The co-creative and research activities undertaken within the CreaTures project resulted in the following free & open-access resources (please note that some elements are still in production and the list is being updated as we go):
Key CreaTures resources
- CreaTures Co-Laboratory Catalogue
A detailed overview of experiences and outcomes that emerged from the 20 experimental artistic productions developed within the CreaTures Laboratory. - CreaTures Documentary
A short film about the motivations, aspirations, joys and challenges of the CreaTures research project. - CreaTures Framework
The framework sets out how creative practices can stimulate action towards eco-socially sustainable futures. Four curated paths through the Framework – Research, Policy Making, Creative Practice and Funding – offer a collection of resources charting the key concepts and terms, processes, tools for evaluation, and resources for various stages of creative practices. - Messages in a Bottle (Open Creative Practices Training Guidelines)
A collection of learnings from transformative creative practitioners who have been part of the CreaTures journey and gathered at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain, 2022. - The CreaTures Glossary – Open code of the online glossary tool + methods for rapid collection of definitions from diverse stakeholders
The CreaTures Glossary is a radically open, fluid and changeable, collaborative platform for giving meaning to a lexicon of terms related to creative practice and transformational change. It thinks of language as a dynamic social thing, belonging to no one in particular and to everyone at the same time. The source code of the online glossary tool will be shared on the github platform. - The CreaTures Zine: Understories – Stories from within the creaturely creative practice and research
A loose and messy collection of tales from CreaTures project bringing light to unseen, yet critical conversations that make a research project alive.
Other resources we know and 💚
- Algorithmic Food Justice – Live Action Role Play Toolkit – Guide for multi-species Live Action Roleplays (LARPs) by Sara Heitlinger, Lara Houston and Alex Taylor
A guide for how to run a multi-species Live Action Roleplays (LARPs). It consists of an introduction, guide to setting up a LARP, templates for the material elements (badges, ID forms, cards etc.) then a series of scenarios for gameplay. The Algo Food Justice Toolkit helped us in navigating through the early stages of our experiments with feral creative practices. - Brussels Health Gardens – Community garden model to nurture relational human-nature experiences by Vitalija Povilaityte-Petri and Sugir Selliah
The Brussels Health Gardens is a community garden model aiming to support an inclusive space for embodied peer learning about more-than-human care. Situated in the local urban context of Brussels, the collective serves as a model to inspire the cultivation of biocentric relationships with nature and peer-to-peer education about more-than-human ecosystems. The project contributed to our discussion at the Mapping artistic methods and tools to foster transformative change workshop. - Caring City map – Graphic recording method to document co-creative events by ZEMOS98
The Caring City map illustrates a graphic recording method used to capture activities at the Mediactivism European Hackcamp “The city is ours” organised by ZEMOS98. It is a low-threshold method to capture with text and graphic expression what happens in a co-creative activity, whether it is a conference, a congress, or a workshop.
- Commonspoly Ambassadors Guide – Guide for playful engagements and critical discussion on commons by ZEMOS98
This guide is designed for ambassadors of the Commponspoly game who act as facilitators of gameplays and commons-related discussion among the game participants. Commonspoly is a non-profit, open-source board game that encourages a culture of cooperation and supports a peer-learning about commons and commoning practices as more socially sustainable alternatives to neo-liberal economic regimes. The guide was used in the Commonspoly ExP activities and contributed to our discussion at the Mapping artistic methods and tools to foster transformative change workshop. - Council of All Beings – Manual for more-than-human rituals and workshops by Joanna Macy
The Council of All Beings is a communal ritual in which participants step aside from their human identity and speak on behalf of another life-form. The work includes a creative mask-making exercise that allows participants to immerse themselves in the role of the creature they represent. - Deep Phytocracy – Anarchetypes – Tool to facilitate a human-plant roleplay and expeditions by Špela Petrič
A fabulative expedition into plant wilderness. Participants explore plant-life guided by the so-called recombinant tools of 10 anarchetypes – humorous and often absurd characters that embody various real-world cultural values and approaches to plants. They multiply instead of clarifying and keep our mind busy investigating phytopolitics while the body has a chance for its own encounter with plants. The Anarchetypes helped us in navigating through the early stages of our experiments with feral creative practices. - Dérive Drift – Guide for experimental drifts through local & personal spaces
The Dérive Drift follows a psychogeographic-inspired approach to explore the local spaces of care, escape, solitude and refuge that shape our worlds. It offers playful provocations in the form of a dérive, or critical socio-spatial tour through the small spaces, places and memory palaces of everyday life. Within CreaTures, we played with Dérive Drift at the Uroboros 2020 festival and used the tool to guide various internal co-creative exercises. - DIY Trust me, I’m an artist (TMIAA) – Toolkit for facilitation of ethics procedures in bioart and DIYbio projects by Waag futurelab
