Use the space below to create your own syllabus;
drag and drop linked text and images from the right!
Use the space below to create your own syllabus;
drag and drop linked text and images from the right!
What does it mean to be with nature?
This syllabus began with a series of questions: Is nature a place we go to? An environment that we are in? // A thing that was? Something that’s doomed? Animate or inanimate? Something we’re re-inventing? Rescuing? Restoring? // When we start thinking of plants and animals as having agency, what does that mean for humans? Do these agencies flow, or do they soak and permeate? Is there a limit to agency? // What does it mean to think mutually rather than competitively and also to what end? // Where did these questions originate? In what ways could they perpetuate a system or be a radical departure or (re)turn? Are these questions constructive, or are they destructive? // What does it mean to be entangled? Interconnected? Enmeshed? With?
You’re probably here because you’re interested in these questions too! What follows are readings engaging these ecocritical and ecohumanist questions, demonstrations of multi-species entanglements, and some of my own methods in an ongoing exploration of how we relate with and to nature.
Together we’ll consider the ties that bind us: to each other and to the Earth, whether socially, materially, politically, economically, technologically, or ecologically.
Hi! I’m Janneane. I’m a Midwest born designer living in New York and working in Philly. I’m interested in rhizomatic relations, considering the space between things, and capturing everyday life through image and sound. I’m currently at Penn where I’m continuing my research on how humans know and relate to nature – as we separate from, embody, or metabolize nature through media.
The syllabus that follows is organized by 5 keywords associated with binding, across relational spheres: Entangle (ecological); Weave (imaginary); Mesh (technological); Debt (social); and Solidarity (political). For each section, there are readings, accompanied by cultural/social objects to listen to, look at, and consider – e.g. an album, an artwork or exhibition, a sci-fi novel. Each section also includes a prompt for observing, collecting, and making as we practice multisensory ways of perceiving the world and multimodal ways of producing/communicating knowledge.
These sections can be remixed and revisited, and I hope you feel free to jump around and build out your own itinerary (text and images can be dragged and dropped to the left). Also, while this seminar can be done alone, it is even more generative with a friend (or a few) as the prompts encourage sharing and remixing. If you’re looking for a collaborator, I’ve created a Google Doc here, where you can add your name and what you’re working on. More about this syllabus here.
Entangle (Ecological)
on domination and mutuality on an increasingly crisis-ridden planet
→ Listen
We’ll start by listening to Nala Sinephro‘s Endlessness, an album in which each continuation is not just a variation of a single theme, but an unfolding of detail. Dissolving binaries and carrying us like a wave.
Then read Sam Green’s conversation with field recordist Annea Lockwood, and her ideas of listening “with” as opposed to listening “to.”
→ Read
→ Look
Tauba Auerbach and Yuji Agematsu, Meander, Clark Art Institute, July 16 - Oct 16, 2022. Curated by Robert Wiesenberger.
We’ll continue Ingold’s notion of the line and bring it into a viewing of Meander at The Clark. For Agematsu, the meander is a verb and a method, as he walks, drifts, and collects bits of material to transform into sculpture. For Auerbach, meander is a motif: a space-filled curve, a stroke, a waveform.
Image credits:
Yuji Agematsu, Zip: 08.01.21 . . . 08.31.21, 2021 (Detail: 08.23.21)
Tauba Auerbach, Ligature Drawing, 29 May, 2022, 2022
Yuji Agematsu, Zip: 07.01.21 . . . 07.31.21, 2021 (Detail: 07.22.21)
Tauba Auerbach, Ligature Drawing, 13 June, 2022, 2022
Tauba Auerbach, Grain - Mandlebrot Quartet Escape (Ventrella Variation), 2022
Yuji Agematsu, Notebook for Zip: 07.01.21 . . . 07.31.21, 2021 (Detail: 07.19.21)
Tauba Auerbach, Heat Current VII, 2022
→ Prompt
Collection: Practice a daily method – collecting, mapping, photographing, drawing, recording. Try to keep as many things constant as possible (location, method, timing) so that you can tune us into the details – e.g. the changing sky, the wheatpasted wall, the sounds on the corner, the plant’s movement, the dog’s walk. This collection will tune us into the “arts of noticing”, practices of listening “with”, and begin the foundation of a new language we’ll be making. Weave (Warping the Imagination)
on what is gained when we change how we describe, view, experience, and imagine the world we inhabit differently
→ Listen
Kaye Loggins immerses us in Spiro World, with lush soundscapes and architectural rhythms. She weaves “somatically profound personal experiences of derealization” and imagines “futures [that] can be frightening, joyous, difficult, effortless, inevitable.”
Then travel to the world beneath our feet in Future Ecologies’ "The Story of the Understory of the Understory," in a special episode with Serpentine Galleries.
→ Read
→ Look
Chang Yuchen, Coral Dictionary; composing sentences and glossary.
