Submitted by richard on Sun, 2008-03-30 05:29.
We need a new name for our conception of "eco media"!
(eco-media is usually defined as how mass media deal with 'green' issues).
Bandwidth
Transmissions
channels
Relays
Questions
1. How far can such a new conception of nature as media advance the public’s understanding of and investment in ecological issues?
2. By mapping some of our human ideas about media - security, privacy and publicly owned space onto the natural world, can we test some of our most ‘species centric’ assumptions?
3. Animal or plant ‘media’ is based on senses such as smell or energy such as wind that are not as important in human media. Can ‘natural media’ with its different agencies and sensorium help to rethink human media, revealing opportunities for action or areas of mutual interest?
Can ‘eco media’ turn scientific modes of environmental monitoring into more tendentious forms of dialogue and links to the world of human decision making?
Establishing Principles:
1. “Art for Animals” should not use animals as instruments nor deplete their involvement in the world but supplement it (animals that do not breed in captivity).
2. To facilitate communication between animals.
3. Animals that learn to interact with humans (the pigeon loudspeakers).
4. To represent the interest of the creatures who contribute to the ecosystem but have no rights.
5. To what extent can it link scientific disciplines and techniques to the decision making process (at what level? Himmelsbach/Volker).
6. What is the benefit to non-human users or audience?
Issues
1. Is participation at a conscious, a semiotic or a biological level?
2. Is there a choice to communicate (do participants need to make a conscious decision to act or emit signals?)
a. Is there a choice of what to communicate? (is a conscious decision between alternative signals required? Is there a limitation to one mode or language of response?).
b. Does the work require humans or non-humans to extend the habitual range of their sensory perception? (becoming animal)
3. How far can different species approach each others point of view? (What happens to the human cultural components and ideologies of media when they are reconfigured for other species?)
4. To what extent can “natural media” of currents, scents and migrations carry “messages” (if only those interpretable by humans) or instead signals that more “act at a distance”? Or a class that are effective as both?
5. Is nature itself the common “database”?
6. What is the difference between communicating and just perceiving the relevance of a certain state? (making a noise means you are there). To “enter into a zone of proximity with an animal and exchange particles at a molecular level” (Deleuze?)
Animal play – probing the affordances of their environment, probing their own capacities as though performing an “anticipatory adaptation” (this is from “becoming animal”).
Sabine Himmelsbach and Yvonne Volkart
No dualistic relationships between man and beast, culture and nature, nature and technology, etc.
Seeks to re-stabilise the system
Scientific modes of recording data that can be visualised in ways that open up new realms of perception.
Art – who can intervene? On what level can models (of eco system) be negotiated? (at what level of public policy or knowledge?).
Because of safety fears, kids have no space to explore natural world. Their scope of activity has shrink from 800m to just the house and garden.
The Hamptons development, Peterborough. Roger Tallowin
Park built before housing. “Growing up with nature”
Methods
Written, visual and on-line documentation of the research process through:
1. Documentation of development stages and conclusions
2. Documentation of correspondence and interviews with experts in the field
3. Documentation of practical methods of data collection and transmission
4. Documentation of questions raised by experimental field studies
5. Reflection & presentation of findings at Bright Sparks Seminars
Publication and presentation of range of concepts as part of the Exhibition at Gunpowder Park.
Ecology – the relationship of living beings to their environment.
Biosemiotics – the transmission of information as part of the living process.
Zoosemiotics – animal communication
Sociobiology – communication, play, displays and learning between organisms.
Ethology – animal behaviour
A taxonomy of life forms according to those which can pass semiotic materials between each other.
Channels, Bandwidth, Transmissions, Relays
Aninmal play
Deer scent trails
Foxes defecating on children’s toys
Courtship displays, bird song, hormones, pheromones, dna, reproduction
Food and foraging – digestion, droppings, top soil fertility
Water cycle – ocean, evaporation, clouds, rain, drainage, estuaries
Navigation – sonar, radar - owls, bats, fish.
Territory – scent trails, markers, droppings
Habitat – nest building, burrows and maintenance
Health – bird baths, mud baths, grooming, scratching posts
Artefacts – tools (rocks for breaking shells), sparkling baubles (magpies for nests).
Direct communcation – Mary Woodhouse, horse whisperers, cows noses
Human – ownership, privacy, commonality, identity, economy, diversity
Pets
Bees – pollen, honey (industry).
Ants and lady birds - aphid farming
