Speakers and Abstracts
Keynotes
Keynote speakers
Miranda Whall
Abstract
Being Dirty, Seedy, Boggy, Gassy, and Cloudy — a state, a mode, and a methodology
Being dirty, seedy, boggy, gassy, and cloudy is not a metaphor, but a way of thinking, making, and being in slow, entangled relation to earth, seed, peat, and air; to the fluctuating moisture and temperature of soil; to the latent potency of a seed; to the anaerobic decomposition of organic matter over millennia; to the slow release of methane and CO₂; and to the amorphous, weightless immateriality of cloudy unknowing.
These states – dirty, seedy, boggy, gassy, and cloudy are conditions of practice as much as environment: each is a practice of ‘living all the way through’. In The Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd wrote that if one managed to walk out of the body and into the mountain, they might briefly become ‘the soil of the earth’, at which point ‘one has been in… that is all’. And that ‘all’, as Robert Macfarlane writes in his preface to Shepherd’s meditative and prescient book, should not be heard diminutively or apologetically, but expansively. Vastly.
This ecology of states forms a creative-critical methodology that privileges entanglement over clarity, presence over extraction, and transformation over fixity. The work unfolds through durational performance, expanded drawing, sound, photography and film, in collaboration with the more-than-human world where knowledge, as Karen Barad writes, is ‘not interaction but intra-action – where meaning emerges between’.
In this keynote, I will reflect on a body of practice that has emerged over the last few years through When Earth Speaks, When Seeds Speak, and When Peat Speaks, which is currently being developed in collaboration with scientists at UKCEH Bangor and the GGR-Peat Demonstrator project funded by CO₂RE, Imperial College London, and the University of Bristol. When Peat Speaks explores how data collected from treatment plots on a degraded ‘Cinderella’ peatland at Pwllpeiran Upland Research Centre in Cwmystwyth, West Wales can be translated into sensory, embodied, and time-based artworks.
This triptych of projects makes time visible in ways that challenge anthropocentric narratives. The work is not only about human endurance — it is about more-than-human rhythms, ecological time, and data as an active, lively material participant. This keynote considers how artistic practice can hold ecological complexity through embodied, relational, and durational forms of knowing.
Bio
Miranda Whall (b. Cardiff, 1969) studied at UWIC Cardiff; Emily Carr Institute, Vancouver; the Royal Academy Schools; and Goldsmiths, University of London. She has received numerous Arts Council England grants, including the ACE-funded Berlin residency, and was awarded a Major Creative Wales Award and Large Production Grant from Arts Council Wales. She is currently recipient of UKRI CO₂RE funding for When Peat Speaks (2025–26) and was recently awarded the inaugural Live Art Rural UK Fellowship by the Live Art Development Agency (LADA). Whall has been a co-investigator on several recent NERC-funded projects and works at the intersection of performance, expanded drawing, film and environmental science. She is the director and performer of two recent stage productions — When Seeds Speak: A Seedy Ensemble (Seligman Theatre, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff) and When Earth Speaks: A Dirty Ensemble (Aberystwyth Arts Centre). Solo exhibitions include When Earth Speaks (Vane, Newcastle), Crossed Paths – Sheep (Oriel Davies, Newtown), and Passage (Institute of Contemporary Interdisciplinary Arts, Bath). She was recently included in the groundbreaking exhibition Soil: The World at Our Feet) exhibition at Somerset House, London. She is currently a postgraduate and PhD research supervisor and lecturer in Fine Art at Aberystwyth University, a creative coach and mentor for Arts Council Wales.
Simon O’Sullivan
Abstract
Writing, Performance, Landscape and Myth-Work
My paper will present three recent book projects, all of which are concerned with writing, performance, and landscape – and all of which might loosely be brought under the banner of Myth-Work. Myth-work is also a name for the claiming of narrative and for practices of self-determination – as well as for practices that move us beyond the fiction of the self. I will offer up some examples from contemporary art of this kind of practice, attending specifically to those that are performance-based and/or involve a turn to the past as a resource for imagining other presents and futures. I will also introduce my own performance based collaborative practice – or ‘performance fiction’ – that deals with some of these issues. Lastly, I will link the above with previous work I have done on fictioning, or the materialisation/enactment of fictions within reality. In particular I will be concerned here with drawing out the implications of fictioning for a critical/creative writing practice and also in developing an idea of fictioning in relation to landscape – especially, with the idea of props and devices for time-travel (or what I will call archaeofictioning). At stake in all these projects and lines of enquiry is a turn towards care and repair – of ourselves and the worlds we inhabit – as well as the affirmation of values and practices that are often at odds with the status quo.
Bio
Simon O’Sullivan is Professor of Art Theory and Practice at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has written various books and articles including, most recently, From Magic and Myth-Work to Care and Repair (Goldsmiths Press 2024); The Ancient Device (Triarchy Press, 2024); On Theory-Fiction and Other Genres (Palgrave 2024); and (in collaboration with David Burrows), Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Other writings can be found at: www.simonosullivan.net. He is also part of the performance collaboration/collective Plastique Fantastique (www.plastiquefantastique.org)
Strand 1: Landscape, Ritual & Technology
Landscape, Ritual & Technology
Sam Wilkins
Abstract
Harvesting Light
This paper explores the interdisciplinary themes emerging from the Harvesting Light video artwork, a creative research project that integrates folk traditions, landscape & performance, and renewable energy technologies. Central to the project is the engagement of communities with specific energy-producing landscapes through collaborative artistic practices. The study juxtaposes traditional customs/rituals—such as Morris dancing and seasonal celebrations—with modern land uses like solar and wind energy production, examining how these intersections influence cultural identity and environmental perception.
Drawing on calendar customs and symbolic folklore, the project investigates how ritualistic behaviours can foster resilience and adaptation in the face of climate change. Performances are documented and transformed/manipulated into animated artworks, bridging environmental discourse with visual storytelling. The research highlights the evolving relationship between technology and landscape, emphasising and exploring historical continuity in landscape image making from agricultural practices to contemporary energy solutions.
