A selection of seven experimental productions from the CreaTures Laboratory was showcased at the Cooler Planet exhibition organised as part of the Helsinki Design Week 2022 🌿🌲🌡️

The seven CreaTures experimental productions featured at the exhibition were:

Open Forest

Author: Open Forest Collective

Open Forest is a collective, experimental inquiry into different forests and more-than-human dataflows. The project explores how forests and forest data can be produced, thought of and otherwise engaged with, in playful ways that consider perspectives of diverse forest creatures and reach beyond geo-engineering, techno-solutionist perspectives. In practice, the project consists of experimental forest walks followed by a co-creation of forest stories. Through these playful activities, the project entangles existing forests’ datasets with data that questions and obscures the currently collected and available – mostly quantitative – insights about various forests. At Cooler Planet, visitors can browse through existing documentation of the Open Forest walks, stories, and forest patches and contribute their own stories and experiences.

Read more about the collective here.

Experimental Food Design for Sustainable Futures

Author: Feeding Food Futures collective

Experimental Food Design for Sustainable Futures was a two day workshop experimenting with food as bio-design material and an accessible starting point from which to explore values, concerns, and imaginaries associated with food futures and climate resilience. Through playful food engagements and discussion, participants co-created eleven experimental food futures recipes that aim to provoke imagination and inspire critical thinking on how human-food practices could be different, supporting sustainable flourishing. The recipes together with other workshop outcomes were compiled into the More-than-Human Food Futures Cookbook which is showcased at the Cooler Planet exhibition and available online, as open access publication.

Read more about the project here.

Nocturne

Author: Isabel Beavers

Nocturne is a series of wild altars meant to be experienced at dusk, dawn, or at night. The altars are experienced outdoors in chance encounters, as well as in museum and gallery exhibitions. Rooted in intimate experiences with the elements, landscape, seascape, and more-than-human species, each site calls upon a specific and ephemeral moment of sensory collaboration: times when the sun, light, sound, and scent coalesce through the senses of the human body to produce sublime or ordinary but intimate moments. The work is an experiment in care-taking, eco-rituals, and a seduction into intimate moments with the more-than-human world. The practice of generating new ceremonies and rituals with more-than-human species serves as a method of re-localization, de-emphasizing the human-human connection, and reemphasizing the grounding impacts of human-more-than-human interactions.

Read more about the series here.

Sustainable Futures Game

Author: Hellon

Accelerating sustainability transitions requires imagination and creativity to concretise desirable futures narratives. For this purpose, Hellon designed the Sustainable Futures Game that connects societal sustainability goals with everyday organisational contexts to help build organisations’ capacities for imagining alternative futures. The game is designed for decision-makers and planners within public and private organisations, offering a creative and holistic approach to address sustainability challenges. The purpose is to help players co-imagine a desirable future state of a commonly decided city in 2030 through fictional storytelling and design prompts and then backcast ways to tackle critical challenges to reach the co-narrated future. As the story is co-narrated, the outcome of each game session varies depending on the participants interests and aspirations. This diversity of perspectives helps the participants find new opportunities and create novel pathways for reaching desirable futures.

Read more about the game here.

Cyano Automaton

Author: Agniezska Pokrywka

The Cyano Automaton author Agniezska Pokrywka recently embarked on an analogue space mission to Mars, in the Utah desert, to fulfill her childhood dream of becoming an astronaut, and to challenge her criticism of space colonization. Her preparations for this adventure included the cultivation of cyanobacteria; more specifically: Arthrospira platensis. Spirulina, as it’s more commonly known, has been used as food in the past (pre-colonial Mexico and Chad); in the present (in hipster and health-oriented communities); and will be in the future (on deep space flights). The spirulina cultivation set-up that is presented here is called Cyano Automaton: a vessel in constant evolution, reflecting the infinite changes that every living system goes through. In spite of these transitions, some questions remain unaltered: What can we learn from this silent observer of our planet and its billion-year-long wisdom?

Find out more about the project here.

Baltic Sea Lab 

Author: Julia Lohmann & Department of Seaweed

The Baltic Sea Lab develops co-creative ways and tools to activate people to promote sea health. The project aims to grow a network of potential “sea stewards”, caring for their local sea environment through co-creative engagements. In 2020–2021, the Lab with its multi-sensory seaweed pavilion Hidaka Ohmu, hosted exchanges, panels and co-creative ocean literacy and research events, partnering with local Finnish institutions like the John Nurmisen Foundation, the Hanaholmen, and the Tvärminne Zoological Station. Drawing on these activities, a framework was established to support creative practices in engaging communities with ocean literacy: Knowledge (awareness of ecological and cultural issues), Care (empathy, emotional and embodied connection), and Action (active participation, agency).

