ANEST / CFP conference: Storytelling for environmental futures
Stavanger August 2024
with
Tamara de Groot
Dutch cultural theorist and educational researcher, postdoc at Erasmus City College, the Netherlands, working with SF and alternative futurisms.
Dutch cultural theorist and educational researcher, postdoc at Erasmus City College, the Netherlands, working with SF and alternative futurisms.
Danilo Olivaz
Brazilian independent researcher working on augmenting human perception in relation to other living beings and the environment (SymBioWare). Creator of the Sympoiesis network).
Artwork by Tamara de Groot
Collaboratively creating more-than-human characters: An introduction to
embodied storying
embodied storying
Our Workshop
Anna Tsing asks in The Mushroom at the End of the World (2016):
“Can I show landscape as the protagonist of an adventure in which humans are only one kind of participant?"
In our workshop we explore this question by enacting other ways of moving, responding and relating to each other and to the nonhuman beings that make up our world. We call this embodied storying and employ it as a first step in creating more-than-human characters.
Embodied Storying
Stories make the world. For a long time, we have been telling similar stories about how ‘we’, in the Western world, relate to each other and nonhuman beings (or ‘nature’). In a Cartesian vein, we consider ourselves separate entities, who operate autonomously and in mastery of ourselves, others (some more than others) and our surroundings. To work towards more ecologically and socially just futures, we must practise with telling different stories, and telling them in different modalities. In our workshop, we therefore propose to create and tell new stories through our bodies – to collaboratively transform the ways we move, touch, listen, and smell by engaging in ‘embodied storying’ and engage in intentional worldmaking with each other and our surroundings. This engenders a process of both ‘embodied estrangement’ – or the defamiliarization with how we usually engage in the world – and also offers opportunities for possible alternatives to emerge.
SF Worldings
For Donna Haraway, ‘SF’ is an important multifaceted figure that encompasses “Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far” and points to the “web of always-too-much-connection” (2013). In our workshop, we aim to feel our way through this web by taking inspiration from SF’s more-than-human characters and tease out ways of being that take us beyond our sense of individual and separated entities. We do so by engaging in a variety of exercises that are designed to encourage speculative explorations of, and a blurring of the boundaries between, our bodies, human-made objects, nonhuman beings, sounds and anything else
Environmental Dialogue - Pauline Oliveros
Pauline Oliveros practice of deep listening is a way to learn how to listen and attune to our more-than-human world. Deep listening is a “heightened state of awareness and connects us to all there is”, and Oliveros developed many ‘sonic mediations’ to make her practice available to all. Deep listening gives access to sonic environments and is connected to acoustic ecology and is a way to not only understand and explore our relations of the world, but also to create new ones.
From Sonic Meditations (1971):
“Each person finds a place to be, either near to or distant from the others, either indoors or out-of-doors. Begin the meditation by observing your own breathing. As you become aware of sounds from the environment, gradually begin to reinforce the pitch of the sound source. Reinforce either vocally, mentally or with an instrument. If you lose touch with the source, wait quietly for another. Reinforce means to strengthen or sustain. If the pitch of the sound source is out of your range, then reinforce it mentally.”
“Each person finds a place to be, either near to or distant from the others, either indoors or out-of-doors. Begin the meditation by observing your own breathing. As you become aware of sounds from the environment, gradually begin to reinforce the pitch of the sound source. Reinforce either vocally, mentally or with an instrument. If you lose touch with the source, wait quietly for another. Reinforce means to strengthen or sustain. If the pitch of the sound source is out of your range, then reinforce it mentally.”
Creating more-than-human characters
In the Creating non-human Characters Guide, Danilo and Ingvild put together a DYI road map for crafting beyond human characters, drawing from philosophy, acting, biology, SF and animism.
You can develop the virtual (avatar) character further at inworld and even export it to Roblox to add your character(s) to an existing place.
Danilo created a metaverse experience for the Rio Sagrado AI-vatar using inworld and roblox. You can chat with the river here
Find all links and further resources in the QR code below:
