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https://wbo.ophir.dev/boards/6GqnakGkGW5-1eW1-aNRS1hXCQeBjwrc3gnQnHthuwM-
  
  Introductions
  
  briefly introduce yourself and your work!
  one sentence about what "ontology" might mean to your work
  And a second sentence on how it might relate what you think about multispecies solidarity
And also your pronouns

Elaine Gan she/her/they - in New York



Cassandra Troyan, they/them, LNU in Kalmar, Sweden
Writer, transdisciplinary artist, & educator. 
Multispecies solidarity opens the possibility for building otherwise worlds in the present.
In working with Helen, we turned towards the idea of solidarity as a meaningful political intervention against not only the idea of multispecies relations being inherently about flourishing, but seeing it as a necessary tool for understanding our relations to others as more than forms of entanglements.  
Ontology is always necessarily related to the ethical and social, hesistant towards the framing of this in design/art practices, as what can be lost in this classification, such as the historic specificity and material forms of violence and exchange. Looking towards modes of abolition, the abolition of the category of the species as such. 

Andrew Prior, him/him, University of Plymouth, UK
Interested in this idea of the onto-epistemological 'The entanglement of matter and meaning' (Barad).
Understanding the materiality and processuality of media - how they contain, and structure epistemology and being.
I'm interested in this idea coming from a media archaeological perspective... esp. engaging with media 'apparatus' through arts practice. This means that there are these entanglements between content/knowledge and the ontology of machines... they interact and affect one another... 
Multispecies solidarity- I'm becoming more and more aware that my approach has been somewhat 'inward', arriving (theoretically) at the borders of eWaste dumps, but not going in, or considering the impact of my practice, and our technologies on multispecies!

Laura Hopes she/her, Tavistock, UK
Any knowledge is made up of multiple ontologies, blended and porous, cognisant that there are no pure ‘knowers’. Ontology within my research couches any understanding of my own within these multiplicitous terrains, and tries to foreground traditionally  overlooked or marginalised ontologies.My work tries to use the tool of vulnerability or precarity , as witnessed within a new reading of the sublime, to uncover the interconnectedness of settler-colonisation and climate catastrophe within the (anthropo-)cene
multispecies solidarity - recognising that we are not managers of the world as system but a part

Emilio Chapela, he/him, PHD Candidate, University of Plymouth, UK. Mexican artist living in Berlin.
PhD project: Moving images diffracted through New Materilism: an earthly response to movement.
Ontology: Understood through my work as a way to relate to the world materially, specially as a way to attune to various movements, spaces and temporalities.
This has led me to collaborate with rivers, volcanos, light, etc.
Multispecies solidarity: A way to challange or animate the percived or emergent borders between species. I'm interested specially in how do to collaborate  with more-than-humans through the moving images.

Zeenath Hasan, she/ her. LNU, Design Department, Sweden. 
Design educator and erstwhile corporate ethnographer. Engaging with fxxd as pedagogy. Ontology as actionable knowledge in normative reasoning processes. Multispecies Solidarity as enabling collaboration at cross privileges, working with uncertainty. Currently struggling with radical giving. 

Helen Bowstead she/her, also in Plymouth, UK. I am doing a PhD in Education. I am engaging with posthuman/vital materialist ontologies to reframe the doctorate as a joyful-artful process. I am going to say that ontology and multispecies solidarity mean resisting human-centric thinkings and doings. 

-----------

Marie - living at Älmhult near the home of ikea.. trees and working alot with the forest .. 11 sheep and bees . Moss and wax as ephemeral typography, used in the space of memorials + the life of plants

Andrew - thinkering... bring together tinkering making stuff and thinking ..working with cassettes - understanding it from a material-semiotic perspective - much practice - looking at devices. multispecies soildarity - electronics relations with the world .. also see above

Helga - collecting.. bulk collection of data of the trees -- linking the trees to the spying trees - tree a a new species.. what species want to live wwith these new trees - and who they remove through their existence through vibrations and sounds.. new technology.. i found the tree branch.. 26 dead lady bugs / in solidarity, recognizing their life and death - living in side the tree 

Kate -- sea caves in the south west.. within the ecologies of these sea caves to gather data  - how artists can bear wittness  - field work to gather data - ontology currently relating in speculative field trips.. expanded notions of field trips - vanished marine caves - rights of divination to try to encounter the speculative sensoria.. speculative sensoria of the vanished caves.. try to reconnect and drop down through these multiple layers 


Colette - practice led phd - public art & human-nature relationship - clusters of bacteria - immersive art project with murals, audio and participatory components - egoness 'i'ness as anthropogenic position - how microorganisms in marine environments - ontology as beingness of these lives - goal to stimulate how we think as humans in this larger picture

Cassandra - see above :) 