Find out more about the lab here.

Pixelache

Author: Andrew Gryf Paterson, Irina Mutt, Sumugan Sivanesan, Antti Ahonen

Pixelache Helsinki is a Finland-based creative association on emerging creative practices with almost 20 years of activity in 2022. Starting as a Festival of Electronic Arts & Subcultures, throughout the past decade the association has been running a trans-disciplinary platform for emerging art, design, research, technology and activism that involved a dynamic local community, and an annual festival experimenting with a rotating directorial model. The rich association’s history and activities in the field of transformational creative practice are the core focus of the association’s process, by engaging with organisational meta-data, and Pixelache’s production office in Suvilahti as a tangible memory device. We set out the hope of answering: How do we keep going? The Cooler Planet exhibition presents two audiozines resulting from an experimental archival and ethnographic work that sought to gather perspectives from active Pixelache members reflecting upon how the organisation has transformed between 2013-2019 via objects and narratives. Within the space are several of the objects referenced in the audiozines, as well as a handmade Gantt chart showing active members in the association.

Find out more about the project here.

🌿The Cooler Planet event:

When: 7. 9. –12. 10. 2022
Where: Väre building in Aalto University campus, Otaniementie 14 – FK lobby, at the entrance of the Department of Design (2nd floor)
Opening hours: Mon-Thu 7:45–21:00, Fri 7:45–20:00, Sat 9:00–17:00, Sundays and 10. 9. Closed

🎤🦑 The CreaTures showcase was introduced at the Helsinki Design Week Pecha Kucha Night on Wednesday 07.09.2022, 6-8 pm, in the Aalto campus. More details and registration are available here.

More about the wider Cooler Planet exhibition is available here.

The Cooler Planet event is organised as a part of Helsinki Design Week’s official festival programme and a World Circular Economy Forum 2022 (WCEF) side event. Aalto University is also one of the EU’s New European Bauhaus partners.

This is an in-person event that involves a 2-days field trip into the protected landscape area Křivoklátsko (CZ) to walk with the local forest and its creatures.

The walk is organised by the Open Forest Collective – a multi-disciplinary group of forest-curious creatures of diverse cultural, professional and biological origins – and guided by one of the Collective’s members, Chewie. We will follow Chewie to explore a patch of the local Bohemian forest and learn about its complex multi-species environment. On the way, we will exchange our experiences, observations and sensory impressions in the form of forest-stories. The walk will be performative and open-ended, centered around the elements of spontaneity, surprise, curiosity and squirrels.

The walk builds on the Collective’s previous experimental walks in other forests around the world that invite diverse forest creatures, including forest dwellers, Indigenous forest guardians, healers, scientists, data managers, artists, designers, as well as dogs and trees, to walk together and share their stories. Through these encounters, the Collective hopes to better understand how various stakeholders make sense of forest; questioning what can constitute a forest dataset, how it can be produced, and by whom. The main aim is to learn how forests and forest data can be produced, thought of and engaged with otherwise, in feral, co-creative ways that consider perspectives of diverse forest creatures and reach beyond techno-solutionist perspectives.

You can join in person, in the Kasárna Karlín venue, Prague (CZ). Please register via the Uroboros festival Eventbrite.

This sharing session invites all Uroboros festival visitors to engage with outcomes of The Feral Gift Loop – a co-creative experiment in shared ways of understanding, doing, and becoming eco-social change.

The Feral Gift Loop has been a six-week process of performative storytelling, where six creative contributors experimented with various meanings and feelings related to eco-social change. Inspired by feral approaches to design research and the Fluxus tradition of scores, the Loop participants explored what something as grand and complex as eco-social change could possibly mean in their diversely situated – local, cultural, personal, intimate – contexts.

Guided by selected eco-social narratives (books, essays, poems, songs), they devised and exchanged scores for situated exercises, which they enacted in the space-times they were currently inhabiting: a kitchen in Helsinki, an art space in Tokyo, a living room in Colombia, a forest patch in Umeå, a mountain in Edinburgh, an elevator in Newcastle, a home in Seoul, a seacoast near Seville…They shared these situated enactments with each other in multiple documentation formats, as a gift. Throughout this process, they explored the theoretical eco-social narratives through very concrete, sensorial, personal and on-the-ground activities. They touched, smelled, tasted, listened to and felt what eco-social transformation might possibly mean to each of them. 

At the Feral Gift Exchange session, these authors present the gifts they have been sharing with each other for the past six weeks and discuss, performatively, bits and pieces of their joint, feral journey. All festival visitors are warmly welcome to join, listen, and share what eco-social change means to them, in their own personal, intimate, and otherwise situated contexts. The session hopes to open an informal conversation on what eco-social transformation may mean, to whom, where and why.  

