RESIDENCY SURVEY: ARTIST

With supporting quotes from collaborating scientists Marcus Yates (SERF) & Gabrielle Lebbink (now an independent ecologist), David Tucker (QUT/SERF) and Eleanor Velasquez (TERN).

Date:  6/12/24                  

1. a) Motivation

• What were your original reasons and motivations in applying for the residency and did these change during the residency?

My reasons and motivations for the residency were inflected not only by my longstanding engagement with art+(ecological) science practices and environmentally engaged/activist practices – but also by the relatively recent focus on AI that had accompanied the release of mainstream tool Chat GPT (released Nov 2022). I was interested in counterbalancing the apparently ubiquitous discussions around artificial intelligences at that time – which predominantly focussed upon intelligences with traits predominantly ‘like us’. Given the innate link between AI and our longstanding extractivist (and often self-destructive) ontologies, my interest lay in understanding other kinds of intelligences that might help us shape better futures. It struck me that the more than human worlds clearly possess extraordinary intelligences – that are often unlike anything that which we might routinely classify as such (i.e. things that think, behave or reason like we do).

This line of thinking coincided with an ongoing relationship I had brokered with an ecological research station in SE Qld (Samford Ecological Research Station/SERF) – where I had recently secured unprecedented permission to restore a currently cleared block of land back to high conservation-value forest. Having already conducted an initial burn of the site in winter 2023, I sensed that the very evident, ‘natural’, connective architects and the architectures of the rapid ecological transitions happening on that site, were clearly intelligences that we all could really learn from.

 

“Well, I’ve always come to understand through my work that,  there is an intelligence in our natural ecosystems. And your project was initiating this. So, from there it was all about observation and seeing how the forest would respond, .. and to observe and to wonder, and to learn from what is happening was really exciting. And that’s what motivated me to help out wherever I can”. (Marcus Yates)

 

These ideas were further inspired by the powerful writings of Karen Barad, and James Bridle who writes of:

“the complexity and variety of nonhuman intelligence, the subject hood and agency of every being, the potentiality and politics of technology, and the wealth of knowledge and ideas we have to gain by opening ourselves to the more than human world with which we are in inextricably and gloriously entangled. James Bridle”: Ways of Being: p307

My aims at the outset therefore were:

• To work with the assistance of an experienced science and land management team to encourage the re-growth of a patch of land at SERF back to what was predicted to be the originating forest, driven less by regimes of cultivation and control, but rather by allowing the innate intelligences within such ecological systems to work their magic to regenerate the forest passively. Could the site, degraded as it was, and set in a time of global warming, still successfully, slowly return to health with minimal intervention.
• To name, and consider, the re-growth of that forest as the project’s ‘meta-artwork’
• To observe whether innate intelligence of those ‘natural’ systems could in some way be able to influence/direct/interact with additional, symbiotic, process-based artworks installed across the entire site (called Forest Art Intelligences (FAI)).

My intentions were to spend the 2024 ANAT residency both deepening my connections with ecological science, observing the changes at the site and over time beginning to understand what such ‘FAIs’ might look like, behave like or become enacted as.’ The FAIs, I resolved, should be dedicated to the health and evolution of the forest (i.e. they should be primarily artworks created ‘for’ the forest). And once established, I would then find ways to bring them to public view through other extended artmaking and science processes – a stage I envisaged happening primarily after the ANAT residence in 2025. That future phase of the project would therefore ask, how future audiences might experience the artworks either across the regeneration site itself, remotely, or in galleries, festivals and exhibitions.

As part of the residency, I also intended to present early experimental outcomes of the collaborative ideas at ISEA 2024 in Brisbane, and scope a future on-line presence for the work that would become part of a range of public facing outcomes coming over 2025-6.

These motivations still fundamentally remain true at the end of the residency – and have framed the intensive work and conceptual development over the past year.

 

• Have your personal expectations been met or not? (please provide examples).

100%. I was privy to an extraordinary learning experience through my regular interactions with the science team, who were generous and willing throughout. I also got to spend significant time on Country, regularly returning to the site in ways that I had probably never had a similar opportunity to do before. And despite usual fears that such a project might be too ambitious or unrealisable – I was able to step through each process and phase slowly in a supportive environment over the extended time available – and therefore remain open, with the team, to making decisions and calls when the time was right.

It’s correct to say that despite the depth of process I engaged in over the year (evidenced I hope in the blog), there is still relatively little physically added to the site at SERF (@ Dec 2024) beyond the wonderful/prolific natural re-growth, a 2 tonne translocated log and some recording/monitoring equipment. But this is in my mind seems wholly appropriate for now – if only because sincerely the making an artwork ‘for the forest’ is a responsibility not to be squandered or taken lightly – and one that might take years to evolve. Time based work, but not at a ‘normal’ human timescale ..

So, at least for now, a large, dead Eucalyptus tereticornis log – relocated to become a habitat and site for forest encouragement, is the most subtle, tangible image of what is to come in terms of future interventions (principally those of ecological encouragement/acceleration, detection, monitoring and translation).

 

1. b) Your Project

• Can you summarise your project in two sentences?

Forest Art Intelligence (FAI) aims to understand how to develop art forms (Art Intelligences) capable of growing and evolving alongside a regenerating forest, whilst also actively benefiting that forest’s health. These hybrid/experimental/organic art forms will ultimately underpin a creative public engagement strategy designed to highlight the intelligent natural regrowth processes of a forest – thereby promoting a more inclusive definition of non-human ‘intelligence’. (For more details see this post).

“.. you know, these things kind of arise, you know, seemingly out of nowhere. But they’re all part of this sort of, you know, like natural system. And I think from my understanding, that was reflected in in in the title of your work; seeing that sort of emergent behaviour or that kind of emergent processes as a form of intelligence. So, you know, the “Forest Art Intelligence” project”. (David Tucker)

 

• What were the most important learning experiences for you during the residency?

When working with slowly evolving landscapes, take long breaths and wait till the next step makes itself known. You are a stranger in that place, with no particular authority over the artwork site, despite ‘ownership’ stories we might tell ourselves. Carefully listening to that Country (something site visitor with the ANAT team  Palawa woman Angie Abdillaclearly reminded us of), and waiting for the proper time, is something to slowly learn. Our First Nations custodians know and teach this always.

I also wanted to inadvertently avoid the project being/becoming extractive at its site – a decision which required a lot of negotiation and reflection at all levels. My mentor scientists helped me a lot with this – with my key learning being that making work that is truly beneficial and reciprocal for the site and its residents, requires long time, immense patience, necessary restraint and fine attunement of senses to the intelligences coursing through the land and air. And also spending the time to witness and learn from the attunement of others: How for example could the botanists on the team be skilled enough to identify so many plants at the outset and during the following winter in what looks to ‘you and I’ like a mowed paddock, or a wintery grassy field with emerging trees … Extraordinary ..

 

1. c) Personal Experience: Collaboration, Communication, Exchange

• What kinds of collaboration with scientists did you experience, with whom and how intensive was your exchange?

“I expected that it would be like, a pretty evolving process , depending on what was happening at the site. And also, external factors from what we were allowed to do and, time. Oh, yeah, everyone’s, various time commitments and things, but, I think naturally these kinds of things have to be an evolutionary process.” (Gabrielle Lebbink)

Being an outdoor research station that people normally visit periodically – rather than being a daily place of work (except that is for the site land manager Marcus Yates) the collaborations were always well paced and evolved organically over the weeks and months at different times and contexts.