Linda - PhD - filmmaking, digital sound, painting, projection - approaching sacred feminine - statue of virgin mary overlooking Firestone Bay (?) in Plymouth - engaging in ritualistic way with statue 

Karin - teacher, educator, background in children's literature - ontology disruption of nature culture binaries, playing with matters of scale - category of exclusion is forgotten - cartoon posthuman child and manifesto
The "we" often forgets the category of the child. A lot of our education is about the world and not of being part of the world
Being lowered into the mine, and how knowing the distance of 100 m, is different from the experience of it. 
- Animals, feral, and child
- Decolonizing early child discourses, reading & research group 
_ post qualitative research
_ how video and sound can reorganize research and pedagogy


Angela - University of Melbourne - childhood studies, arts - relational ontology, storytelling with the human and the more than human, in and of the world rather than about the world - multispecies solidarity as more than human nature, environmental degradation, BLM, planetary health, storytelling for speculative futurities - also a member of Decolonizing early child discourses 

Toby - PhD - medical education - simulation suites in medical training facilities - cyborgs as monstrous mannequins who teach medical professionals - interdisplinary approach to immersive installations - ontology as meaning making non-verbally in clinical context - bio medical ontology as objects that draw meaning from our bodies

Leah - student, farmer - Feminist Farmers collective - regenerative agriculture, spearheading experimental farm site - invigorate different economies around food in the city - Småland Living Labs metadesign project, Resilience Garden, subjective, embodied resilience - how we become through and with multispecies relations with a focus on choreographies and place specific ecologies - multispecies solidairities how we can diffract binaries, how we can be collectives in our bodies. Under Ekarna, place specific culture lab in Växjö, one of Sweden's oldest volcanoes

Emilio - see above

Åsa - long term collab with Kristina Lindström, Un/Making Studio - constructuve and destructive side of design, when we make we also unmake - when we are building worls we are also curating knowledge
-Exchange between knowledge producing / practice producing
http://www.unmakingstudio.se/
Un /M aking soil communities - dug into aftermath of glass industry in Småland. 
Un /M aking pollination - to recignise pollination is a relationship that has been developed, how we treat landscape is a part of pollination relationships

Helen Billinghurst - research fellow, fictioning, poetry, performance, attending and responding to place with body - multispecies solidairy as attending to place and being voice for the voiceless, tune in with our bodies

Mohamed - interdisciplinary artist - speculations on the future - maps, nature, river, water, climate - immersive, interactive experiences - river Nile - not just as place but also as water resource, maps of future river Nile - invite public to experience narrative
-What does it mean to partipate or take part? Virtual/immersive reality as a tool for environmental change
-Solidarity as an integrative process, studying being/well-being and how these conditions affect us all. 

Helen Bowstead, she/ her - PhD - Jane Bennett 'Vibrant Matter' - photos of rubbish in the Southern Harbour, Plymouth - disposable bodies, matter, who/ what comes to matter - 'with whose blood were my eyes crafted' Haraway

Pete - PhD - computational art, architecture - pictorial, architectural, game spaces - multi-fandom cosmo technics - onto-episteme between physical and virtual spaces - architectural maximalism - Yuk Hui 'Cosmo Technics'

Elaine - 3 responses 
(1) design is political - multimodal practice, question-aparatus that opens up rather than resolves - relationship between aesthetics and politics, opening up also closes down, 'How do we engage with situated practices' Haraway. From where connected to a when . Where is always partial, No single way of solving climate change
Is design ontological? Design has always made a huge difference. Architecture, agriculture, game design is an intervention. One is always in the realm of the ontological
-Design is already always ontological 
-Which mehtods or practices address differences, differently 
-What would it mean to question the very notion of the idea of justice? 
-Making and unmaking of the terrain, due to the Green Revolution 
-What does it mean to question the promises of modernity? One of which being justice -- how might justice be a question, rather than the goal? Through the term into question as the goal. 
-Much of STS is thinking that technoscience is the ontological condition for much of the world, the loans we pay, the food we eat, the conditions under which we live. 
-Interested in metrics, which is "successful"? The Green Revolution was a just project from certain perspectives. 

(2) Separation between the ontic / onto logical 
-The ontic, the being in the world, a lived social relation; the ontos the capacity to meta the self 
-Ontology is a way to challenge the master narratives of the west, and allowing ways to think and move beyond
opening a temporary site between ontic and ontology [i think] opens up worldbuilding practices that always throw into question "word" and "world" or "epistemology" and "ontology"

(3) To enter into the ontics of another, is to enter into questions of shifting scales
-The films are landscapes as temporality, rather than films about landscape/set in a particular landscape, as they are constantly changing, the landscape is ontic. The ways that the film work with shifting temporalities, scales. 
-Methods, not storytelling vs data, or qualitative vs quantitative; what are the transdisciplinary methods we can come up with. Shifting our temporality and modes of existence. Creating their capacities to endure, to last. 
-Not arts + humanties + sciences as a way of doing things. Barthes; interdisciplinarity develops from attention 
-What does it means to build on modes of damaging rather than flourishing?