The Feral Gift experiment was proposed by Markéta Dolejšová (Czech Republic/Finland) and Danielle Wilde (Australia/Sweden/Denmark) and brought to life together with Iryna Zamuruieva (Ukraine/Scotland),  Martyna Miller (Poland), Ann Light (United Kingdom/Sweden),  Felipe G. Gil (Spain) & the Open Forest Collective (Jaz Hee-jeong Choi – South Korea/Australia, Andrea Botero – Colombia/Finland, Markéta Dolejšová – Czech Republic/Finland).

This is a hybrid event: you can join us in-person in the Kasárna Karlín venue, Prague (CZ) or remotely via the online Zoom platform. Please register via the Uroboros festival Eventbrite. A Zoom link will be provided to all registered participants closer to the event date.

This meditation builds empathy pathways to other life forms. It is part of a larger collaborative role-play project called The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 depicting the story of the dawning of interspecies democracy. It’s a new era of equal rights for all living beings, where all species come together to organise and shape the environments and cultures they inhabit, in London’s Finsbury Park (and urban green spaces across the UK, the world, and beyond!) After much protest it has been agreed that a treaty of cooperation will be drawn up.

The meditation is used as a tool for character development and immersion. As participants we use our imaginations and a bonding ritual to enter the body and consciousness of a different species and to reflect on the nature of their existence. This ritual transports us to the interspecies multiverse where we sit for a guided meditation. The meditation is followed by a sharing circle where we describe the experiences we have of our new bodies and sentience. By listening to each other we understand more about our place in webs of life.

Credits:
Treaty concept by Ruth Catlow and Cade Diehm
Meditation by Ruth Catlow and Sarah Friend in 2021.
The bonding ritual was originally created for a multispecies food justice LARP called ‘Now London is a City Farm…’ created by Ruth with Sara Heitlinger, Lara Houston and Alex Taylor as part of the Algorithmic Food Justice research project.

You can join in person, in the Kasárna Karlín venue, Prague (CZ). Please register via the Uroboros festival Eventbrite.

Creative reflection, self-awareness and embodied activities are applied to guide participants on a journey where the ability and willingness of individuals to let-go, shift perspectives and adopt new roles and practices is central.

The transformation toward eco-social sustainability involves a personal dimension of change. It calls for turning inwards and paying attention to the fundamental, innermost questions: Who am I (as part of a larger whole and eco-system)? What is my work? (as a human being on this planet)? Such personal, internal journeys of change often require external stimuli to help us become aware of what might have been invisible, stuck and hidden. These experiences might help foster our understanding of our interconnectedness: how we relate to the world, to other human and non-human creatures, and to ourselves.

In this session, we will approach such personal dimensions of change by guiding participants on a journey of shedding their skin through creative reflection and self-awareness practices, as well as generative embodiment activities. We will explore our inner worlds and the fundamental questions of our entangled existence through a co-creative exercise in opening a space for non-doing, pause, and letting-go. We will pay attention to the qualities of our relating, focus on how our perspectives shift, and experiment with radical openness: receiving and trusting the emerging elements that unfold beyond our control. By creating connections between non-doing and doing as an inspiration for future shifts, these exercises may enhance our sensitivity to how ‘change’ might feel like here and now.

With many overlapping social and ecological crises, we urgently need to transform how we live together on this planet. Artists, designers and social change-makers have been developing alternative forms of eco-social thought and action rooted in ‘multi-species’, ‘more-than-human’, and ‘feral’ modes of co-existence. How can these creative practitioners connect fruitfully with policy-makers, who work with related ideas around ‘natural resource management’, ‘ecosystems services’ or ‘biodiversity conservation’?

In October 2022 the CreaTures project bought together stakeholders and practitioners from both creative and policy fields to ask: how can creative practitioners and policy-makers work together for multi-species governance? 

A panel of four creative practitioners shared experiences of cross-sector working and explored the value of creative practices in opening up public dialogue and developing policy around environmental governance for the benefit of all species.  The hybrid session was part of the Uroboros Festival in Prague (exploring creative pathways to eco-social transformation). 

Summary

The four contributors offered a fascinating range of practices for bringing the more than human into the policy conversation.  Iryna Zamuruieva presented artist-led workshops in which experiencing and responding to videoed river journeys encouraged policy makers to think from the perspective of a river, exploring a non-anthropocentric understanding of flood risk management.  Ruth Catlow described how LARPs (Live Action Role Play) enabled users and managers to experience the perspective of the non-human inhabitants of a local park.  Julia Lohmann showed how exploring algae both as a biomaterial and an organism in its own right engaged senses and emotions beyond material process design.  Marion Lean described how gamification enabled policy makers to explore scenarios and impacts in a narrative form.