Further reflections underscore the potential of calendar customs to deepen community engagement, promote sustainability awareness, and facilitate intergenerational dialogue. By aligning the project with the history of British landscape painting, the study situates its artistic expressions within a broader cultural and environmental narrative. Harvesting Light offers exploratory models for interrogating image and identity, folk heritage and ecological consciousness, contributing to both academic discourse and public engagement.
Bio
Sam Wilkins is a Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader for Film, Television and Digital Production at Bath Spa University. His interdisciplinary research and creative practice explore the intersections of folklore, landscape, and renewable energy through collaborative, site-specific performance and visual storytelling. With a strong interest in visual culture, Sam investigates the historical and symbolic links between landscape painting and contemporary screen practices, particularly in the realms of visual effects and compositing. His recent project, Harvesting Light, blends ritual performance, and animated painting to examine how traditional customs and modern technologies shape our perception of rural environments. Sam’s work bridges environmental humanities, digital media, and participatory arts, fostering new dialogues between heritage, sustainability, and visual innovation
Cherry Truluck
Abstract
Integrating the Shadow – an embodied engagement with temporality and the land through the use of digital twins
This interactive, arts-based performance explores temporality, technology, and plant breeding through a more-than-human lens. It responds to the capitalist, colonial imposition of linear, progressive time, prioritising productivity and control, by proposing a pluritemporal experience rooted in cycles, rhythms, and relationality. Anchored in a research-based artistic practice spanning cyberformance, community, food systems, and the poetics of plant genetics, the work centres on the development of a new oat variety through digital twinning technologies.
Participants are invited into a speculative, sensorial encounter: a ritual of ‘integrating the shadow’, drawing on Jungian and feminist storytelling frameworks. The performance composts data, myth, and multispecies kinship into an unfolding narrative that reclaims and recycles the technologies of industrial growth. A central element of the experience involves the communal tasting of an oat-based offering: an edible manifestation of the temporal entanglements and speculative futures under exploration. The act of tasting becomes a site of reflection, grounding abstract concepts in embodied knowledge and seasonal nourishment.
Here, the ‘hybrid’ plant – at once natural and cultural – becomes a site of resistance and possibility, transgressing boundaries and conjuring new temporalities. This performance is an invitation to reweave ourselves into the multispecies web of becoming, through story, ritual, and shared sustenance.
Bio
Cherry Truluck is an artist and researcher, who tends towards edible, collective, collaborative and sometimes curatorial work. With roots in architecture and theatre, her transdisciplinary work explores the possibilities of food and farming as a speculative artistic practice, focusing particularly on temporal rhythms in agricultural systems. As an artist, she works across community building, botany, cooking, farming and performance – “gambling”, as Marina Vishmidt describes it, “on an artistic practice, reaching past art – but by means of art – for a critical purchase or real-world effects where art has no pre-existing claims.” Her current research, based at the University of Aberystwyth, is developing in close entanglement with her project work with Cement Fields in Medway and explores the potential impact of a pluriversal concept of temporality on a just transition for agriculture. Alongside and as part of her studies to date, she has exhibited and performed across the UK and internationally, from the Hayward Gallery in London to the island of Bornholm in the Baltic sea and nGbK gallery in Berlin whilst also growing oats in her own garden and at her local community farm in Somerset, with her nine year old assistant and collaborator, Ernest.
Frances Disley
Abstract
Reconnecting Ecologies: Bridging Disconnected Communities and the More-Than-Human World
This paper explores how digital technologies, archives, and web-based resources can bridge the gap between disconnected human communities and the more-than-human world. Drawing from Frances Disley’s recent projects, including cwrdd â mi wrth yr afon, Talk to the Garden, Chamomile Circle, and The Host and the Symbiont, the paper examines how video and participatory digital media foster ecological awareness, interconnectedness, and relationality beyond physical boundaries.
Through cwrdd â mi wrth yr afon, a nomadic collaboration along the afon Conwy, Disley intertwines human and more-than-human networks, facilitating the sharing of ecological encounters and stories through digital spaces. This work, along with Talk to the Garden and Chamomile Circle, explore the importance of localised, plant-based knowledge systems, using digital archives to document and disseminate practices rooted in care, community, and ecological solidarity.
In these projects, Disley re-materialises connections to the land using digital platforms, not as detached or place-less tools, but as mediators of ecological intimacy. This approach reconnects participants to ancestral relationships with nature, bringing awareness to the ways the more-than-human world has historically been woven into daily life. By creating digital archives and interactive experiences that document these encounters, Disley challenges the inaccessibility of wild spaces and advocates for inclusive ecological participation.
Projects such as The Host and the Symbiont extend this vision by examining the interplay between human experience, nature, and technology. Disley’s work embodies the idea that digital ecologies can not only connect us but also nurture a deeper awareness of our place within the broader ecosystem of life. By reimagining digital technologies as systems of care, empathy, and transformation, Disley invites us to reconsider our relationship with both technology and the natural world, looking at the mutual support that sustains both.
Bio
Frances Disley is a multidisciplinary artist based in Liverpool, born in Warrington. Working across sculpture, installation, performance, and socially engaged practice, she explores networks of mutual support between people, plants, and environments. Her work addresses neurodivergence, care, access, and ecological entanglement, often creating sensorial, inclusive spaces that disrupt institutional norms and foreground collective experience.
Disley’s solo exhibitions include Pattern Buffer at Bluecoat in Liverpool and OUTPUT Gallery in Liverpool, with recent commissions including The Host and the Symbiont at Liverpool Cathedral, Following the Roots with Heart of Glass and Knowsley Council, and Chamomile Circle with At the Library and Sefton. Her participatory and research-led projects span libraries, schools, parks, and galleries, including Mosspits Forest Garden, Talk to the Garden, and meet me by the river at Mostyn. Her collaborative, often site-responsive approach reconfigures public and cultural spaces as zones for rest, conversation, and speculative repair.
