Joanne Scott

Artist-researcher
Portugal (residence), United Kingdom (citizenship) °1977
research interests: live media performance, intermediality, audio-visual, Practice-as-research, Practice Research, more than human, eco-art, ecology, artistic research, soundwalk, soundscape
affiliation: Independent, collaborating researcher with i2ADS, University of Porto and CEIS20, University of Coimbra
en

I am an artist-researcher based in central Portugal, using creative digital practices to explore our felt relationships with the more than human world. I create performances, installations, video art and sound walks and have led more than 20 artistic research projects since the award of my PhD in intermedial performance-making in 2014. I also write about and reflect on the use and impact of new digital technologies in live performance-making and am Associate Editor of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media. My most recent sound walk, exploring the legacy of the colonial plantation in our contemporary relations with vegetal life, is due to be published in 2025. 

 

My current research is exploring the use of sited sonic practices such as sound walks, instructional works and sonic scores to explore human relationships with changing, disturbed and damaged landscapes. This research is particularly interested in the relationships we form with the other than human world, the value we place on our companion species and how creative digital practices can reveal our close entanglements with these species. Using a creative multispecies methodology, I am experimenting with the use of sited sonic practices to foster different modes of attentiveness, curiosity about and interaction with our other-than-human kin and the landscapes which we all inhabit.

 

A particular focus for this research is ‘anthropogenic’ landscapes, which are shaped and disturbed by human actions and those that are changing due to the effects of the climate crisis, in the form of a warming planet, more extreme weather events, biodiversity and habitat loss. I have a long-running interest in using textured digital mixes to form sited sonic experiences, combining looped vocal refrains, texts, digital sounds and field recordings to prompt renewed ways of engaging with and being in familiar places.

research

research expositions

  • The Salford samples (2017) author(s): Joanne Scott published in: Journal for Artistic Research
    The Salford Samples is a practice-as-research project in intermedial place-making. Using materials that arise from the city of Salford, including fragments of its cultural history, an autobiographical audio diary, and images/footage of the place itself, a range of shifting combinations are created. Through the mixing of diverse materials, as part of live performances and in online 'video-texts', issues related to this fast-moving, redeveloping, and conversely traditional and static place, arise. Specifically, questions around 'solastalgia' or 'the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment’ (Albrecht et al. 2007, 95) emerge. In addition, these factors both foster and disrupt 'place-attachment' in a contemporary urban environment.
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  • ‘It’s cowboy country up there’: Ruination and Ruinenlust in the wilds of Broughton (2020) author(s): Joanne Scott published in: Research Catalogue
    This article articulates and reflects on dual practices that arise from concurrently responding to my home locality through creative research and resident action. It considers these parallel practices through the dual notions of wildness and ruins/ruination. The critical writing is punctuated with artefacts of both practices, generating a mode of intermedial writing that, through placing these elements and critical reflection in direct conversation, allows feeling-thoughts to emerge about the process of researching a locality in which you are embedded, as well as the wild and ruined features of contemporary urban landscapes.
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  • Urban Wild_Life: Exploring affective relationships with wild urban nature through creative digital practices (2023) author(s): Joanne Scott published in: Research Catalogue
    This research project arose from encounters with wild more than human beings in city spaces close to where I live. The encounters themselves were very rich, complex and flowing over with meanings and feelings that I couldn’t quite grasp in the moment of their happening. As a practitioner-researcher, I therefore chose to explore these feelings and meanings through creative practice, while also engaging in academic research to position these encounters in discourses, both directly relevant and those that resonate with the ideas and feelings arising. I characterise this as a project that aligns with and is productively informed by multispecies studies and practices. In its mixing of encounters with wild nature through primarily digital images and sounds, the practice activates an ‘ecology of technology’
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