The Leonardo Laser talk (Tuesday, June 25, 2024, from 3.30-5.30 pm) at Brisbane Convention Centre was a great success art ISEA – and it was a very enjoyable occasion  working with the wonderful Brett Leavy and Kelly Greenopp, chaired by: Dr. Anastasia Tyurina.

Fellow Speaker Brett Leavy descends from the Kooma people whose traditional country is bordered by St George in the east, Cunnamulla to the west, north by the town of Mitchell and south to the Queensland/NSW border.   As a multimedia producer and Indigenous advocate, Brett heads up Australia’s leading First Nations social impact cultural design company– Bilbie Virtual Labs(link is external), designing an innovative and connective program known as Virtual Songlines – a suite of immersive, interconnected multi-user virtual heritage simulations that showcase the history and heritage of fifty cities and regional towns across Australia.

Dr Kelly Greenop is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland’s School of Architecture, Design and Planning. Her research is in Digital Cultural Heritage, utilises 3D laser scanning of heritage environments to document and archive fragile, remote and at-risk heritage sites, and research the use of digital heritage.

The purpose of the panel discussion was to delve into innovative approaches for advocating, preserving, and celebrating Australian Culture and Country in the digital age, highlighting the transformative power of the arts as a catalyst for social and ecological change.

For this talk I spoke about the following topics:

The transformative power of the arts as a catalyst for
social and ecological change

Active Optimism ..
  The world is in deep trouble
  The world is getting better
  The world can be much better still

AllyshipBuilding community – creating contexts for ethical and respectful
knowledge exchange around Care for Country

My/Our Creative Objectives:
  Experimental practices inviting audiences to
envisage and experiment with pathways towards socially/ecologically-  just & regenerative futures

Further Contexts/Inspiration/Working Spaces:

• Art+Ecological Science (field collaborations)
• Regeneration as a creative practice
• Sensitive advocacy for the ‘More than Human World’
• Integration of practice & ‘campaign’

How Intelligences (microbes, fungi, invertebrates, plants, ..) are each embodied & embedded – and mostly not like ‘us’ and mostly unknowable

So we should ask less: Are you like us? as more: What is it like to be you?

.. remembering .. there hasn’t been a single study in the past decade that shows animals or plants to be dumber than we thought
(Robin Wall Kimmerer)

Some Big Picture Questions:

Need to re-educate ourselves on many levels – reframing priorities

Can we transcend the narrow frequency of ‘being human’?

Use mediating technology to sense non humans’ time scales and (maybe) some part of their embodied, embedded intelligences

Because:
The ‘more than human world’ has answers to questions we struggle to even ask..

It was wonderful to welcome almost all the ANAT leadership team to SERF on 28th June, during ISEA 2024 – MELISSA DELANEY Chief Executive Officer, JENN BRAZIER Program Manager, CAROLLYN KAVANAGH Marketing and Communications Manager and AUSHAF WIDISTO Arts Administrator.

We were also very happy to have ISEA  keynote presenter and artist and Palawa woman and ANU Professor Prof. ANGIE ABDILLA (also director of Old Ways New – whose mission is “Creating Systemic Change, Indigenous Agency and Autonomy“).

My science collaborators David Tucker, Marcus Yates and I were able to show them the project site and take them on the site Science Walk.

Here is how Angie is introduced in the ISEA catalogue .. “Professor Angie Abdilla, Palawa is the founder and director of Old Ways, New. Angie created the company’s strategic design methodology, Country Centered Design, leading projects for the public and private sectors over the past decade. She is an Advisor to the federal government for Services Australia, the Attorney General’s Copyright and AI Reference Group, CSIRO’s Data61, and the National AI Centre Think Tank, and previously was a member of the Global Futures Council on Artificial Intelligence for Humanity as part of the World Economic Forum. In her professorial role at the Australian National University’s School of Cybernetics, she works with Indigenous knowledges, systems, and technology as a cultural practice. Her published research explores Indigenous deep-time technologies and Artificial Intelligence, informed by the Indigenous Protocols and AI working group (IP//AI), which she co-founded“.
(courtesy ISEA 2024 Program)

Furthermore Angie’s company – Old Ways, New on their website states : “Country Centered design is our methodology, which utilises Indigenous knowledge in the design of places, experiences, and critical technologies. Our process incorporates systems and design thinking, combined with futuring techniques to deliver culturally, socially, and environmentally sustainable outcomes“.

Earlier in the ISEA 2024 artistic program I had very much enjoyed experiencing her work ‘Meditation on Country‘ at the State Library of Qld – a work that beautifully “brought together Indigenous knowledges and Western astrophysics through charting Creation time and evolutionary events.”  For me especially hearing the voices of Uncle Ghillar Michael Anderson and Aunty Bronwyn Penrith in the artwork’s soundtrack, and then yarning to them afterwards, was a truly memorable experience! Thanks so much Angie and team for bringing your moving stories to us in such a powerful way!

After coffee and an introduction from Marcus Yates –  we all walked the new SERF Engaging Science Trail together – through the mature forest towards the clearing on the other side where the site is located.

We then lingered at the Forest Art Intelligence plot (which is a stop on the trail), and circumnavigated much of the 2Ha space- to discuss where we had come to and possible next steps.

Angie’s advice during. that time to me was to try to accelerate the consultation process with local elders – to bring them actively into the process early if possible. The situation at SERF in terms of clear Traditional Owner recognition is still under discussion – so we discussed possible strategies in a situation of uncertainty. One we alighted was to take a walk going forward with Prof. Wesley Enoch – who works at QUT – and who was also an ISEA 2024 convenor – and that is something I have initiated subsequently.

Another amazing thing happened on that walk! As we stopped on the way back at what we call the mother tree – Soon after absorbing the presence of this hundreds of years old blue gum, ANAT CEO Melissa Delaney’s hearing returned – she had been close to functionally deaf for quite sometime due to an unknown ailment.

Coincidences can be acknowledged or ignored – we all chose the former – ending  the day on a particularly joyful note 🙂

My collaborator Dr. Eleanor Velasquez, in her role as TERN education manager, was instrumental in funding and helping set up a new Science engagement walk at SERF – and the Forest Art Intelligence Site, it was decided, would become a key stop along the way – ensuring that the project would be part of a circuit visitors would regularly make to the site.

The Engaging Science/Science Walk Launch Event took place at SERF on June 4th and was launched by the Qld Chief Scientist. It was followed by a full day symposium where all researchers connected to the site presented their work.

Setting up for the day involved the negotiation of text and signage with the TERN graphic designers – which initially (June 2024) was printed on core-flute to test the idea. A video was also shot at the site and a web page associated via a QR code.

On the launch date I also showed a preliminary version of the artwork Analog Intelligence  and also presented the project to an assembled group of scientists and other interested visitors in a talk called Forest Art Intelligence: Art, Science and a Red Backed Quail Meet at the Forest’s Edge.

After much deliberation, it became clear to me that the artworks at the site at SERF were very much still in development, and therefore a planned showing for ISEA 2024 on site would not be feasible.

Instead, I decided to access a Lidar (laser scan) aerial and terrestrial data set of the site – that had been prepared by the QUT REF Operation team/Dr. Dmitry Bratanov – and use it to design and render an aesthetic, part representational, part symbolic  fly through of both the passive regeneration and wetland sites –  that would introduce the site/project to audiences at ISEA.  The soundtrack included voices of Dr. David Tucker and Dr. Gabrielle Lebbink conducting the 2023 plant survey, and included the call of the Quail that had been so influential in the setup of the site. The  work – called Analog Intelligence, will be  included in the juried ISEA exhibition ‘Constellations’ during June 2024. It will be accompanied by other smaller screens showing different media from the project.

The ISEA page for the event within Constellations is here – Part of the text reads ..

This video installation (Analog Intelligence) speaks to the projects’ first tentative steps – into uncovering and bringing to attention the extraordinary natural intelligences of a land in self-repair after decades of clearing, providing the inspiration for a non-extractive, hybrid art-science work capable of growing and evolving with the forest, whilst also actively benefitting it.

Analog Intelligence explores the future artwork site by land, air and soil, speaking poetically to early findings into conceiving loosely coordinating site-wide artworks, able to bring the forests’ regeneration process to public focus, whilst finding and occupying their own intelligent, beneficial ‘niches’ within that re-emerging forest ecology.