Disley’s work is held in the Arts Council Collection, Walker Art Gallery, and University of Salford Collection. She holds an MA in Fine Art Printmaking from the Royal College of Art. Her practice positions art as a relational ecology, grounded, improvisational, and always in conversation with its context.
Megan Broadmeadow
Abstract
DEWINIAETH
Dewiniaeth (Welsh for Sorcery) is an ongoing collaborative project between the artist, voluntary participants and A.I others. Inspired by the Welsh Mabinogion stories which feature numerous shape-shifting characters, participants are guided by the artist to creatively conjure and subsequently write a text description of their magical selves. Broadmeadow then feeds the text to numerous Artificial Intelligence platforms to produce 3d models which represent the beliefs and spirituality as well as the objects, and anima associated with these newly manifested magical others. Dewiniaeth has varied forms and is still in development having premiered at Green Man Festival in Wales UK in the summer 24. This version is a single hologram of imagery only; in other versions there may be multiple holograms and can include interactivity within the visuals and sounds. The aim is for communion and communication between technology, participants, audience and non-humans.
Strand 2: Machine Futures
Machine Futures
Charlie Tweed
Abstract
Erewhon (2025) is a performative lecture which takes its title from the 1872 novel by Samuel Butler which depicts a country whose inhabitants have undergone a revolution destroying all machines. The novel was the first to critique the risks of advanced and intelligent technologies, considering notions of replication and machine consciousness. Erewhon was also used by Deleuze as a way of rethinking the concept of what a machine could be, in his reading Erewhon, is not only a disguised no-where but a rearranged now-here.
The narrator travels down to an old tungsten mine where they find a series of exploratory spaces. Here, rather than technology being used to dominate humans and extract value, it is being reconsidered as a collaborative tool that can offer hope for alternate futures and amalgamations between humans, nonhumans and machines. Various forms of speculative bodies are outlined here, all of them emerging from the waste materials on the surface.
The visual material used to depict the island plays on its own instability, pixelating, merging and disappearing, always on the edge of breakdown, poor images that attempt to rethink the possibilities of the machine and its images using forms of speculative recycling.
Bio
Charlie Tweed is a media artist and researcher working across video, text, digital media and performance, developing works that interrogate the relation between human technologies and the earth, considering notions of control, extraction, waste and more than human intelligence. In his work, he employs strategies of re-appropriation and speculative fiction, often taking on personas of anonymous collectives and hybrid machines, to outline speculative plans for future forms of technology and more than human relations.
He has exhibited his works internationally with solo shows at The Stanley Picker Gallery, London; Spike Island, Bristol; Animate Projects, London and Aspex Portsmouth. Group shows and film festivals include: Rencontres Internationales (2019), HKW, Berlin; Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Germany; WRO Media Art Biennale (2017), Poland; Nunnery Gallery, London; Meetfactory, Prague; Whitechapel Gallery, London; ICA, London, CCA, Glasgow and Zentrum Paul Klee, Switzerland. He is currently Subject Leader in Art at Bath School of Art, Film and Media and he is co-lead of Material : Art and Technology Research Group.
Daniel Shanken
Abstract
Degenerative Influence
This project traces the cognitive and perceptual effects of generative AI and machine learning systems through art practice, exploring how these technologies impose a dialogue on users, reshaping practices, thought patterns, and decision-making in ways that reflect vested interests and embedded control mechanisms.
AI-enabled platforms have the potential to guide, constrain, and alter perception. They rely on forms of “shadow prompting” that steer users toward prescribed aesthetics and conceptual territories while limiting outputs to align with platform goals. In response, I turn to open-source tools such as ComfyUI, which offer greater autonomy through experimental pipelines and custom workflows. Methods including image feedback and randomized prompting are used to degrade, distort, and transform the hidden logics of these black-box systems.
As generative content proliferates and saturates digital spaces, we risk entering a feedback loop of model collapse, where agency erodes and cognitive processes become increasingly shaped by homogenized outputs. Drawing connections between AI hallucinations and speculative fiction, recent artwork serves as a foundation to explore cognitive reliance on intelligent technologies and the consequences of algorithmic enclosure, attempting to both resist and indulge the degenerative influence of machine-driven perception.
Conrad Moriarty-Cole
Abstract
In Dialogue with Pond Computers: Rethinking Administration through Organic Cybernetics
This paper critically interrogates the dominant management paradigm, characterising modern organisations as large, slow Artificial Intelligences—a mode of administration where rigid, rule-bound systems and algorithmic processes marginalise human agency, reinforce a logic of exploitation, and obscure accountability. Responding to the critiques of technology by Yuk Hui and Hito Steyerl, the paper explores experiments in organic computing from the history of cybernetics to offer a radical reimagining of administrative practices.
The analysis is structured around three figures. First, Stafford Beer’s pond computer experiment is revisited as an early embodiment of organic computation, demonstrating how natural, self-organising processes can yield adaptive, feedback-driven systems. Second, Gordon Pask’s interactive dialogue experiment is examined to illustrate the emergence of co-constructed knowledge and dynamic interaction, challenging the static nature of conventional computational models. Third, the paper scrutinises modern organisations—such as corporations and universities—as semi-organic systems dominated by artificial structures. Here, the critique of organisations as AI is developed, showing how these institutions, by over-relying on inflexible rules and algorithmic controls, exemplify the dehumanising tendencies critiqued by Hui and Steyerl.
By synthesising insights from cybernetic theory with critical management studies, this paper argues for the reconfiguration of organisational systems through decentralised feedback loops, adaptive learning, and greater accountability. Such a reimagining is aimed at counteracting the exploitative logics of standing reserve, offering instead an image of a more humane and responsive administration in the digital age.
