D.3.1 Planetary Enchantment: Human-Animal Entanglements in Victoria Vesna’s Octopus Brainstorming

Cristina Albu, University of Missouri

In 2015, artist Victoria Vesna collaborated with scientist Mark Cohen on staging Octopus Brainstorming, a performative installation based on EEG technology which explores a long-lasting philosophical dilemma concerning humans’ ability to envision the experience of other sentient beings. Two participants wore octopus-shaped crowns with dangling arms while their brainwave rhythms were made visible to the audience through colored lights and sounds. When participants entered a meditative state, the visual and acoustic signals synchronized to indicate mental attunement. In the background, video projections of octopuses enhanced the longing for connection to these intelligent invertebrates whose nervous systems are distributed across their limbs. Unlike most artworks based on biofeedback, Vesna’s project prioritized thinking about inhabiting a different cognizant body over pondering human abilities for regulating neural oscillations. By generating affective and cognitive engagement, it elicited an enhanced consciousness of relations that surpass species boundaries.

In this paper, I examine how Vesna’s Octopus Brainstorming generates planetary enchantment by merging scientific inquiry into brain-to-brain communication with speculation on human and animal consciousness. I explore the relation of Vesna’s works to ecofeminist practices built on open-ended collaboration, as well as to Roy Ascott’s theory of “planetary technoetics,” which suggests that the convergence of technological and biological media can expand consciousness and enhance connectivity. I argue that while the work may fall short of enabling participants to understand the sentience of octopuses, it successfully inspires mindfulness by challenging misconceptions about body-mind relations and self-centered models of consciousness. Through intermingling metaphorical thinking with scientific facts, Vesna heightens awareness of the way humans modulate their perception of the world in tandem with others.

D.3.2 Low and Slow, a performance-lecture: Exploring interspecies awareness and embodied practices through Freediving

Ella Tetrault, York University

As an introduction to Wet Ontologies, Sternburg and Peters quote writer William Langewiesche’s Atlantic Article Anarchy at Sea:

In July 2020, I began the process of learning how to freedive as a way to speculate what, in practice, living in an ocean world may mean. Freediving, although referred to in certain contexts as an extreme sport due to the risk of drowning, involves slowing your heart rate by reaching a meditative state with the intention of holding one's breath for long periods underwater. As famous freediver and television host Umberto Pelizzari quotes, “The scuba diver dives to look around. The freediver dives to look inside.”

Performance scholar and environmental activist Una Chaudhuri identifies “embodiment, presence, process, event [and] force” as common interests between human-animal studies and performance. Chaudhuri cites several human-animal collaborative performance projects by artists that she believes cultivates the “enhanced ecological and interspecies consciousness that the Anthroprocene demands.” Like Chaudhuri, I see performance and video as excellent places to foster interspecies awareness. I am interested in exploring associative worlds through intersubjective and embodied forms of knowing and, to use post-humanist scholar Ron Broglio’s term, the non-verbal “surface encounters” we have with other species. My particular artistic and academic research is currently entrenched in how we interact, identify and relate to other species, particularly marine mammals. This lecture-performance explores my experience so far in learning how to be a freediver. Through-video and auto-theory, I will dive into the potential for freediving as a tool for my own practice-based research and as an embodied, performative practice that can lead to a deeper understanding of the ocean and its inhabitants.

D.3.3 Noticing Enchantment and Denial in Ecological Entanglements

Kristie MacDonald, University of Guelph

This presentation will illuminate my current research concerning the history of human presence on Antarctica. From the perspective of a visual artist engaged in research-creation I will use visual artifacts (including archival photographs, online images, press ephemera, advertising, and artworks) as touchstones for a discussion of the environmental imapacts of human occupation and travel on the continent in recent decades. I will use visual and material analysis of these artifacts as the basis for a critique of the complex geopolitical circumstances of Antarctica, an extraterritorial space (subject to governance by treaties between nations that are often at odds), and its status as a socio-cultural symbol of climate change in the Anthropocene.

In the introduction to the anthology Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet it’s editors Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing et al. suggest – “living in a time of planetary catastrophe begins with a practice at once humble and difficult: noticing the worlds around us.” The entanglement of people and place in Antarctica involves a network of international treaties, transportation logistics, and wealth that requires further consideration. Contemporary fascination with Antarctica in the sciences, art, popular culture, and contemporary nature tourism is rife with contradictions of enchantment and denial. The researchers, cultural producers, and tourists experiencing global interconnectedness through in situ experiences of Antarctic ecosystems necessitate long distance plane travel, and unsustainable practices of shipping food and goods.

As suggested by anthropologist Peter Schweitzer the...

How humans choose to inhabit Antarctica (as well as which humans inhabit Antarctica), and the material culture produced as a result of this occupation are the means by which the continent is historicized and understood. In an effort to notice, following from Tsing’s prompt, I will unpack the types of image-making, history-making, and storytelling embodied in the visual artifacts employed within my presentation, working to link narratives of polar preservation and destruction.