How might we relate to the world, and to each other using a language made with coral? Chang Yuchen constructs one for us, after months of close observation. From her dictionary, she composes, weaves, and arranges their shapes to create pourous communications.
See also Oscar Salguero’s Interspecies Library and his Therolinguistics Manifesto or How to Approach Nonhuman Languages Poetically.
Images from Interspecies Library.
→ Prompt
Language: Using what you collected from your daily method, collections, work to make a dictionary of your own. Sift through your collection: are there motifs that repeat? Recurring objects or players? A set of actions? How could the pieces be transformed into units of understanding, that can be ordered, patterned, arranged to form sentences, or meaning? A shape, a sound, a word, a movement. Return to the collection process as often as needed. Mesh (Technological)
on ecological morphologies and technological networks; on the uses and misuses of innovation: to what end and for whom are we “advancing”?
→ Listen
What happens when you try to mark time with a clock that is permanently glitching? What happens when you feed a computer itself? If you repeat discontinuity, does it make a new continuity? In the mid-1990s, Oval scratched up a bunch of CD-Rs and attempted to find out.
Then listen to Harkening Critters, featuring the work of 32 field recordists and sound artists, tuning us in to the clicks, vibrations, murmurs, rustles, whistles, and whirrs of creatures around us in an infinite nature.
→ Read
* These links via Shannon Mattern’s Library Field syllabus and her conversation with Jade Meili Barget in Pansori: A Soundscape of the 21st Century (Gwangju Biennale, 2024). Click through for her lists, insights and resources!
→ Look
Then, look through Ari Melenciano’s work. She uses sound, dance, design, AI, and many disciplines to research interconnections and relationships across time and space. Particularly of note, are her soundscape experiments in the bio-sonification of plants.
→ Prompt
In the world: We’ve taken our daily collections and made them into something linguistic and knowable via language. Now, we ask: how does this language start integrating into the world? Form a sentence with your language and share it with someone. What was your intended meaning? How was it read or misread? Could it also be misused or seen differently? By allowing your language-form to relate to other people, consider how someone can engage with, understand, refuse, react to your language.Debt (Social)
on obligation and predation: what we owe each other, what is expropriated from us
→ Listen
The durational tracks of Laraaji’s Segue to Infinity stretch and oscillate between harmonic and percussive, and engage us in the healing power of music.
In Forest Scenes, MIZU parallels social and gender transition while pondering the boundaries of the forest, interrogating systems, and exploring the unknown.
→ Read
→ Look
In the exhibition Humane Ecology: Eight Positions, curator Robert Wiesenberger explores the “inseparability of the natural and social.” The featured artists create works that critically engage practices of care, cultivation, extraction, and exploitation. Image Credits: Humane Ecology: Eight Positions, Jul 15 - Oct 29, 2023 The Clark Art Institute Carolina Caycedo, Installation View
Korakrit Arunanondchai, Songs for Dying (Still), 2021
Pallavi Sen, Experimental Greens: Trellis Composition, 2023
Juan Antonio Olivares, Fermi Paradox III, 2019
Gallo’s ongoing project, Pasta Ecologies, considers pasta in its many forms, through experiments, workshops, publications, and pasta-to-order. Browse though and read her Pasta Guide meditating on materials, generational traditions, reproductive labor, and politics of the commons.
Adriana Gallo, Pasta Ecologies (ongoing)
→ Prompt
Obligation: Our languages have become relational, eliciting reactions and forging new webs between living beings. So we now ask: how can we imagine language as a contract - what do we owe each other? When your language forms a web between it and its knowers, what effect does it have on them?Solidarity (Political)
on interdependence across difference
→ Listen
As A Host for All Kinds of Life, Green-House presents a sonic exploration of mutualism and the work of biologist Lynn Margulis.
In “Beasts of Burden w/ Sunaura Taylor” on The Dig podcast, the author discusses her book with (sister) Astra Taylor, particularly the relation of disability liberation to animal liberation. How we think about difference – dis/ability and non-human – typically requires a framework of subjugation. Sunaura counters this by examining animal liberation, personhood, and exceptionalism
→ Read
→ Look
Browse the Catskill Agrarian Alliance website and their initiatives to place people and plants before profits: through community organizing & mutual aid; equitable land access; agroecology-centered farming; and their aggregate alliance to institution distribution. Images from Star Route Farm and Catskill Agrarian Alliance; Star Route Farm Poster designed by Amanda Wong
Then look at Toward a Hopeful Ecology, curated by Kajet Journal with Nocturn, and consider how we can reimagine new and hopeful futures for our relationship with nature. What novel ways can we formulate to understand the natural world, that will replace age-old patterns? The exhibition offers a critical re-framing of Eastern Europe, from passive recipient to an active force shaping novel ecological frameworks.
