This research project arose from encounters with wild more than human beings in city spaces close to where I live. The encounters themselves were 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 chose to explore these feelings and meanings through creative digital practice, while also engaging in academic research to position the encounters in relation to discourses, both relevant to the inquiry and also resonant with the ideas and feelings arising.
The creative digital practice, which I mobilised as a core element of the research methodology, involves the creation and mixing of sonic and visual materials to form live audio-visual performance and fixed media works. Digital mixing practices have sat at the core of my practice as research for over a decade now, and I have used these creative tools to interrogate and explore a range of places, contexts and ideas. For this project, I worked with a musician – Scott Millar – to develop the sonic mixes from texts I wrote in response to the initial embodied encounters. The research resulted in two creative outputs – a live audio-visual performance in Leeds, UK in October 2022 and an online video version of the audio-visual mix, which was released soon after.
This project 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’ (Bridle 2022). Through exploring the encounters using the sonic and visual tools of a digital mixing practice, ambivalent, sometimes contradictory feelings about our co-existence with wild urban nature are revealed. In addition new felt understandings emerge of the asymmetrical relationships between humans and more than humans in the city and their connection to the climate and biodiversity crises we currently face.
- How can live audio-visual performance and digital mixing practices be mobilised to activate and explore complexity and ambivalence arising from encounters with wild, urban nature?
- What feelings and meanings, embedded in such encounters, are revealed through the practices of live audio-visual mixing?
- What do these affective encounters with more-than-humans, and their exploration through creative practice, reveal about multispecies co-existence in the city?