Sniazhana Diduc, PhD & Rumy Narayan, PhD
Abstract
Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Sustainable Digital-Ecological Symbiosis
As the Anthropocene epoch progresses, the convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and ecological systems presents unprecedented opportunities for fostering environmental sustainability. This paper explores the potential of AI to cultivate a harmonious digital-ecological symbiosis, wherein intelligent technologies not only coexist with but actively enhance natural ecosystems.
The study begins by analysing current AI applications in environmental monitoring, such as predictive analytics for climate modelling and biodiversity assessment. These technologies have demonstrated efficacy in data collection and interpretation, yet their integration with ecological processes remains superficial. To transcend this limitation, the concept of AI-driven ecological augmentation is introduced, proposing systems where AI facilitates real-time adaptive responses within ecosystems.
Central to this approach is the development of AI models that emulate natural processes, enabling dynamic interactions between digital and ecological entities. For instance, AI algorithms can optimize energy consumption in smart grids by mimicking photosynthetic efficiency, or enhance waste decomposition through bio-inspired computational methods. Such integrations aim to create self-regulating systems that bolster ecological resilience.
The paper also addresses ethical considerations, advocating for AI designs that prioritize ecological integrity and biodiversity. Collaborative frameworks involving technologists, ecologists, and policymakers are essential to ensure that AI implementations align with environmental conservation goals.
Acceptance of AI as a catalyst for sustainable digital-ecological symbiosis necessitates a paradigm shift towards interdisciplinary innovation. By embedding AI within the fabric of natural ecosystems, humanity can harness technological advancements to not only mitigate environmental degradation but also to rejuvenate and sustain the planet’s ecological balance.
Stephen Cornford
Abstract
Speculative Machinisms of Carbon Governance
The political proposition of net zero is predicated on the idea that planetary atmospheric composition can be regulated economically: that market-based mechanisms can govern greenhouse gas concentrations. Following the scientific logic that you can only manage what you can measure, remote sensing technologies are being mobilised to account for the emission and absorption of CO2. At one end of the carbon cycle, satellites are now quantifying the intensity of emissions from individual pixels of their hyperspectral imager. While at the other, the capacity of forests to sequester carbon is being modelled in unprecedented detail by terrestrial laser scanning. The implication of twinning these technics of data visualisation is that fixing the picture somehow equates to fixing the planet.
In this talk, I will examine the highly speculative basis for economic accounting of greenhouse gases, exploring how the aesthetic, technical and political are all entangled in the coming image regimes of carbon governance. The work adopts a perspective of “critical remote sensing” to ask how these technologies, rather than being used to calculate offsets that enable emissions elsewhere or perpetuate business as usual, might be used to challenge the dominant narratives and vested interests of extractive industry.
Bio
Stephen Cornford is a media artist and writer who researches relationships between media systems and planetary systems to challenge the viability of addressing ecological collapse through extractive and economic logics. He is currently Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Winchester School of Art and a founding co-director of Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics research group
Strand 3: Soil as Place, Internet as Place-less-ness
Soil as Place, Internet as Place-less-ness
Rolien Hoyng
Abstract
Sensing Uncertain Soil
This paper draws on process-oriented theory by Simondon, Whitehead, and Gabrys to imagine an alternative way of sensing climate change, particularly as it unfolds in the ecologies that farming partakes in various parts of Turkey. In recent years, Turkish farms have been exposed to shifts in regional climates as well as a barrage of unfortunately timed droughts, rain, heatwaves, hailstorms, et cetera. AgriTech promotes “smart farming” solutions to tackle difficulties through sensing, modeling, and forecasting. Instead of modeling climate-exposed farm worlds as a physical reality and predicting singular future states for it, this paper proposes to consider practices and technologies of sensing that are oriented onto a more-than-human, multispecies pluralism of many worlds. Such sensing produces climate change as multiple—namely consisting in ongoing individuations and openness derived from “real potentiality” as defined by Whitehead. It encompasses data practices as individuations of sense that generate new and deeper relations in a transindividual, more-than-human network. Whereas uncertainty in Big AgriTech’s smart farming comes with a distribution of risk that imparts precarity onto farmers, this paper explores an alternative approach to uncertainty that builds on experimentation as sharing in potentiality and re-articulating sense. Referencing concrete examples encountered during fieldwork in Turkey that suggest alternative practices of sensing, this paper explores farming formations and practices that intervene in AgriTech’s big data and its politics of uncertainty. Several questions are guiding the exploration: What are the possibilities for more-than-human sensing that is situated and pluralistic rather than disembedded as big data formations? What different politics can be imagined involving the unknown and uncertain? How can we rethink what farming is and does on the basis of such sensing practices?
Rob Jones
Abstract
The SOLAS Project | Mycelium as Algorithm: Digital Composting and the Metabolic Image
This paper presents The SOLAS Project, an ongoing visual and theoretical investigation into the material entanglements of soil, technology, and networked ecologies, where both fibre-optic submarine cables and mycelial networks exemplify materially grounded, distributed systems—transmitting data or nutrients—each entangled with extractive ecologies and dependent on soil as a living, material substrate. At its core is a speculative system of algorithmic mycelium spores—recursively coded foraging agents that mimic fungal metabolism—transforming photographic images into mutable, process-driven data forms. Positioning The SOLAS Project as a posthuman exploration of digital composting, the paper introduces the camera mycelia—an alternative model for thinking about images not as static records, but as entangled within dynamic, algorithmic ecosystems, continuously reconfiguring through computation, where data, like organic matter, decomposes into emergent visual ecologies. Foregrounding the ecosophical concerns of Guattari’s Three Ecologies (1989), the paper interrogates the spatial politics of digital networks, which exist paradoxically as both placeless (cloud infrastructures, digital abstraction) and place-bound (soil as a material foundation for biological and digital systems alike). Finally, by drawing parallels between submarine cables, fungal networks, and soil ecologies, the project offers a speculative framework for rethinking digital infrastructures as entangled, decentralised and metabolised —rather than extractive.