Toolkit for artists, curators and arts organisations to investigate how to engage deeply with biotechnology and biomedicine. With this new toolkit, you can create your own DIY TMIAA event using our successful format for investigating, revealing and debating the ethical issues that arise through the process of collaborations between art and bioscience. - ECOTarot Deck – Guide on how to do ECOtarot readings by Adriene Jenik
The ECOtarot deck enables participants to perform “Climate Future” readings. With the deck, the facilitator – the reader invites others to “channel” scientific facts and modeled projections related to human-driven climate disruption through the layered form and meanings of Tarot. The aim is to catalyze a conversation regarding our shared futures, while offering support and encouragement to people for the role they can play in it. The deck was used in the co-creative activities performed within the Baltic Sea Lab ExP. - Engaging the world through a Sancocho-Style approach – Relational platform for human-nature engagements by Leonardo Parra-Agudelo and David Rincón
A relational platform with multiple access points aiming to
1) uncover entanglements that can provide avenues for relating to our kin, 2) integrate ourselves in co-existence with the natural, abstract, artificial and spiritual, 3) integrate ourselves with other forms of thinking, feeling, being and doing. The platform helped us in navigating through the early stages of our experiments with feral creative practices. - Feminist Finance Zine – Zine experimenting with more equitable, diverse, and sustainable futures for finance and economy; by Amateur Cities and Institute of Network Cultures
A printed zine ‘Radical Care: Embracing Feminist Finance’ collecting contributions on care, cooperation, locality, value(s), and alternative finance models, comprising contributions from the Moneylab network – a collective of artists, designers, researchers, geeks and activists dedicated to the task of experimenting with more equitable, diverse, and sustainable futures for finance and economy. The zine helped us in navigating through the early stages of our experiments with feral creative practices. - Human-Food Interaction Zine – Zine speculating on regenerative more-than-human food futures; by the Feeding Food Futures collective
The Human-Food Interaction Zine is a collective open-access publication co-created by participants of an experimental food design workshop held in San Diego in 2019. It summarises workshop discussions, scenarios and walk-shop activities to draw a set of recommendations for creative, equitable, and sustainable research in the field of sustainable (more-than)human-food interaction. The zine inspired co-creative activities in the Experimental Food Design for Sustainable Food Futures ExP and our overall discussions on more-than-human futures. - Machine Ghosts! – Guide for experimental urban walks by Dr. KitKat
Machine Ghosts is a replicable model for a psychogeographic tour of urban spaces which explores the city as an algorithmic playground, unveiling the more-than-human encounters and histories that are typically overlooked in everyday life. The guide helped us in navigating through the early stages of our experiments with feral creative practices. - Ministry of Multispecies Communications – Manual for experimental multi-species walks by Rachel Clarke
A training manual for those wishing to join the (fictional) Ministry of Multispecies Communications. The manual introduces a near future scenario where all creatures have fled cities for safe refuge elsewhere. A team of secret government officials are then tasked with finding ways to make the environment better for them to come back. The manual provokes creative thinking and reflection on changing local multi-species biodiversity and related eco-social issues. It also includes co-creative mask-making activities and guided walks and prompts that can be organised as a face-to-face event or online using synchronous and asynchronous platforms such as WhatsApp and Slack. The Ministry helped us in navigating through the early stages of our experiments with feral creative practices.
- More-than-Human Dérive – Guide for experimental urban drifts & attunements to more-than-human worlds
More-than-Human Dérive aims to playfully inspire anyone wishing to become more attuned to the more-than-human worlds that surround them. Inspired by Situationist International’s artistic strategies, the tool interweaves more-than-human stories and perspectives to imagine our shared futures. Through drifting, we might augment sensing and knowing what surrounds us to include more-than-human stories, ‘voices’, and perspectives by exploring new ways of mapping with expanded, multisensory ideas of data. The Open Forest ExP illustrates how More-than-Human Dérive could be used in practice. - More-than-Human Food Futures Cookbook – Cookbook for regenerative food futures by the Feeding Food Futures collective
The cookbook contains eleven co-created, experimental food futures recipes that aim to provoke imagination and inspire critical thinking on how human-food practices could be different, supporting sustainable flourishing. From a picnic meal reimagining the human body as a resource to slug-driven food governance, the recipes capture co-creative thought experiments of 33 contributors who came together for the two-day workshop Experimental Food Design for Sustainable Futures held online in July 2020, as part of our food ExP. - Ocean Confessional – Guide for Ocean Confessional ceremony sessions by Pete Fung and Sam Shamsher
Ocean Confessional is a public ceremony where passersby are invited to reconsider their relationship with the ocean. Participants can express and seek forgiveness for past and present environmental transgressions or share their love by directly confessing to the ocean. The ritual was performed during the Baltic Sea Lab ExP and supported the ExP’s creative research and activities. - Parlour of Food Futures – Food Tarot – Card deck of 22 future food-tech archetypes