Return after break: 
-Achille Mbembe, ke y question of colonialization is "who owns the earth?" The Earth belongs to all of us. It is what we all hold and possess in common. Articulating decolonisation. What it might mean to say, 'WE belong to the earth'  (Necropolitics; Fanon Wretched; Foucault Biopols)
-To move away from teh individual we and subject, who is a holder and container of certain rights. 
Thinking through verbs, artistic practices, rather than subjects and o bjects, might allow for seeing this we, allowing it to shift. It belong interdependent. Contingecy and change are at the heart of this. 
-Being & knowing
_ Barad, entanglement as onto-epistemologies (Meeting the Universe Halfway)
_ Foucault, 'apparatus' that determine what we are able to see
Camera delineating what you want to open up

-What is the apparatus that allows the continually shifting 'we' to come into focus? 
-What is the Earth? How is it something in common? How is it something unique to us? (Like breathe)
-Joseph Mas co, 'Age of Fallout' https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.5406/historypresent.5.2.0137.pdf
"For even as scientists generate increasingly precise and vivid depictions of ecological precarity on planet Earth, the immediate challenge remains to collectively achieve a form of planetary governance that can fully recognize, and not just begin to account for, escalating fallout." pp. 138

- 1945 as embedded within the unintended toxic effects - we are living in an environmental aftermath - operates at a plurality of scales that we can only every engage with partially - a process that remakes bodies on a planetary scale and thus calls for new ways of thinking about how we might begin to govern ourselves + collecitves

- detonations have radically transformed
- also given us earth systems science - scientific tools - to get a better sense of the planet - so the facts we have any sense of planetary exisitence is part of the fallout - 
- fallout - global wind patterns, global distribution.. radio active elements in soil dont stay put and dont dissapear 
- makes its ways through multiple bodies of plants and animals around the world .. 
- form of solidarity .. 
- all working from this condition - ways of being and thinkin g  
- Fallout doesn't affect us all equally, collectively and asymmetrically distributed. While having a more immediately damagaing effect on us, specific bodies, specific ecologies. Affects everyone, but not all to the same degree. 
-The co presence, co-existence that we need to try to navigate. 
-For Sarah Christman, Swarm Season, the 'we' is broken into multiple groups. In Behemoth, the we is more clear, the viewers are implicated in the destruction that he has filmed. 
-Modern literary genres are incapable of addressing the current era. (Ghosh, The Great Derangement)



Some terms to discuss:
-- TOUCH
-- CHANGE
-- LANDSCAPE / BODY / BREATH
-- VOICE (bio or necropolitical)
-- TEMPORALITIES
-- COLOR
-- CHILDREN



How is change being represented in these films?
-Swarm Season, at first the amount of touch/touching that are present in the film. In first 10 minutes, picking from the tree; lemons, coffee, bees. Not an overly tender touch, pushing down the honeycomb, a tuning to the touching, as a moment of change. Going to visit the scientist, lingering shot of the telescope, attention to who performs the labour touching and making these worlds. A person of color is moving the buttons. The moments of touching is where these shared sites of touching . 
-Statue of the past, looking into the future, a socialist realist statue of the socialist future of where teh society could go, and of what it is becoming. 
-The lamb is being held, there is also the religious associations, and the past, present, and future. The shepard who is holding the sheep while riding the horse
-Ashes, coal, bodies, graves, coal being pulled from the sedimentary layers of teh ground. The sedimentation in the ground, the lungs. Pulling compressed vegetation from the ground, and then the bodies that are then being returned to the Earth. 
-Sound of the coal mine was haunted by the wheezing of the workers. The sound, the touch. Scene where the man is looking at his hands, and how callous they are, the labor is inscribed in his hands. 
-How to address these temporalities?
-The rose has never seen the gardener age (??source)
-When we use an apparatus, we are not forced to use that clock, but still do. How to situate ones self within these various rhythms. 
-Behemoth, the aesthetic wonder/brilliance of the films, colors of red, naked figure, mirrored triangulations. We're looking at models and toys, granite-pirple-white, asked to engage in a different way when we then engage with the individual, human qualities. The clashing of these palettes, using classical cinematic devices
-Laura Hopes: Totally ticking all the boxes of the sublime, horror; different scales of the sublime; the majestic mountain being hacked to pieces, getting the sense of scale. Yet the distance becomes touching distance, and then relates to this differently scaled experience of the sublime. The role of human within these more than human cinematic experience, we don't want to throw away our human knowledge. Both films dealt very tenderly with living in/living with the world.   