Bio
Rob Jones is a senior lecturer and researcher at Swansea College of Art, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, where he is pathway leader for the MA Moving Image programme and theory lead for the Coexistent Perspectives module delivered across the MA Contemporary Dialogues Portfolio. His research sits at the intersection of media theory, environmental humanities, and posthumanist philosophy, with a focus on visual culture, networked ecologies, and experimental moving image practices. He is committed to interdisciplinary approaches that integrate theory and practice, and his work contributes to emerging dialogues around ecological media, speculative computing, and posthuman visuality.
Niya B
Abstract
Re:Rooted: Techno-Rituals for Ecological Kinship
In my artistic practice, particularly through the Trans:plant project (2012-), I have ventured into the realm of ‘making odd kin’ (Haraway 2016), engaging with Aloe vera as a ‘companion species’ and co-performer. This endeavour birthed a ‘gender-ambiguous’ Aloe family through asexual plant reproduction, co-habitation, and co-working. With my subsequent project Collective Lover (2018), I departed from ecosexuality (Sprinkle and Stephens, n.d.) to explore ‘ecointimacy’ and the potential of ‘ecogender’ futurities (Bell 2018).
My current project, Re:Rooted, employs ritual technology and autoethnography to further explore trans ecologies (Seymour 2020) – the confluence of trans studies and ecology. This ongoing techno-ritual performance investigates the transecological entanglements between my urban life in London (UK) and my ancestral roots in the Peloponnese (Greece).
Within a ritual circle made of soil, I bring my companion species and co-worker Aloe vera in its tangible form – a potted plant – to meet with the digital entity of Olea europaea, the common olive tree, through the portal of a VR headset. The olive tree, a ‘symbiont’ of my Mediterranean ancestors, has nourished mine and past generations of bodies that, in turn, have cultivated and cherished it. In this circle, bodily memory, sound, movement, touch, immersive vision, the granular texture of soil, sleek electronic interfaces, the fleshy aloe gel and the silky olive oil converge, to process the intersecting geopolitical trajectories, ecologies, materialities and dynamic relationships of plants, humans and machines.
My interdisciplinary inquiry is attuned to multi-species kinship and multi-gender futurities. It examines translocal entanglements through an autoethnographical techno-ritual performance that integrates body-based methods and land-based knowledge. This work generates situated material semiotics (Haraway, 2016), that inherit the complex histories, present challenges and ambiguous futures of human and non-human bodies – organic and inorganic – as they emerge from and return to the soil.
Luca Scheunpflug
Abstract
Following Thirsty Clouds: Engaging with Digital Water Assemblages in Amazons Europe Region – Aragon, Spain
In Spain’s Aragon region, Amazon Web Services (AWS) aims to establish one of Europe’s largest data technology hubs, making unprecedented investments in the metropolitan area of Zaragoza that offers access to water and (wind) energy to expand hyperscale data centres (Amazon, 2023; AWS, 2025). These dry soils are highly dependent on water sources, which form an integral part of both the sociomaterial configuration and symbolic-cultural identity of the region. The transformation of water sources and flows, therefore, has historically triggered public involvement and conflicts (Blásquiz, 2022; Montoya-Hidalgo, 2007). These profound water relations, however, subside to the current technopoliticaleconomic regime that promote data centres despite their water consumption, proving very material effects of cloud technologies (Monserrate, 2022) as they heavily transform hosting hydrosocial territories (Hommes et al., 2022). This contribution critically juxtaposes stories and lifeworlds of fluid (non-)human relations in novel digitalized assemblages with the exploitation of increasingly dry lands (Sheikh et al., 2023, p. 4). This takes up ontological and nature sensory debates (Abram, 1996; Blaser, 2013) through a more-than-human ethnography that follows water and uses visuals, voices and (counter– )stories to embed the cloud in the hydrosocial territories of Zaragoza’s metropolitan area and problematize current techno-optimist developments.
Bio
Luca Scheunpflug is a research assistant and PhD candidate at the Chair of Sociology of Organization and Economy at the Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany. Through interdisciplinary and international research experience, he is primarily concerned with infrastructures and urban nature from the perspectives of urban political ecology, environmental justice and science and technology studies. The relationship between water and urban society through infrastructures and digital technologies, contingent future constructions as well as power dynamics in political ontologies and more-than-human relations play a central role in his research. This follows on from previous work on conflicts over the remunicipalisation of drinking water and the political mobilization of social movements in Spain. He also combines this with scholaractivist political education in the city on urban-infrastructure development, postcolonial continuities and questions of justice in adapting to the climate crisis.
Andy Weir
Abstract
Fatberg Under Barclays
Bio
Dr. Andy Weir is an artist, writer and educator, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Chelsea UAL, London. His research explores relations of art to deep times and futures of the underground, drawing on materialist philosophies, myth and planetary politics. Recent projects include: writing in Journal of Visual Culture; Politics of Design Reframed and Beyond Modernity: Alternative Incursions into the Anthropocene; exhibitions including The Work of Time, Z33, Hasselt, Belgium; and Neuhaus, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam; co-curated events Fiction Machines 4 (Bath Spa) and Site/Non-Site 25 (Chelsea); and collaborative workshops including Art IN the Underground. He completed his PhD at Goldsmiths, Uni. of London, focusing on art and long-term isolation of radioactive waste. He is editor of the art research journal Self Moving Matter and is currently working on a book on Deep Time Now planned to come out with Intellect in 2026. https://www.andyweirart.com/ Images Still from Fatberg Under Barclays (Day Version) composed by prompting generative AI with the material make-up of the entity. Research for Polymerized Flow Snag 2, object scan of the El Chaco meteorite fragment, digitally extracted from its sacred resting place in Argentina
Claire Loder
Bio
Dave Webb
Bio
Dave Webb is a lecturer in Creative Computing within the School of Design at Bath Spa University, and a practicing creative technologist, using various technologies as tools and media within and in complement to, other forms of creative practice. Dave employs digital storytelling and discursive design techniques within multi-disciplinary creative teams to create audience experiences and provoke engagement with less-familiar perspectives. Recent works include evolving, critical narratives around our relationship with technology at Shangri-La, Glastonbury Festival (doi.org/10.17870/bathspa.29291774.v1) , and a recent commission for CERN’s public outreach work at European Festivals with community arts organisation Little Lost Robot (lostrobot.org)
Artworks, Films and Workshops
.
