the intersection of art and science to be successful. You were selected as a possible participant in this study due to your engagement in unique projects that advance people’s engagement in reimagining healthy ecologies. I, Susie Pratt, am a PhD candidate in the Journalism Media Research Centre at the University of New South Wales.
Description of study If you decide to participate, I would like to undertake a 60 minute interview with you to discuss the conditions that enable you to inspire people to re-imagine sustainable action. I am interested in exploring how an interdisciplinary approach can contribute to innovative forms of knowledge production and interpretation in relation to environmental health.
With your permission I would like to record your interview. I would like to record observations with video, audio, photographs and written notes. If you give me your permission by signing this document, I plan to discuss/publish the recordings and results in academic journals, an art exhibition and on the projects website. However, you may consent to an interview for research purposes but not for public display. You will also be provided with a performance release form, if you choose not sign the performance release form then your interview will only be used for research purposes rather than in an artwork for public display.
We cannot and do not guarantee or promise that you will receive any benefits from this study.
Feedback to participants A summary of the research findings and a link to the projects website will be sent to you via email at the completion of the study.
Your consent Your decision whether or not to participate will not prejudice your future relations with the University of New South Wales. If you decide to participate, you are free to withdraw your consent and to discontinue participation at any time without prejudice.
Any concerns may be directed to the Ethics Secretariat, The University of New South Wales, SYDNEY 2052 AUSTRALIA (phone 9385 4234, fax 9385 6648, email [email protected]). Any complaint you make will be investigated promptly and you will be informed out the outcome.
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask, I will be happy to answer them. Please contact me via email [email protected]. Or you can contact my supervisor Professor Judith Motion on +61 2 9385 4857 or via email [email protected].
You will be given a copy of this form to keep.
Page 1 of 2
227
THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES
PARTICIPANT INFORMATION STATEMENT AND CONSENT FORM (continued) Re-imagining ethical and sustainable action at the intersection of art and science
You are making a decision whether or not to participate. Your signature indicates that, having read the information provided above, you have decided to participate.
I agree to: (please tick the levels of participation that you agree to) Audio recording Photography Video recording
…………………………………………………… .……………………………………………………. Signature of Research Participant Signature of Witness
…………………………………………………… .……………………………………………………. (Please PRINT name) (Please PRINT name)
…………………………………………………… .……………………………………………………. Date Nature of Witness
REVOCATION OF CONSENT Re-imagining ethical and sustainable action at the intersection of art and science
I hereby wish to WITHDRAW my consent to participate in the research proposal described above and understand that such withdrawal WILL NOT jeopardise any treatment or my relationship with The University of New South Wales.
…………………………………………………… .……………………………………………………. Signature Date
…………………………………………………… Please PRINT Name
The section for Revocation of Consent should be forwarded to Judith Motion, Journalism and Media Research Centre , The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia.
228
Appendix D: Participant Information Statement and Consent Form (Hunter Valley)
Journalism and Media Research Centre
Approval No (12 171)
THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES
PARTICIPANT INFORMATION STATEMENT AND CONSENT FORM
Re-imagining sustainable action through art and science
Purpose of the study You are invited to participate in a PhD project that investigates how innovative practice at the intersection of art and science can inspire people to re-imagine sustainable action. You were selected as a possible participant in this study due to your experience of and/or involvement with Coal mining in Australia.
Description of study If you decide to participate I would like to undertake a 60 minute interview with you to discuss your experiences of Coal mining. I am interested in gathering stories about Coal mining in Australia and the impacts it is having on different communities.
With your permission I would like to record your interview on audio and video. If you give me your permission by signing this document, I plan to discuss/publish the recordings and results in academic journals, in an exhibition and on the projects website.
Feedback to participants A summary of the research findings and a link to the projects website will be sent to you via email at the completion of the study.
Your consent Your decision whether or not to participate will not prejudice your future relations with the University of New South Wales. If you decide to participate, you are free to withdraw your consent and to discontinue participation at any time without prejudice.
Any concerns may be directed to the Ethics Secretariat, The University of New South Wales, SYDNEY 2052 AUSTRALIA (phone 9385 4234, fax 9385 6648, email [email protected]). Any complaint you make will be investigated promptly and you will be informed out the outcome.
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask, I will be happy to answer them. Please contact me via email [email protected]. Or you can contact my supervisor Professor Judith Motion on +61 2 9385 4857 or via email [email protected].