“I guess, probably like any discipline, you tend to get a bit, stuck. .. Basically, everyone you talk to every day is doing the same thing. And you all kind of think about things in a very similar way. So, for me, you know, I think it was being able to appreciate a different perspective on how, I guess how you know a project like this, and that would unfold… So, it’s good to talk to people who aren’t in that field and who think about things in a different way, o kind of open your eyes to things that you don’t particularly see, particularly as a sort of a natural scientist.” (David Tucker)

 

 Each scientist took on a different role in the collaboration, arguably consistent with their temperament, openness to, or interest in some of the ‘extra to science’ unknowns that I was bringing into their worlds . Dr. David Tucker (QUT Landscape Ecologist) and Dr. Gabrielle Lebbink (QUT Freelance plant and Invasion Ecologist) both had strong botanical and forest restoration experience. Marcus Yates (SERF Site Technician) was SERF’s site manager/technician with a plethora of local skills including forest management and planting; Dr. Eleanor Velasquez (Education and Training Manager at Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) Australia) was a science educator, ecologist and someone who had had some prior experience in the arts; and occasional mentor A/Prof Caroline Hauxwell (QUT Microbiologist and Agricultural Biotechnologist) taught us about her soil fungal analysis work – also bringing her students onboard for a site post burn analysis.

“From an artistic point of view, the way of understanding, you know, something that’s essentially the same thing (as science) is more, you know, it’s free of flowing, and, you know, I guess, yeah, less rigid compared to, you know, like, a highly formal scientific approach”. (David Tucker)

 

Each scientist complemented the team in different but powerful ways – coming as to be expected with different strengths and expertise: i.e. alternately as scientific teachers, logicians, analysers and experimentalists. The science team were also open to the application of lesser known or emerging ideas that interested them – drawn either from the science or the arts – especially understanding that we were not seeking to exert precise, tight or re-creatable protocols over the site as would normally be the case. They  were also each comfortable in brainstorming and feeding back and forth around the ideas we were grappling with, and how they might best find form (i.e.  approaches to the (lite) site management, or what kind of additions would be most appropriate for the FAI components (with the general agreement that the addition of appropriate organic materials as site accelerators would work well at all levels). In these ways we all kept our expectations level and open and were happy to await developments that were agreeable to and representative of us all.

“..going back to first principles of the joy of doing something, because humans need more than just graphs. And, you know, scientifically worded reports. I think we need something that gives us that full sense, through all of our senses, of how great something is. And it’s nice to go back to that, and it’s nice to also just have that feeling, but in relation to something that you’ve studied to a very high level in a scientific way, so such as ecology, such as I have.” (Eleanor Velasquez)

Modalities of collaboration were therefore necessarily framed by the changing needs of the site. Not surprisingly ecological information or ecological approaches were well covered by Dr. David Tucker, Marcus Yates, Dr. Gabrielle Lebbink and Dr. Eleanor Velasquez – with David (Tucker) providing big picture site management and details of monitoring protocols (such as ‘acoustic observatory’ bird identification). Marcus also offered lived, practical, land management tips alongside a warm, esoteric/spiritual lens that indicated his emotive, connective and embodied relationship to the intelligent intensities alive at the site. For me, he was someone who had walked on that Country daily for decades – and it showed. A/Prof Caroline Hauxwell offered a deep passion for soil microbiology, and she invited Eleanor and I on multiple occasions to visit to her lab (e.g. experimental sessions (1), (2) & (3), and allowed us access to her students). Eleanor interestingly crossed somewhat across all these spectrums, with both her pragmatic lenses honed by her role as an education manager at TERN – in a world of deep data protocols – in tandem with her overt desire to engage with the more subjective creative aspects of the site and the process (as evidenced in her lucid explanatory video for the SERF science engagement trail FAI stop. (Also see this associated blog page).

 

“I guess it, you know, be very fluid in your thinking and be scientific, but also creative in that space, which I find very appealing to the way I think”. (Eleanor Velasquez)

Consulting across the team both separately, and collectively (especially for big decisions) allowed us to work with our broad and evolving range of perspectives – but always in an atmosphere that was supportive. In essence we all knew innately that we were members of the same ‘Community of Care’

 

• Was it difficult for you to communicate with and understand the scientists?