Dunseath & Churcher
Flytipping Digital Waste is a short film composed of nocturnal fly-tipping sites, sliced with computational intelligence and predictive technology. The film navigates everyday realism and speculative fiction against the backdrop of a prowling black car. Driven by automation, advances in technology and the resulting ethical consequences, the film captures waste, simulates speculative waste, and simultaneously creates digital waste.
The vehicle’s headlights provide an unnerving act of surveillance. Illuminating quiet cul-de-sacs, dead-end roads and unwatched spaces, it identifies sites for finding or dumping waste. Stained mattresses, broken appliances, and decomposing matter become markers of society. The protagonist fossil-fuel car is indicative of industrial change with a complex environmental legacy and impact.
The films’ structure nods to contemporary post-production methods. AI imagery is regurgitated through the editing processes used to create the alluring adverts that once promoted the now discarded items. Real footage is interspersed with speculative fiction created from edited AI imagery of fly-tipping. A local council’s fly-tipping website simultaneously serves as a repository for reporting fly-tipping, and a resource for generating AI imagery. Each image, an entry in an ever-growing digital archive of neglect. Remnants of this footage have been dumped across social media platforms. All accumulating to create digital landfill.
Bio
Dunseath & Churcher work together to explore the ambiguity of the digital and the tangible, exploring how physical and computational processes overlap and transform. By combining real-world footage, physical processes, AI-generated imagery, and post-production techniques, their work investigates human agency, and the boundaries between the material and the immaterial, and the human-made and machine-made.
Their collaborative practice is rooted in a shared background in sculpture and film. By combining Dunseath’s interest in futility, with Churcher’s expertise in post-production and image manipulation, they use a bricoleur approach to create slippages that promote doubt and uncertainty to investigate the relationship between digital and physical realities. Through works such as Flytipping Digital Waste and RTFIRLAI, they engage with technological excess, digital waste, and the erosion of creative autonomy in the face of automation.
Dunseath is Reader in Fine Art Sculpture at Bath Spa University. Exhibitions include Korean Cultural Centre, CICA South Korea, Flat Time House, Royal Academy of Art, Barbican, and events at Tate Modern. Churcher is a post-production specialist at Time Based Arts, contributing to major commercial and artistic projects, including Daughters (2023) Love Lies Bleeding (2024).
Warren & Moseley
Deputised Objects explores how an entity can act on behalf of another and exchange the power of affect. The work draws on psychologist Donald Winnicott’s idea of transitional objects and space, that provide an in-between world of play, creation and developing relations. A physical deputised object stands-in as a deputy for the French Communist Party Headquarters in Paris designed by Oscar Niemeyer. It speaks on behalf of the building through its form, style, gesture, and colour. Its motifs and materiality embody the psychological characteristics of the building, encompassing both conscious and unconscious dimensions of its character from its inception to the present day. There is a virtual double, a haunting, that shimmers into being. It is illusive and agile. A performer is enlisted as a third protagonist in a transitional space of encounter and play. The ‘dance’ that ensues questions who is exerting the power of movement over whom. The rigid lines that divide the human from the nonhuman, and the physical from the psyche soften, become synergetic and interlace.
Deputised Objects is one work of a new body of work generated for Psychostructures, an award-winning transdisciplinary research initiative that explores architecture, subjectivity and the unconscious.
Bio
Sophie Warren and Jonathan Mosley are an artist collaboration (RWA) based in Lisbon and London and co-founders of the new transdisciplinary initiative Psychostructures. They make installations, choreographic objects, films and images, narratives and events, often involving the viewer as participant, player or witness. The practice operates at the intersection of conceptual art, architecture and the psycho-social. It explores the negotiation and psychology of space and emergent relations between its human and non-human occupants. Commissioned by galleries and museums including Tate, Showroom, Casco, Tins Sheds Gallery, Spike Island, Arnolfini, Firstsite, Santral Istanbul, Moderna Museet, the practice has won awards from Institut Francais, Arts Council, British Council, Arts and Humanities Research Council. Their work has been widely published, reviewed and presented including at the New European Bauhaus and Korean Pavilion of the Venice Biennial. Jonathan is Associate Professor of Architecture and Experimental Practice at Bristol UWE. Psychostructures.org; Instagram.com/warrenandmosley
Diogo Soares Martins is a Brazilian filmmaker. He works with the audiovisual cooperative Coletivo Sintrópica in Lisbon and is a partner at the production company Estrangeira Filmes in São Paulo. He directed the feature film Through (2015), released in theaters and screened at festivals worldwide. His second film, Pedro’s Tongue, is currently in development.
Estrangeirafilmes.com.br
Steve Klee
The Institute for Predictive Images is an art video fictionalising a psychology experiment at the University of Lincoln, collaboratively designed with neuroscientist Kirsten McKenzie. The investigation explored body image: a representation constructed by the brain-body that shapes our perception of appearance and supplies a sense of bodily ownership. The video combines essay film, sci-fi and campus novel genres to explore philosophical issues excluded from empirical experimentation. It envisions Lincoln’s campus as part of a future institute launching an expedition into space to identify and understand alien intelligences. The artwork theorises images, bodies and scientific knowledge. In the work, bodies and images (understood as technologies) are inseparable. The video is replete with representations of figures: digital doubles, projected avatars – subject to dissolution and transformation. My claim is that we are in a permanent state of self-creation, mediated by images of our own making, whether unconscious (body representations) or consciously produced artefacts. Another thematic strand references colonial scientific expeditions: the video interrogates the epistemological violence of Western knowledge systems. Where colonial explorers classified and extracted knowledge from the ‘unknown’, The Institute for Predictive Images offers an alternative. Rather than imposing order on alien worlds, researchers find their perceptual frameworks destabilised, their categories undone.