You will be given a copy of this form to keep.
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THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES
PARTICIPANT INFORMATION STATEMENT AND CONSENT FORM (continued) Re-imagining ethical and sustainable action at the intersection of art and science
You are making a decision whether or not to participate. Your signature indicates that, having read the information provided above, you have decided to participate.
…………………………………………………… .……………………………………………………. Signature of Research Participant Signature of Witness
…………………………………………………… .……………………………………………………. (Please PRINT name) (Please PRINT name)
…………………………………………………… .……………………………………………………. Date Nature of Witness
REVOCATION OF CONSENT Re-imagining ethical and sustainable action at the intersection of art and science
I hereby wish to WITHDRAW my consent to participate in the research proposal described above and understand that such withdrawal WILL NOT jeopardise any treatment or my relationship with The University of New South Wales.
…………………………………………………… .……………………………………………………. Signature Date
…………………………………………………… Please PRINT Name
The section for Revocation of Consent should be forwarded to Judith Motion, Journalism and Media Research Centre , The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia.
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Appendix E: Model/Performance Release Form
Journalism and Media Research Centre
Approval No 12 171
THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES
MODEL/PERFORMANCE RELEASE FORM Re-imagining sustainable action at the intersection of art and science
Purpose of the project You are invited to participate in a PhD project that investigates how innovative practice at the intersection of art and science can inspire people to re-imagine sustainable action.
Declaration
Talent Name:
Project Title: Re-imagining sustainable action at the intersection of art and science
I hereby give my consent to record, copy, edit, adapt, modify, distribute or exhibit my image, likeness, voice and / or transcript, in whole or in part, for the purposes of art, illustration, broadcast, or distribution in any manner.
I understand that I will not receive any payment in signing this release. I also understand that participation in this project is voluntary and that I may discontinue my involvement at anytime.
…………………………………………………… .……………………………………………………. Signature of Research Participant Signature of Witness
…………………………………………………… .……………………………………………………. (Please PRINT name) (Please PRINT name)
…………………………………………………… .……………………………………………………. Date Nature of Witness
Brief description of visuals/audio recorded:
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask, I will be happy to answer them. Please contact me via email [email protected]. Or you can contact my supervisor Professor Judith Motion on +61 2 9385 4857 or via email [email protected]. You will be given a copy of this form to keep.
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Appendix F: Introduction Letter
EMAIL TO ARTISTS
Dear [Participant]
I am a PhD candidate at UNSW conducting research on artists working at the intersection of art and science to re-imagine sustainable action.
I would be grateful if I could conduct an interview with you to discuss your art practice.
I would like to use audio and video to record an interview with.
I have attached two documents that contain further information about my research project: a Participant Information Consent form and model release form. Please look over these documents before agreeing to take part in my research.
This research has received ethics approval (approval no. xxxxx) from the HREA Panel B at UNSW.
Warm Regards, Susie Pratt
0431126978!
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Appendix G: Sample Interview Questions
Sample Interview Questions
CASE STUDIES OF ARTISTS
Note: Questions will vary slightly depending on the interviewee Potential participants
- The artist - Participants / audience members - Collaborators from other institutions / networks - Funders - Media / Journalists - Students - Galleries / Institutions that show the work - University Staff
1. Can you describe how you developed the project you are currently working on? 2. What do you perceive the purpose of your practice to be? 3. Can you tell me a story about how one of your projects inspired you/people to re-imagine sustainable action? 4. Can you tell me a story about how your work opens up ways ‘actors’ / people can negotiate power relations and form their identities? 5. Can you tell me a story about how your practice facilitates engagement in environmental issues? 6. What, for you, are the most important conditions for creating projects that inspire people to re- imagine sustainable action? 7. What role do you believe art can play in fostering environmental health? 8. How can an interdisciplinary approach contribute to innovative: a. forms of knowledge production and interpretation in relation to ecological health? b. methods of assembling human and nonhuman “actor networks” (Callon, 1986; Latour, 2005) around “matters of [ecological] concern” (Latour, 2004)? 9. How do you measure the success / effectiveness of your projects? 10. What, for you, are the opportunities of working across disciplines and what are the weaknesses? 11. Is there anything else you would like to add? 12. Can you recommend anyone else for me to interview?
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