Normally no – until of course they went into the deeper levels of their science, which I think they often filtered out for me – but if not, would lead me to do a lot of background reading and learning – to understand what it was that then needed to be asked/understood. In that sense the scientists read the room and were gentle but clear with me – and were always keen, especially when prompted, to pass on papers that fascinated them – e.g. this one from Dr. Gab Lebbink which led ultimately to the log translocation experiment in late 2024.

 

• How did the people in your lab react to your creative input or your reactions? Did this include any critical or ethical feedback?

“..your adaptability, I think comes through. ..you’re a very deep thinker, very considerate of everybody’s, comments and, yeah, very considerate, I would say”. (Marcus Yates)

“I find working with Keith really easy.. Keith is just a really open person to ideas and thoughts. And I don’t think you don’t seem to me to be the sort of person to shut ideas down readily. You’re very thoughtful and considerate and a very good listener, which not everybody can do. But yes, it’s been very easy and collaborative and a wonderful experience”. (Eleanor Velasquez)

Overall, I found the science team to be extremely supportive. They welcomed me into their culture. They made me part of some very real decision-making capacity over the site and they included the project in the permanent ‘Discovering Science’ trail now installed permanently on site (with a stop on the trail specifically dedicated to the project). They also invited me to present at the SERF open day initiated by Eleanor Velasquez, and were very positive about the way the project evolved – and the care and attention that was clearly being heaped upon the site and its flourishing ecology. I also of course made myself aware of the ethics of that site to avoid us making inadvertent contraventions.

 

“I’d say, Yeah, most people were, you know, in the in the at the very least, curious and mostly highly supportive of the collaboration”. (Dave Tucker)

“I think everyone was super interested in the project. And keen. I think there’s a lot of people keen to science art, collaboration, because they are really good examples of it. Improving science, communication. And,  also, yeah. Being able to communicate the things in science that we can’t communicate with numbers necessarily. I think there’s a lot of things that are, like, qualitative. And I think that, side of that helps. , so, yeah, I think everyone was super keen”. (Gabrielle Lebbink)

1. d) Knowledge production

• Can you describe your working methods and processes in the lab?

Observing, discussing, walking, listening, sitting, installing, spying, browsing, reflecting, reading, weeding, iterating, rendering, meditating, poring over, examining, writing, deciphering, translating, photographing, filming, scanning, recording, iterating  ..

 

“You’re always asking questions, Keith, and conversing with, with all involved, yeah, the questions you were always interrogating”. (Marcus Yates)

—

“I know that Keith has been very interested in actively reading papers that the other scientific members sent. Gabrielle was, always coming up with really interesting papers that she’d read that were related to the project, and Keith was involved in a survey of the site and the transect work and things like that”. (Eleanor Velasquez) 

—

“Well, I got the impression you had many, technical skills. So .. even though you’re, nonspecialist as far as the scientific research goes, you have very strong technical skills and a strong interest in in the scientific process. And it’s probably a bit like I, you know, I was saying, before you, you know, both, the scientific approach to understand the world and an artist’s approach to understanding a world, are both highly creative processes”. (Dave Tucker)

—

 “I guess, a slow and measured approach that he (Keith) allows the time, .. he has the ability to allow the time – to take the time to listen and to absorb what might work for a project without rushing in, and we had the fortune of not .. having a very strict time frame. And yes, it was a year. But there was always that – I think that feeling of it’s gonna be a longer-term project, when the main artwork or modification to the site really happens”. (Eleanor Velasquez)

• What level of access did you have to scientific research (data, visualisations, field work, etc.)?

In general as much as I requested or sought out, i.e. access to historic data and scans on the site, access to all of TERN’s database through collaboration with Dr. Eleanor Velasquez, and access and processing of LiDAR scans of the site, some of which I commissioned.

 

• Has your art practice been influenced by the working environment in the lab? (Please provide examples).