-The ontologies are not presented in opposition from each other. The scientists, in order to think about the colonization of Mars, living in plural worlds/ontologies 
Marisol de la cadena earth beings

-A peripheral experience of the world. Being at the coal face is being on the edge, stories of solidarity. Peripheral politics, (Abou Mali Simone
) to not respond to the center, through their own rhthyms and coherences. 
-The use of a singular figuration gets played out from multiple perspectives; the Queen Bee, the mother, The Queen of Hawaii; the statue in Behemoth herder with the sheep. 
-Young boy throwing the soil, connection to exploration, to the Earth and potentially fetishisizing relations of indigenity to land. How is the viewer figureds in this? Different viewers and viewpoints, to see the problematics in that.
-Manu is also playing with the dirt. 
-What are these forms of storytelling that might allow other modes of being to come across? What allows Otherness to respond? What is the role of the storyteller? What is the role of the viewer? Not environmental documentaries that give us a specific resolve, an answer or resolution for the characters. Forms of storytelling that takes verb seriously as practices of exploring rather than stories of outright destruction. An oil spill, anthropogenic event where one storyline unfolds. These films are constantly shifting back and forth. 
-Gave a tenderness to the humans within it.
-Humans on the Earth vs. human as part of a system; being chewed up by it, charcoal bodies that are left on top of it. 
-"How dirty can it get?" the bee keeping vs. the coal mining 
-Behemoth was intentionally hard to watch. Feeling angry at the filmmaker, and being asked to bear witness, and what is happening to the people and the planet, and the narrative that we have to sit with. 
-What does it mean to ask to bear witness in ontological cinema?
-Liang shot this with a handheld camera, durational cinema, forcing a viewer to enter into a timescape/scene. The difficulty in holding the camera for that long, shapes in fact how the story evolves. 
-Timestamp of when figures appear and diappear, the way a filmmaker threads a story together, without a single script. Through the juxtapositions of figures. 
-In Behemoth, the belaboured breath, the processes, which are difficult and to move through and watch.
-The chronology of Manu in Swarm Season, following an ethnographic method, preliminary filming, and decided to focus on certain figures.
-What does it mean to bear witness? 
-You can see the heavy metals on the face, the sound of the machinery drops out, and then bring its attention to the modenist ontology, that the world is there to be extracted from. The still exisiting ontology or not, since it is an uncomfortable moment. Us consuming those labors, faces, oppressions, The dropping out of the sounds of teh infrastructure, the modernity legacies of the extraction we're participating as, in the extractions occurring during our bearing witness to these faces. 
-A question of genre; documentary filmmaking vs ontological cinema, and working through this term. Thinking about realism, in the ontological sense
-Neo-realism, cinema verite, 
-Trying to decenter the human gaze; how bees swarm, what does it mean to let the bees occupy the shop? For longer than it is comfortable. The capacity to hold air in lungs that are considered disposible. Ontological in the sense that it is allowing the digital/video/camera to hold still so that the way in which beings that are in the process of becoming can experience and be in that screen, and we're sychronizing it with it, rather than some kind of outside.
-Trad documatries, the director gives teh narrative, that tells us teh story and why we should care. 
-2 films are pedagogical that are being built out of multiple ways of being, being immersed in the living experiences that are incredibly different. There is no outside, or there various degrees, or that you are in it, then being thrown out, repeatedly. 
-Feminized/masculinized in terms of the type of filmmaking according to teh directors. Both films capable of holding multiple ways that insects and rock have a certain way of being that has exceeded documentary filmmaking.
-The capacity to extend to a time beyond 

-Is there any kind of flourishing in these films?
-There will be survival in the midst of this. Points of care; tending to the plants, partners cleaning each other at the end the day, Tsing, living in capitalist ruins. 
-Tenderness, and stewardness, a tending, taking care of (Puig de la Bellacasa)
-Thinking from modes of damage and toxicity, the notion that care should be there. To start from the places of damage, (Jennifer Gabrys. Elizabeth Grosz) What woudl it mean to think of a type of care that doesn't predetermine that they need care, that damaging processes need care and what might a care for the indeterminate might be. 
-Use of teh term care; in rice cultivation, care comes from teh rhetoric of care, and find more valuable the thinking through attunement, enabling dofference to respond, trying to inhabit another materiality. What is another term? (Using the term, "Creaturing", Gabrys)
-A complicated legacy around the term care, but the word we are stuck with for now. 

figure not just a signification but the figure has the capacities of the sign for the being? to come through 

sound drops out in Behemoth:
1:01:04 SHIFT happens through disappearance of sound; focus on individual portraits "the way he looked before" 1:03