The Food Tarot deck is a tool for co-creative explorations of plausible food-technology futures. Inspired by the Tarot de Marseille tradition, the Food Tarot deck presents 22 imagined food-tech tribes, such as Datavores, Ethical Cannibals and Turing Foodies, that embody emerging food-tech practices and issues. The aim is to provoke participants’ reflection on the growing technology presence in our everyday food practices. The Food Tarot readings can happen anywhere, with anyone who is interested to join, including workshop participants or random passersby at various street corners. The deck was used in co-creative activities in the Experimental Food Design for Sustainable Futures ExP. - Pedagogy of Care – Open paper introducing tools and methodologies to work with care in organisations; by ZEMOS98
Pedagogy of care is an interdisciplinary research work on the care economy, collaborative activism and political participation. Its main goal is to map and provide greater visibility to care practices developed in activist contexts, aiming to create movements based on more sustainable structures where power is fairly distributed among their members. It is also a set of practical tools and methodologies that can help us implement in our own struggles the theoretical side carried out by feminist activists. - Resourcing youth-led groups and movements – Reflective playbook for youth community organisers by Gioel Gioacchino
The playbook presents stories and activities for resourcing and organizing youth community groups and movements focused on social justice and sustainability themes. - Six forms of Reflexivity with Design Methods – Collection of methods studied in an academic publication by Josina Vink and Kaisa Koskela-Huotari
This resource pays attention to the transformative potential of (service) design methods by highlighting how they help people build reflexivity by exploiting six different interrelated states: temporal, material, physical, relative, cultural, and cognitive. Building reflexivity informs people’s awareness of (hidden) institutionalized mental models and social structures that can be then accessed, addressed and reshaped in the creative processes. - Social Presencing Theater – Guide for practicing embodied intelligence by Otto Scharmer, and Arawana Hayashi, as a part of the Presencing Institute
The guide shows how to practice Social Presencing Theater – a social art form and a set of practices for co-sensing the social systems through social fields and embodied intelligence. These practices allow participants to gain insight into their current (individual and collective) situation and realities, and make visible and more tangible the invisible future potentials and opportunities for change. - Calling for a More-Than-Human Politics – Manifesto by Superflux
The manifesto provides a guide for people to shift their considerations from a human to more-than-human perspective. It is hoped to inspire practitioners and thinkers in generating sustainable more-than-human approaches in their own work. The manifesto was produced within the Superflux’s work on their ExPs Refuge for Resurgence and Invocation for Hope. - We’re calling time on human exceptionalism – Manifesto by Superflux
A manifesto for humankind, to help humans see themselves as part of nature, encouraging them to reflect and consider their ways to live together through an experiential storytelling path. The manifesto was produced within the Superflux’s work on their ExPs Refuge for Resurgence and Invocation for Hope. - Susplace – Sustainable Place Shaping Project – Toolkit for personal emotional transformations, by Kelli Rose Pearson, Malin Bäckman, Sara Grenni, Angela Moriggi, Siri Pisters, Anke de Vrieze
A collection of arts-based methods for transformative engagements, including instructions and practical tips for organizing and facilitating. Special focus on deep personal transformation – ‘change from the inside out’: engaging with emotions, changing cultural narratives and worldviews, and stimulating specific mindset shifts conducive to socio-ecological innovation. - The Dream Turbine DREAMPAK – Guide for dreaming and embodied processing of more sustainable ways of being and doing by A+E Collective
The Dream Turbine is a speculative, participatory tool for stimulating, processing, converting and sharing sustainable and postcapitalist imaginaries. The Dream Turbine is at once a resource site and a generator of public engagement, ecological thought and re-visioning through the energising gestures of dreams. By encouraging attentive forms of dreamwork from the potential space of sleep, The Dream Turbine invites you into a mode of transfer, speculative turn, ongoingness and the tender commons of shared velocity. The DREAMPAK guide includes practical and galvanising suggestions for sleep preparation exercises, dream recording, and more. - The Social Change Ecosystem map 2020 – Framework to help individuals, networks, and organizations align with social change values, roles, and broader ecosystems by Deepa Iyer
The Social Change Ecosystem Map encourages people and groups to get aligned with their values and purpose, and to weigh the themes of equity, shared liberation, inclusion, and justice in their projects. - Walking one sense at a time – Guide for experimental walks by Iryna Zamuruieva and Elliot Hurst
Sensory Walks + methodology for conducting them focusing on engaging with the place through smell, sight, touch & hearting. Each sense has its own methodology that’s composed of three sections, maps & guiding questions. The walks are aimed as a participatory, playful & thoughtful attention-shifting socially-engaged practice. The guide helped us in navigating through the early stages of our experiments with feral creative practices.