In numerous ways: for example, adaptability to working outside, deploying light-weight and weather sensitive approaches, and particularly balancing question, intention, structure and community responsibility with creative licence/flow. Having such a responsibility to care for the site , and with that consideration inflecting all choices – the venue, arguably unlike a gallery, impacted the entire process – and almost always, I sensed, in a good way. It reminded me again that past traditions of our disciplines, such as land art or even much of environmental art, was really not in the interest of the more than human world – and that sincere and lasting contributions from the arts ‘for’ and ‘to’ ecology had a relative dearth of strong prior examples. I too had arguably failed this challenge in the past and at this late career moment I felt/feel the need to seek out better pathways through this process.

 

1. e) Artistic influences on the scientific environment

• How and what did the scientists learn from you and what kind of traces will you leave in the lab at the completion of the residency?

I think that the scientists would have observed that contemporary artists have a far more diverse set of practices than they might have previously imagined. I believe that I demonstrated that we artists are good listeners, and avid interconnectors, capable of bringing disparate things together in ways that can make new forms of sense and capitulate new forms of sense-making – despite sometimes breaking the self-imposed rules of other disciplines. I believe that I demonstrated that we are rigorous and methodical, and yet never fearful of taking apparent low middle or high roads towards destinations that may appear hard to discern or describe:- and that what we find there sometimes, maybe unexpectedly to us all, can make sense, maybe even be change making..

“To bring elements into the forest, for example, the log and the decomposing ability of the log and its presence within forest systems; that is so funky. Yeah. So funky indeed, and the images that you’ve captured and the sounds – a compliment to ever evolving forest. And to bring that into a visual piece of art is wonderful. Yeah, it truly is wonderful”. (Marcus Yates)

The project outcome will ultimately be a fully functioning forest – that will evolve over decades whether I am or am not involved – a forest allowed to come back to full life. My hope is that as that forest evolves in perpetuity – which is currently the intention, long after the any tangible artforms and additional materials have re-integrated themselves back into that sacred place.

 

1. f) Broader influences

• Do you think the residency had a wider influence (on your lab, the research organisation, society in general)?

“Oh, most definitely. Yeah. Keith will always be present for eternity within that project! Yeah. Your presence, through my eyes always be there, and I think through other people’s eyes as well, what you’ve been a part of in creating is, timeless and yeah, very exciting”. (Marcus Yates).

—

“I feel like Keith was, or this project had .. an allowance for percolation and listening”. (Eleanor Velasquez)

–

The impact on the site/SERF is clear in terms of the footprint of the artwork, and the trust that this has generated will make other projects that come after mine there be all the easier to instigate. Artists, I believe I showed, are able to work within respectful and ethical guidelines that govern sites such as these, but also pursue sympathetic outcomes that were never envisaged when those guidelines were set.

–

“And I guess,  you know more broadly as society. I mean, you know, we’ve kind of I mean, just recently started opening up the facility to the broader public, and we’ve had people in, like, local community groups and stuff like that. But there are people coming in and seeing what we’re doing there. And this is part of, you know, promoting that sort of collaboration and research. , more broadly as well”. (David Tucker)

—

“Yeah, well, the site’s still there, so it’s gonna be there for a long time. So, you know, that’s gonna be your legacy that you’re gonna have, like, a forest growing there. It’s gonna be pretty good. I mean, like I said, I went there the other day, and it’s amazing, like, you know, like, in the next two years, those trees are going to get pretty big. I imagine so”. (David Tucker)

Obviously, any broader social impacts remain to be seen as the project evolves into the future – and whilst its notoriously hard to satisfactorily connect the presentation of artworks with changed social attitudes and behaviour patterns, I’d hope that the works when realised will make their own small mark. 2024 after all has been marked by dangerous lurches to the right – in our state (Qld), federally and in the US and Europe – almost all of which come with reduced care for land, and its first Nations custodians. Our responsibility as artists and change makers therefore becomes ever the more critical – to use our skills to pursue justice for all, especially those of us in a position of significant privilege and profile – i.e. like ANAT Synapse residents.