Across these diverse projects there were identifiable commonalities in approach.

• Opening up spaces to consider different futures was a recurring theme, through shared processes of imagination, pre-figuration or speculation.  The fact that these processes were done collectively enabled understanding of, and incorporation of, wider perspectives.

• Processes of design were used to explore how a current situation could be changed to a preferred situation. what that preferred situation might be and for whom – both human and ‘more than human’.
• Engaging actively with the ‘more than human’ raised questions around what and who is forefronted in such discussions – opening up a ‘multi-species’ perspective.  At the same time, decentering the human, prompted questions of equity and social justice within the human realm and explorations of the rights of the individual versus the rights of community. The inclusion of non-human presence helped engage participants in experiences which were tactile, sensory, emotional – bringing different perspectives and modes of thinking.

• Activities offered connection to head, heart and hands (described by one practitioner as knowing, caring, acting with creative practices serving as ‘flux’ between these states).

• Experimentation was key – supporting participants to move away from formal policy spaces (characterized by responsibility, delivery and deadlines) and encouraging questioning, exploration, imagination and failure.  Projects offered a safe space for creative thinking, permission to play and encouraged a sense of agency – underpinned by the belief that everyone has innate creativity, a valuable contribution to make and a role to play.

• There was recognition of the intrinsic value of the processes involved.  Ensuring good process is often as important as attempting to seek definitive answers to what are often multi-layered and challenging questions.

• There was particular impact from activity that built connections and was rooted in place. Working with and supporting existing local connectors and making the effort to involve as many people as possible who have a stake in the process and outcome of change.

• A common theme was the vital importance of allowing time for this work.   In order to build relationships and trust, allow for deeper connection and reflection and ultimately create more powerful impact.  Projects started from a place of shared values and made those values explicit in the process.   As one panelist observed – ‘don’t underestimate the time it takes to translate the ‘arty bollocks’ into something that is inviting for many people and makes them feel at home’

• Panelists explored ways to achieve longevity of impact when programmes like this are often limited by short term funding.  These included empowering participants to feel confident in their experience of new ways of thinking to support them applying these in ongoing practice.   Seeking out and working with people who are energized to take the ideas forward and repeating activities over time allowed for reconnection with the ideas and practices. 

In Conclusion

In her closing remarks, panel moderator Ann Light observed that whilst this Feral panel was taking place, in a swimming pool at an arts festival, elsewhere in Prague the inaugural meeting of the European Political Community Summit was being held.  The question hanging in the room as the session closed – how can we bring these worlds together in future? 

Panelists:  

Marion Lean (SCT/UK) –is a Scottish design researcher based in London. The focus of her research is improving choice and empowerment through real-world research, storytelling and collaboration, within different cultural settings and with different species. Marion is currently a Design Coach and Innovation Fellow, Centre for Digital Citizens, Newcastle University. She was based at Building Digital UK and laid the foundations for a Policy Design Lab at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

Julia Lohmann (DE/FI) – is a Professor of Contemporary Design Practices at Aalto University and the founder of the Department of Seaweed, a transdisciplinary community of practice investigating the potential of macro algae as a design material. She uses her artistic practice as research through design to explore the ethical and material value systems underlying our relationship with flora and fauna. She is a creative practitioner in CreaTures and a researcher in the Academy of Finland funded Biocolour research project on natural dyes, and in the Nordplus funded Nordark research project that investigates non-human needs in relation to after-dark outdoor lighting.

Ruth Catlow (UK) –is a recovering web utopian and a creative practitioners in CreaTures. As artistic director and co-founder of Furtherfield London’s longest-running (de)centre for art and technology, she curates and creates collaborative, playful and emancipatory artworks to engage people across silos around emerging technologies and the wicked social and political problems they give rise to or intensify.

Iryna Zamuruieva (UA/SCT) – makes images, writes, walks, organises and performs. Originally from the middle of the Ukrainian steppe, Iryna now lives by the North Sea coast in Scotland, working with sustainability organisation Sniffer, a partner in CreaTures, on transforming organisations and places to flourish in the future climate. This involves leading climate change adaptation projects (with Adaptation Scotland) and creating structures for collaborative, care-ful and non-hierarchical decision-making. In her independent practice Iryna explores multispecies relations from pigs and viruses to natures to walking and steppes & ecofeminism.

Co-moderators and respondents:

Lara Houston (UK) 

Ann Light (UK/SE)

Markéta Dolejšová (CZ/FI)