Bio
Dr Steve Klee (he/his) is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Lincoln, an artist and theorist exploring imagination, creativity & aesthetics, posthumanism, philosophy of mind & body representation, especially involving predictive processing and 4E approaches. The through-line is the question of (post)human agency: how biologically and historically constrained subjects act, perceive, create and imagine. He has exhibited in the UK, Europe and the US, and published extensively. Recent activity includes a chapter in Posthumanism in Practice (Bloomsbury, 2023), and the publication of his art video The Institute for Predictive Images on Screenworks (2024), a peer-reviewed platform for moving image research. The video was also exhibited solo at Lincoln Arts Centre (2023) and Steam Works Gallery, London (2024). Since 2020 he has worked with cognitive neuroscientist Kirsten McKenzie on an interdisciplinary research and impact project titled Alien Bodies. The project focusses on body image, as understood by empirical psychology, and employs a range of research methods: scientific, philosophical and aesthetic. Together they have created The Alien Embodiment Laboratory, an arts and health workshop for young people, enhancing body confidence through a playful, ecological rethinking of the human form.
Charlie Tweed
Umwelt/4470 – Part I (2024)
A new series of text and video based works which outline a set of speculative eco-technological spaces where human, non-human and technological relations are re-imagined via experimental amalgamations and new modes of interconnectivity. Images and materials operate between digital and physical processes, collaborations with AI neural networks draw out visual responses and re-imagine the narrative. The works make use of an ongoing collaboration with AI imaging tools and models, working with complex text based prompts written by the artist to produce unexpected visualisations. In turn the images produced have influenced changes in the written material as it responds and adapts to its unstable and precarious movements.
The images are fragmented, liminal and constantly changing, they continue the artist’s exploration of digital waste material and its potential as a critical tool. The first video in the series begins with an adapted image of Spike island art space in Bristol, where the artist has his studio, and the generative results produced by the AI models have then been animated as it morphs and forms into another type of imaginary architectural space, a transient position filled with potential. The video also focuses on a second space, a place where humans are engaging with a vast body of worms, attempting to empathise with them, communicate with them and adapt themselves into hybrid forms. The title of the work makes reference to Jakob von Uexkull’s notion of the unique environment experienced by every form of life and this is juxtaposed with Ursulal Le Guin’s notion of World 4470 where a sentient environment of interconnected intelligent plant life is discovered.
Shown at: Braziers International Film Festival (2024); Arte Scienza Festival, Goethe Institute, Rome (2024); Antimatter Media Art, Canada (2024); Art and Film, Vienna (2025)
Bio
Charlie Tweed is a media artist and researcher working across video, text, digital media and performance, developing works that interrogate the relation between human technologies and the earth, considering notions of control, extraction, waste and more than human intelligence. In his work, he employs strategies of re-appropriation and speculative fiction, often taking on personas of anonymous collectives and hybrid machines, to outline speculative plans for future forms of technology and more than human relations.
He has exhibited his works internationally with solo shows at The Stanley Picker Gallery, London; Spike Island, Bristol; Animate Projects, London and Aspex Portsmouth. Group shows and film festivals include: Rencontres Internationales (2019), HKW, Berlin; Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Germany; WRO Media Art Biennale (2017), Poland; Nunnery Gallery, London; Meetfactory, Prague; Whitechapel Gallery, London; ICA, London, CCA, Glasgow and Zentrum Paul Klee, Switzerland.
Harry Meadows
The Community Gardener: Kelly’s Commentary
Machines used to measure an ecosystem also act upon it, creating the potential for new ecological imaginaries. This video and accompanying sculpture demonstrate a methodology for decoding the black box systems of digitally encoded imaginaries. Co-created with a community gardener, this videogame explores Jennifer Gabrys’s theory of the Computational Planet using non-standard processes to intuitively code and decode ecosystems of plants, people, machines and exotic pets. Viewing non-standard ecological practice through Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s theory of the Epistemic Thing, the Technical Objects of climate sensing can be tinkered with and retooled to challenge the binary futures of technological utopia or sublime dystopia. Instead revealing richly complex ecological imaginaries.
Gabrys’s Computational Planet looks beyond functionality, to reveal a planetary ecosystem inseparable from the digital sensing machines that sense and encode it. This ecological imaginary emerges when instruments arranged to generate predictable results become entangled with the wider network of human and non-human actors to create “newly modified connections and relations… and gives rise to new ecologies.” (Gabrys, 2016, p15). This description follows Rheinberger’s for the potential of Technical Objects to, “reveal characters other than the original functions they were designed to perform.” (Rheinberger, 1997).
A problem with digital sensors is one of the politics of compression ((Gleick, 2012), (Slager, 2012, p108)). The machines that do the digitisation of ecosystems are far from benign ecological actors, and information deemed as unimportant in the mechanistic task of sensing can be omitted or erased. The aim of this methodology is to retool using
game engines to recover, decompress and decode information lost in the black box process of standard methods, with a view to explore the ground truths of experts like Kelly Willcocks, the community gardener and carer for two Hermann’s tortoises. The development of a videogame as a prompt for deeper discussion reveals novel ecological textures of the Computational Planet.
Gabrys, J. (2016). Program earth: environmental sensing technology and the making of a computational planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gleick, J. (2012). The Information: a history, a theory, a flood, Fourth Estate paperback ed. London: Fourth Estate.
Rheinberger, H.-J. (1997). Toward a history of epistemic things: synthesizing proteins in the test tube. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.
Slager, H. (2012). Context-responsive investigations. In: Dombois, F. Bauer, U.M. Mareis, C. et al. (eds.). Intellectual birdhouse: artistic practice as research. London: Koenig Books.