 

• What is your impression of the residency in retrospective: did it contribute to a better exchange between art and science?

Yes, in the case of the particular sciences that I engaged. Without overly generalising – the project was widely discussed across my collaborators’ peer and colleague group with majority enthusiasm (both for the objectives, the possibilities of telling better stories around science and the possibility of what might emerge through the art-science process that could be beneficial to conservation movements more generally).

–

“.. as it’s opened up (i.e. access to SERF) and these sort of, projects have, become more established ..I think it’s made it a lot more vibrant. You know, it’s and it’s sort of, making people aware of,  I guess the thing the same thing can be valued in different ways, you know?” (David Tucker)

—

yeah, I think totally. I think, I think in general, it’s refreshing for us scientists to view things through an artistic lens, and I think it does .. really help to capture some of those things that we don’t usually capture. And I think a lot of those things are actually the more tangible stuff so that people the most people can kind of relate to. So, yeah, I think it’s great. (Gabrielle Lebbink)

 

• Did the residency have any public reach or engagement?

1. ISEA 2024 Showing (Analog Intelligence)
2. Leonardo Laser Talk at ISEA 2024
3. ANAT Micro Talk, 10 Oct,2024
4. A permanent station and web presence for the SERF Discovering Science Trail
5. Public Presentation and Analog Intelligence artwork preview at the 2024 SERF Open day
6. Keith Armstrong’s ANAT Blog, artist website (embodiedmedia) and use of images for ANAT Synapse 2025 campaign.
   (ANAT/TERN/Embodiedmedia) social media and news campaigns ongoing and ANAT Digest
7. Internal publicity at QUT – and via the MoreThanHumanFutures group.
8. Google Arts and Culture (forthcoming)

 

• Were there any unexpected outcomes?

Better understanding of the responsibilities of making work that is truly non-extractive, that is ecologically active rather than being only ‘expressive of something’, and that is beneficial for the site itself, rather than being a vehicle for varied forms of human consumption, aesthetic, political or otherwise. . And never knowing how close you might be able to come to that ideal .. which necessarily will limit mark making on site maybe more than I had initially imagined.

A pivot ½ way through the year – from an earlier approach of active revegetation in the gulley area of the site – to a passive/steady state revegetation approach because of a rare quail visiting the site.

An ongoing challenge to establish who has Traditional Ownership of the SERF site and who we can consult with – something that the site’s managers had intended to resolve – but that have as yet been unable to deliver.

 

1. g) Suggested improvements

• What could be improved for future residencies?

n/a

1. h) Further comments

• Would you like to add anything further?

This 2024 residency has been a definite career highlight. I am very thankful for this second extraordinary experience (prior Synapse was 2012) – another amazing, productive process-driven year. And thank you also for the ongoing online profile that ANAT have generated – so many thanks!

—

“I am thoroughly enjoying this journey with Keith. And, the rest of the scientists Eleanor, Gabe and, and David. I’m so much looking forward to every day, as you walk through that area the Forest Art Intelligence site,  yeah, I’m in awe, really of, how the earth can heal itself if left, to its own devices and to observe that, and connect art and science together is really exciting. I’ve used that word many times, but it is truly exciting to be a part of that and to, and to walk through there on most days of the week”. (Marcus Yates)

—

“It was really interesting, like, you know, a different experience. I never thought I would get to do that. And it .. was something I’ve been thinking about, I guess reinvigorating my creative side for a while in a more formal sense. So, it was really nice to be able to play in that space through this project. (Eleanor Velasquez)I think it’s useful for these collaborations to continue. .. I think it’s important that people get an idea of the perspectives of people from different disciplines, and particularly how we understand, you know, the environment using different, you know, creative approaches, whether that be art or science”. (David Tucker)