Toward a Hopeful Ecology, Kajet Journal & Nocturn , October 2024
Artworks by 𝐹𝑂𝐶 (𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑖 𝐵𝑒𝑐ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑢, 𝐼𝑜𝑎𝑛𝑎 𝐶𝑖̂𝑟𝑙𝑖𝑔, 𝐵𝑜𝑔𝑑𝑎𝑛 𝑇𝑢𝑡𝑢𝑛𝑒𝑎𝑛𝑢), 𝑁𝑜𝑐𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑛, 𝑉𝑙𝑎𝑑 𝑁𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑎̆, 𝑅𝑜𝑏𝑒𝑟𝑡 𝐴𝑛𝑡𝑜𝑛𝑖𝑎𝑐, 𝑉𝑒𝑟𝑜𝑛𝑖𝑐𝑎 𝑁𝑜𝑗𝑎𝑐, 𝐾𝑎𝑗𝑒𝑡 𝐽𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑛𝑎𝑙
put together by 𝑁𝑜𝑐𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑛 & 𝐾𝑎𝑗𝑒𝑡 𝐽𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑛𝑎𝑙
hosted by 𝑁𝑜𝑐𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑛, 𝐶𝑟𝑖𝑠̦𝑎𝑛𝑎 29, 𝐵𝑢𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑡
visual identity by 𝐹𝑙𝑎𝑣𝑖𝑢𝑠 𝐴𝑢𝑔𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑛
→ Prompt
Interdependence: Your language was collected, formed, and shared. It created or altered relationships with those who encountered it. Now we ask: could we work with someone else’s language that they’ve developed? Remix it with your own? How can we create interdependence across difference? If you’re looking for a collaborator, I’ve created a Google Doc here, where you can add your name and what you’re working on. What we’ve learned // About this Syllabus
If you’ve made it this far - thank you! Together, we’ve explored the ecohumanist shift to modes and metaphors of entanglement, enmeshment, solidarity, and interconnectivity, and considered what attracts us to these ways of thinking. We asked if the shift is a response/call to rethink past failures of imagination that have rationalized or compartmentalized nature. A radical (re)turn to material roots, and away from narratives of progress that abstract, alienate, and dominate? Together, we are seeking to understand the power that divides, and its relation to the power that joins together, by inhabiting the worlds of those thinkers/creators who imagine nature generatively, mutually, in solidarity, and against austerity.
Through this interrogation of a bounded nature, we’re equipping ourselves to build a framework for contemporary creation, and think actively about language and form. In a recent talk on “Concrete”, Anna Tsing remarked that we need language and form to bring us into awareness of a common activity. So “how do we re-make each other through this encounter; in what form?”
By bringing together an academic discourse regarding language, agency, the human, post-human, more-than or non-human, with an experimental creative practice that encourages forming and making, I hope we can demonstrate new possibilities for being with nature.
About me
Hi! I’m Janneane. I’m a Midwest born designer living in New York and working in Philly. I’m interested in rhizomatic relations, considering the space between things, and capturing everyday life through image and sound. I previously ran Printtext, a bookstore and community space with my wife Willa where we published cultural broadsheets, designed album covers, and made books about soundscape ecologies. Recent projects include Stations: Listening to the Deep Earth (2022) and Recipes for a Warmer World (2024). Since then, I completed my MFA at Pratt, where I explored interspecies communications. I’m currently a doctoral student in Cinema & Media Studies at Penn where I’m continuing my research on how humans know and relate to nature – as we separate from, embody, or metabolize nature through media. (want to connect?
About my approach
The learning that excites me is one that occurs in collisions/overlap/mixing of disciplines, practices, and methodologies. By transferring material and knowledge from one sphere to the next, one needs to apply and thus learn and deepen their understanding, raise questions, and build connections. My aim is to (re)awaken participants’ senses and ignite their joy/wonder. To approach readings curiously, to experience ones’s environment inquisitively, and to listen closely.
The processes I share I largely learned from design, anthropology and media studies. Methods of observation, collecting, translating, synthesizing, listening, generating, and clarifying.
The seminar is built on feedback loops between theory and method. By pairing discussion and readings with prompts for observing and designing/making, participants will be engaged to think about physical form and relationships.
Who is this for?
I imagined this syllabus for creative professionals looking to connect their practice to posthuman/interspecies/ecohumanist theory and thinking critically about what they’re making; and then also (post)grad students looking to explore new methods of engaging text through a handful of design methods. I hope that through this syllabus you will:
- Gain a brief introduction to and preliminary understanding of ecophilosophy, environmental history, and scientific inquiry underpinning the ecopolitical and ecohumanist shift.
- Find an introduction to (or refinement of) design thinking and methods to interrogate notions of eco-solidarity and engagement of the senses.
- Develop strategies and approaches to conducting research, generating concepts, and sharing knowledge.
- Grow in appreciation for, practice, and understand multidisciplinary ways of thinking, and multimodal ways of generating knowledge.
- Deepen your sense of kinship – with nonhumans and humans – gained through attention and development of a shared language.
- And through it all find solidarity, interdependence, and hope.