This sound pieces and incredible 3d render is the product of a research project around prehistoric animals. Obsessed!

this work really resonates with – its creating art that hopes to reflect and reinterpret relationships between

• Beneath the Neural Waves explores biodiversity through an attempt at creating (digitally) an aquatic ecosystem as a means of attempting to engage with the very abstract concept of relationship. These dioramas of artificial life, together with the various sculptural fragments, imagery, and text, reach out towards the complex entanglement of natural life, both with itself and others.
• The choice of the aquatic, specifically the coral reef, was due to our belief that these reefs ecosystems are the perfect example of how the interconnectedness occurs in the natural world between life, no one creature is the core component of the reef, rather it emerges from the interwoven whole of all the individual component species.
• Deep learning allows us to take a contemporary approach to pattern extraction. It facilitates extracting three-dimensional patterns from nature and rearranging them to envision new speculative worlds. By choosing this workflow we were faced with the challenge of creating datasets, teaching us how the available data and the way it represents marine life reflects how humans look at the natural world. Neural networks trained on coral reefs and their many inhabitants produce a large variety of 3D models which are then brought together to form new, speculative reefs from beneath the neural waves.

also her critically extent project!

• A project exploring the limits of available data as a means of engaging with critically endangered species. By only using open, publicly available data, representations are generated that reflect upon how little (or much) they are present in our everyday, digital lives.

• this pieces make me think about Graham Harmen and OOO – poetry as a way to break into the ‘real object’. metaphors and art as a way to relate to the more-than what ever it was.

I HEARD THE POET BILL SIVERLY this week say that the essence of modern high technology is to consider the world as disposable: use it and throw it away. The people at this conference are here to think about how to get outside the mind-set that sees the technofix as the answer to all problems. It’s easy to say we don’t need more “high” technologies inescapably dependent on despoliation of the earth. It’s easy to say we need recyclable, sustainable technologies, old a new—pottery making, bricklaying, sewing, weaving, carpentry, plumbing, solar power, farming, IT devices, whatever. But here, in the midst of our orgy of being lords of creation, texting as we drive, it’s hard to put down the smartphone and stop looking for the next technofix. Changing our minds is going to be a big change. To use the world well, to be able to stop wasting it and our time in it, we need to relearn our being in it. Skill in living awareness of belonging to the world, delight in being part of the world, always tends to involve knowing our kinship as animals with animals. Darwin first gave that knowledge a scientific basis. And now, both poets and scientists are extending the rational aspect of our sense of relationship to creatures without nervous systems and nonliving beings—our fellowship as creatures with other creatures, things with other things. Relationship among all things appears to be complex and reciprocal—always at least two-way, back and forth. It seems that nothing is single in this universe, and nothing goes one way.

In this view, we humans appear as particularly lively, intense, aware nodes, of relation in an infinite network of connections, simple or complicated, direct or hidden, strong or delicate, temporary or very long-lasting. A web of connections, infinite but locally fragile, with and among everything—all beings—including what we generally class as things, objects. Descartes and the behaviorist willfully saw dogs as machines, without feeling. Is seeing plants as without feeling a similar arrogance?

One way to stop seeing trees, or rivers, or hills, only as “natural resources” is to class them as fellow beings—kinfolk.

I guess I’m trying to subjectify the universe, because look where objectifying it has gotten us. To subjectify is not necessarily to co-opt, colonize, exploit. Rather, it may involve a great reach outward of the mind and imagination.

What tools have we got to help us make that reach?

In Romantic Things, Mary Jacobus writes, “The regulated speech of poetry may be as close as we can get to such thing—to the stilled voice of the inanimate object or the insentient standing of trees.”1

Poetry is the human language that we can try to say what a tree or a rock or a river is, that is, to speak humanly for it, in both senses of the word “for”. A poem can do so by relating the quality of an individual human relationship to a thing, a rock or river or tree, or simply by describing the thing as truthfully as possible.

Ursula K. Le Guin ~ Deep in admiration

Sometimes I am taken for granite [1]. Everybody is taken for granite sometimes but I am not in a mood for being fair to everybody. I am in a mood for being fair to me. I am taken for granite quite often, and this troubles and distresses me, because I am not granite. I am not sure what I am but I know it isn’t granite. I have known some granite types, we all do: characters of stone, upright, immovable, unchangeable, opinions the general size shape and pliability of the Rocky Mountains, you have to quarry five years to chip out one little stony smile. That’s fine, that’s admirable, but it has nothing to do with me. Upright is fine, but downright is where I am, or downwrong.
I am not granite and should not be taken for it. I am not flint or diamond or any of that great hard stuff. If I am stone, I am some kind of shoddy crumbly stuff like sandstone or serpentine, or maybe schist. Or not even stone but clay, or not even clay but mud. And I wish that those who take me for granite would once in a while treat me like mud.
Being mud is really different from being granite and should be treated differently. Mud lies around being wet and heavy and oozy and generative. Mud is underfoot. People make footprints in mud. As mud I accept feet. I accept weight. I try to be supportive, I like to be obliging. Those who take me for granite say this is not so but they haven’t been looking where they put their feet. That’s why the house is all dirty and tracked up.
Granite does not accept footprints. It refuses them. Granite makes pinnacles, and then people rope themselves together and put pins on their shoes and climb the pinnacles at great trouble, expense, and risk, and maybe they experience a great thrill, but the granite does not. Nothing whatever results and nothing whatever is changed.
Huge heavy things come and stand on granite and the granite just stays there and doesn’t react and doesn’t give way and doesn’t adapt and doesn’t oblige and when the huge heavy things walk away the granite is there just the same as it was before, just exactly the same, admirably. To change granite you have to blow it up.
But when people walk on me you can see exactly where they put their feet, and when huge heavy things come and stand on me I yield and react and respond and give way and adapt and accept. No explosives are called for. No admiration is called for. I have my own nature and am true to it just as much as granite or even diamond is, but it is not a hard nature, or upstanding, or gemlike. You can’t chip it. It’s deeply impressionable. It’s squashy.

Maybe the people who rope themselves together and the huge heavy things resent such adaptable and uncertain footing because it makes them feel insecure. Maybe they fear they might be sucked in and swallowed. But I am not interested in sucking and am not hungry. I am just mud. I yield. I do try to oblige. And so when the people and the huge heavy things walk away they are not changed, except their feet are muddy, but I am changed. I am still here and still mud, but all full of footprints and deep, deep holes and tracks and traces and changes. I have been changed. You change me. Do not take me for granite.

[1] Take for granite is an expression that is the result of mishearing or misinterpreting the phrase take for granted

Data collection and monitoring

During this baseline monitoring period, the University’s Lake Maurepas Monitoring Project (LMMP) team deployed four monitoring buoys that will collect data on water quality and health, including water temperature, dissolved oxygen, pH, carbon dioxide, and water turbidity (cloudiness of the water), among other parameters. The LMMP team will also collect data on aquatic wildlife including shrimp, blue crabs, and Rangia clam populations, lengths and weights of each species, alligator nesting and egg viability, and environmental DNA samples to comprehensively assess fish species diversity.