Papiermaché ‘heat lamp’ made from A Beginner’s Guide to Hermann’s Tortoise Husbandry (Hamilton, 2020), 3D printed tortoise shell, gardeners gloves, aluminium wire, formed and chrome plated steel tube, Unicol stand base.
70 x 200 x 80cm
The videogame commentary can be viewed here: https://www.criticalzoneobservatory.com/#/personal-ecologies-the-community-gardener/
Bio
BIO: Artist and lecturer Harry Meadows leads Critical Zone Observatory. This research framework explores sculptural possibilities for environmental sensing practices and creates partnerships for games designers, musicians and scientists. This practice-led research imagines the relations between humans, technology and living systems under the conditions of the climate crisis. Since 2014, Meadows has worked at Arts University Bournemouth as Senior Lecturer in Fine Art. He is currently a doctoral researcher with the Centre for Research and Education in Art and Media (CREAM) at the University of Westminster. Research groups include The Deep Field Project and Drawing: Transformative Matter, Material Trace.
Geza Csosz
Reimagining Machines for a Sustainable Future
This video art project explores how machines – long associated with extraction, exploitation, and environmental degradation – can be reimagined as agents of care, empathy, and sustainability. Drawing from Yuk Hui’s philosophy of cosmotechnics, the work challenges the dominant Western technological paradigm by speculating on alternative futures where technology emerges from diverse cosmologies, ecological ethics, and cultural narratives. Through hybrid visual languages and multispecies perspectives, the film proposes machines that communicate with non-human intelligences, embody organic or symbiotic forms, and participate in rituals of maintenance and repair. Blending critical theory with experimental aesthetics, this project envisions post-anthropocentric futures in which art and philosophy co-create a transformed, inclusive understanding of what technology can be.
Bio
I am a fine artist and scientist whose work operates at the intersection of contemporary visual art, physics, and philosophy. With a background in chemistry, physics, mathematics, and computer science—studied in Szeged and Vienna—I later earned an MA in Fine Art (Photography) at Bath Spa University. My interdisciplinary practice explores the symbolic and existential dimensions of time, drawing on scientific and philosophical inquiry to challenge the concept of the present moment and its non-existence.
My recent work focuses on ecological, technological, and temporal systems, with an emphasis on the role of visual media in shaping narratives about sustainability and future imaginaries. At the Digital Ecologies III symposium, I am presenting my film Reimagining Machines for a Sustainable Future, which investigates how technological artifacts can be reconsidered through speculative and ecological lenses. The work seeks to reframe machines not only as tools of consumption but as active agents in rethinking planetary coexistence.
Through photography, video, and experimental moving images, I aim to generate critical dialogue about time, environment, and posthuman futures. Currently based in Bristol, I continue to evolve my research-led practice, focusing on integrating scientific frameworks into contemporary art-making.
Anna Mundet Molas
The Name for Landscape is Horizon (2024) is a community-based artistic research project that explores the relationship between technology, memory, and landscape representation in the Catalan territory. 15 mins
Bio
Anna Mundet Molas is an artist-researcher, climate activist and PhD candidate at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where she investigates ecological resistance strategies to machine learning applied to image generation. She works at the intersection of technology, image and ecology and her research interests include critical artificial intelligence, speculative visual studies, ecocriticism and environmental humanities. Her practice combines new media tools with experimental audiovisual forms, drawing inspiration from curatorial practices, speculative fiction, science fiction and processes of mediation and community participation.
Michelle Atherton
Soil Séance Session (Bookable Workshop)
What is it like to commune with the ground? To turn your senses downwards – using an electrical device as a portal to the underworld?
Soils hold mutable spaces, constantly shifting and changing over time. They have a genesis and a lifespan. Commentators agree that soils have no clear boundary. As the writer Elvia Wilk remarks, the earth erodes boundaries and separations, not least through constant climatic action, rot and shifting regeneration. The anthropologist Christina Lyons argues soils defy the modern dualisms between nature and culture, the living bios and the non-living matter of geos. Soils trouble modern temporal divides between past, present and future.
Soils are more than just granular mineral deposits, originating from rocks transformed over millennia their evolution chart, amongst other things, the history of weather and human practices. They include ‘structures within structures within structures.’1 These aggregates or clusters and cavities are also formed through the actions and interactions of a host of organisms including earthworms, plant and tree roots, fungi, mites, springtails, bacteria, and microscopic predators like tardigrades, ciliates, amoebas, us. They contain dead matter, gases, liquids, complex chemicals, minerals and pollutants.
This is an invitation to turn your auditory perception downwards. An offer to transduce, to turn one form of energy into another by way of wires, minerals (extracted) and vibratory matter. To spend some time tuning into the micro frequencies communicating with themselves beneath our feet.
Kristina M. Lyons ‘Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners + Life Politics’ Duke University Press 2020
Elvia Wilk ‘Death By Landscape: Essay’ Soft Skull 2022
Bio
I am an artist and academic. My current work considers the impact art practice research can have on global environmental challenges; experimenting what might lie beyond human perception and how we might undo reductive binaries between the living and the non-living. The works often use a remix aesthetic incorporating sound, image and text to create fragmented narratives as hooks to explore our slippery perceptions of the world. The aim is look again at matters that seem settled, beyond question, but where inherent instability opens into other questions of material states, refusals, politics and new imaginaries. My work has been exhibited and presented widely in Europe and supported through funding from National Lottery and Arts Council England, UKRI: Arts & Humanities Research Council and a series of international residencies. I teach postgraduate fine art at Sheffield Hallam University.
Max Dovey
Dowsing Drawing Walk (Bookable Workshop)
Bio
Max Dovey is pathway leader for MA Fine Art Computational Arts at UAL’s Camberwell College.
Max designs performative interactions between people and things and creates participatory experiences that make use of networks, data, algorithms and computational culture. His work looks at contemporary algorithmic culture through an embodied performative practice.