And here is the dedicated  page on my own site embodiedmedia.com Further imagery will be posted here in due course once the work is installed.

Ill be talking about this work in this event too – ANAT Synapse in Conversation :: 20 Years of Art + Science Collaboration – 29 June 2024, Sunshine Coast Field Trip, University of the Sunshine Coast, ISEA2024 Everywhen.

I also  agreed to speak during IEA 20024 at a Leonardo Laser Talk  around ideas connected to the project, (Tuesday, June 25, 2024, from 3.30-5.30 pm, AEST at the Plaza Auditorium, Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre, specifically talking to the power of such artworks within the promotion of ecological regeneration of First Nations country talking on a panel with Brett Leavy and Dr Kelly Greenop. The panel discussion will delve into innovative approaches for advocating, preserving, and celebrating Australian Culture and Country in the digital age, highlighting the transformative power of the arts as a catalyst for social and ecological change.

 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

During FAI’s R&D to date I’ve been  often influenced by James Bridle’s thinking in his book ‘ Ways of Being’ (2022) – notably his assertions that in order to act ecologically in the world we should strive to design our ecological (computing) creations accordingly. He speaks in his prior book (New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future) about the ‘new dark age’ of incomprehension we are experiencing of the digital systems  that control our worlds (e.g. we can’t as easily explain how email works vs. the more comprehensible old school post office) – and highlights the immense violence that digital/sampled models of the world have been integral in contributing to the extractive mindset (think corporate AI). Bridle asks that we instead should seek to move our thinking and creations away from this predominant ‘model’ and ‘mastery’ ethos.

“The world is not like a computer; computers are like the world”

Bridle cites developments from history, or from the edges of today’s thinking (e.g. unconventional computing and alternate engineering) that give him hope of a kind of computing that is more analog (i.e. as is the world) and that works within, and for it, rather than as an tool to master it.  Computers, he reminds us, are natural: – they are part of nature: they are our creations.

Consistent with this thinking, FAI must therefore itself, at each level, be envisaged as an ecological creation – one that invokes care and justice across both human and more than human contexts. This is consistent with Barad’s thinking discussed in my prior post  – which suggests engaging/energising  ‘wave-like’ motions through the work rather than working with individual sampled data points – an analogy that presents analog complex change in the site (intra-actions) over time through an analog mediums,  as opposed to a focus upon individual ‘particles’ or binary states. This intention to create an artwork invoking a connective, wave-like, analog, computational structures across the reforestation site, raises the possibility that the creation might be better able to resonate with the  mystery and unknowability of  the site’s innumerable intelligences.

FAI should hence resonate with, rather than seek to directly model or represent the natural intelligences at the site.  Bridle gives an example:  complex actions of systems fed via electrically powered agitators to create complex, multiple ripples in a bucket of water – which, he says, is a form of ‘pre-processing’ that  allows complexity to become somehow readable to us.

Consistent with Bridle’s thinking therefore, FAI’s (analog) works should embody three tendencies:  ‘non-binary’, ‘decentralised’ and ‘unknowing’.

• ‘non-binary’
  Just as ‘man’ and ‘woman’ don’t reflect the full diversity of human experience, neither can 1’s and 0’s, or digital samplings of the ecological richness of the biological (analog) world. To act with justice and care towards humans, and more than humans, it’s critical to eschew the binaries that foreground contemporary computing/thinking/creation and allow our ideas/machines/artworks, through their design, to do likewise. 
• ‘decentralized’
  We are not the most important species or the focus for everything else, but simply a specialised, equal part of a vast more than human world – within which everything is equally evolved (Ref Lyn Margulis). We should ask how can we design our actions and the constituent tools/artworks we create to become contributions to, and mediations with everything else – as opposed to considering what we do as “unique, and uniquely, powerful, artefacts of human superiority”. Decentralisation acknowledges the power of communal, cooperative undertakings, intra-actions/becoming- togethers that foster outcomes greater than their parts. In this way of thinking, actual power must also be transparently shared rather than centralised. 
• ‘unknowing’
  This requires us to comfortably acknowledge limitations of that which we are able to know, and respect rather than ignore or erase that which is beyond our understanding. Rather than considering unknowing as a form of  helplessness we should rather trust our ability to navigate a complex, ever-shifting landscape that we cannot control. (e.g. traditional cosmologies used ritual and respect for non-human beings to enable their survival.
  

