In September 2019, I participated in a 5-day art/research lab called Cartographies of the Vanishing Now, hosted by Amsterdam-based arts organization FIBER. In FIBER’s words, the lab was, “A new research and development project exploring the potential of sensory art and alternative cartographic methods to remap reality in the age of environmental collapse.”
For me, the lab was an opportunity to connect in person with other artists and creatives who are interested in ecology, climate change, and living systems. Loneliness, isolation and anxiety is what has dominated my thoughts on these subjects for the past several years, and I was seeking connection, which I found. I have wanted to engage with these challenging topics emotionally, but have struggled to pare down to a manageable and expressible size. The lab gave me an opportunity to have conversations with others on these topics.
It was also an opportunity to engage closely with the materials and living things that I harvested and experimented with during our field trip and in the lab, and this may be what has stuck the most. I developed a research method that I have experimented with since: Transect walks, a method borrowed from field ecology and combined with somatic practice, in which I walk along a randomly chosen path and stop at regularly planned intervals. I then engage with each location closely and document the sights, smells, and emotions experienced there.
After the lab, I have a stronger sense of how to connect art and science and the huge possibility space opened up by joining them. There’s more overlap between these frames of mind than I’d previously thought. Scientific inquiry requires an attunement, at least at first, to what surrounds you. Then, it requires sharpening a particular set of ears and turning what is heard into data. Art making requires a similar paring down of the senses into just a few streams. Meaning is made through ignoring some inputs and amplifying others. The challenge I feel with talking about climate change is that the input streams do not signify only themselves, but an enormous and ongoing process that cannot be pointed to.
