Lessons from a Multispecies Studio
Uncovering Ecological Understanding and Biophilia through Creative Reciprocity
9781789384529
      
      
    Distributed for Intellect Ltd
Lessons from a Multispecies Studio
Uncovering Ecological Understanding and Biophilia through Creative Reciprocity
          A collection of nonfiction, first-person writings about creative collaborations with local animals and ecologies. 
In this highly original book, Julie Andreyev explores agency and consciousness through her encounters with other lifeforms—companion dogs, wild birds, mineral beings, plant life, and forest communities—to illuminate the ways creativity can play a part in generating a renewed sense of wonder and kinship with nature. Drawing from her extensive work in interspecies collaborative art, each chapter weaves together personal reflection, interdisciplinary research, and critical thought with new media, sound, generative, indeterminacy, and other art methods. The threads converge on this main point: the need to move away from anthropocentrism and towards ecological understanding through reciprocity and biophilia. The local journeys in each chapter are guided by more-than-human ways of knowing, which provide an expanded sense of the world and underscore the imperative to act. This book invites readers to step into other worlds, re-sense life, and re-think their relationship with the planet and all of its inhabitants. In proposing an expanded field of aesthetics, Andreyev offers new applied approaches from interspecies art to help shape and evolve human outlooks, emotions, and actions.
    In this highly original book, Julie Andreyev explores agency and consciousness through her encounters with other lifeforms—companion dogs, wild birds, mineral beings, plant life, and forest communities—to illuminate the ways creativity can play a part in generating a renewed sense of wonder and kinship with nature. Drawing from her extensive work in interspecies collaborative art, each chapter weaves together personal reflection, interdisciplinary research, and critical thought with new media, sound, generative, indeterminacy, and other art methods. The threads converge on this main point: the need to move away from anthropocentrism and towards ecological understanding through reciprocity and biophilia. The local journeys in each chapter are guided by more-than-human ways of knowing, which provide an expanded sense of the world and underscore the imperative to act. This book invites readers to step into other worlds, re-sense life, and re-think their relationship with the planet and all of its inhabitants. In proposing an expanded field of aesthetics, Andreyev offers new applied approaches from interspecies art to help shape and evolve human outlooks, emotions, and actions.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Dogs 
 Dog lessons
 Early days 
 Dog communications 
 Communication ethics 
 Transformation 
 EPIC_Tom 
Crows and Stones 
 A gift from a crow 
 Good neighbours 
 Crow mind and narrative ethics 
 Stone communications 
 Stone aesthetics 
 Ruins 
 Other gifts 
 Crow Stone Tone Poem 
 New gift, new art 
Salmon and River 
 Salmon lesson 
 River 
 The Adams River spawning grounds 
 Salmon migration projects 
 Fish ways of knowing 
 Salmon People 
Forest 
 Dawn 
 The forest 
 Life’s beginnings 
 Phyto-fungal-communications 
 Interspecies indeterminacy and biophilic attention 
 Anthrophony 
 Old trees 
 Biophilia 
Afterword
Acknowledgements