(Note to self) The pre-used term ecological niche in the original description of the work  may therefore not be the right terminology –  as it is often thought of as a “job” or “role” in an ecosystem. The idea that just as individuals have specific roles in society (e.g., doctors, teachers, farmers), species have specific roles in their environment now seems inconsistent with the design.

An Initial Punt at Artwork Components
These are the potential components of the artwork on site:  4-5 ART Intelligence installations + scientific instrumentation equivalent to that used elsewhere at SERF,  at the following locations.

Site 1  An emerging, self-seeded tree site on the regeneration bank, within easy reach of the central access path on the sloping bank. (Surface emergence):

Site 2: The current forest edge – suggesting old and new integration (Relational emergence)

Site 3: The ephemeral pond in the wet gulley
(Temporal emergence)

Site 4: Single transect at the Southern/road side end
(Subsoil emergence)

Site 5: Multiple transects along the wet gulley
(Subsoil emergence)

Fungal Transects (A/Prof Caroline Hauxwell’s project)
For each 50 m transects, 0.25×0.25m plots were sampled along the site: First sample point was on the outside of the now recovering area. The next three consecutively within the previously burnt area and the 5th sample outside on other side of the burnt area.

Ideally these artwork sites should

• playfully uncover the rich intelligence of the site – in terms of its complex intra-actions locally, and beyond
• Somehow attune to/benefit their sites
• Somehow bring this natural intelligence to human attention
• Exhibit co-creative, playful devolution of part of the ‘processing’/ ‘thinking’, to nonhuman actors: (e.g. c.f. bucket of pre-processing water/slime moulds). At the heart of the system there is something ‘doing its own thing’ (Ref. Turing’s Oracle (not a machine)/ decentralised)
• Audiences should sense the site’s intelligence without needing to understand the ‘intra-actions’ of each site (i.e. retain unknowability) – such an atmosphere of unknowing requires a kind of tryst, or solidarity with non human others.

Scientific Instrumentation

Phenocam 1:  – Top of grassy bank     looking down
Phenocam 2: Bottom of Grass Bank looking up
Phenocam 2 – Wet Gulley RHS
Phenocam 3 – Wet Gulley LHS

BAR Acoustic Recorder 1/100m range: (consistent with David Tucker’s ‘Acoustic Observatory’ project), at the  intersection of the wet gully and bank

See TERN Howard Springs PhenoCam Seasonal Veg Change Phenocam

The preliminary idea is to use an interpretation of the analog complexity of each site – and its local outcomes as   drivers for a further ‘analog computational art work’ – available either online or in a physical space (e.g. gallery). Data from Sites 1-4 will therefore be somehow ‘pre-processed’ locally (analog/analogous) – and collected ‘offline or remotely’,  (local data cards, images, observations + other Arduino remote sensing) and subsequently assembled to ‘drive/activate/direct’ a further analog/analogous installation speaking to the site’s intelligent complexity, non-representationally. This summative work is accompanied by site images of ‘intelligences’ (aerial, terrestrial and sub-terrestrial), point clouds and other artefacts driven from the collected experience).

The Analog Intelligence Artwork
The first outcome of the project will be a single channel animation work of the site (called ‘Analog Intelligence’ for ISEA 2024), + 1-3 iPad auxiliary screens?  Will serve as an introduction to the expansive aims of the project and the site and will be presented for two days during ISEA 2024 (June 21-30) – and potentially during the SERF Engaging Science Trail Launch – and Showcase on June 4th, 2024> the artwork will be used to promote the FAI project and add to the ongoing documentation.

This work will:

• Be built using  the SERF point cloud model
• Indicate the artwork sites (as animated points of interest) – and potentially suggest forms of connection
• Exploit  capacity for subsoil animation (fungal transects) – and added scanned/point cloud items
• Will pan from forest to grassland?
• Suggest/animate the future forest growth.