This course focuses on the production of artistic experiments driven by research in art and changing ecologies.

How can we listen more deeply to the adapting environment in which we live? How can we attune our senses to the earth we inhabit?

How can technology help us cross different perspectives and realities? How can we grasp the changing bodies we are becoming? And how can we better communicate with the world around us?

Our physiology - and perhaps our psyche - limits our ability to listen to our non-human kins and the world in which we live. Compared to many other species, humans are poor listeners. Below the lower end of human hearing is deep infrasound: the realm of thunder and tornadoes, elephants and whales. Many creatures can sense and communicate in infrasound, which travels easily over long distances, through air and water, earth and stone.

The deepest infrasound is produced by the planet itself. If you could tune into the Earth's infrasound, you could hear the rumble of calving icebergs, the howl of a volcano, or the roar of a typhoon halfway around the world.

And if you think of visual communication like bioluminescence, we humans do not always see what other species can see. But humanity is beginning to expand its ability to tune in. Digital technologies, so often associated with our alienation from nature, offer us the opportunity to listen to non-humans in powerful ways that revive our connection to the natural world.

In this practice-theory seminar we will explore issues of terrestrial technologies and how artists express the impact of late capitalism on our bodies, weaving personal memories through technologies of planetary healing rituals. Is it possible to feed AI with plant intelligence and indigenous cosmology rather than just human rationality?

The aim is to explore looking at, dreaming of and listening to the world we could build, and the joy and liberation that we have the potential to achieve.

The course is divided into 5 chapters

1. The Sounds of Life

2. Spatiality in an era of Surveillance Capitalism

3. Experiments in Imagining Otherwise

4. Lessons on Survival from our Ancestors

5. New work - assignment.

Students will be introduced to digital landscape scanning / world building and explore the basic elements and possibilities of augmented reality in a workshop led by artist Benedikt Terwiel.

We will also visit and explore a site in Brandenburg (Mittenwalde), one of the largest marshlands around Berlin, where curator/artist Vlado Velkov is in the process of creating a utopian „Water Art Association“ in the ruins of a former colliery building, next to a flooded former coal mine.

This site functions for us as a place of experimentation and possibility for the creation of a site-specific / AR work.

_Literature:

The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants By Karen Bakker

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff

Attunement: Form in Motion by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Big Trouble in Biology by Lynn Margulis

Margulis, Autopoesis, and Sympoiesis by Scott Gilbert and Bruce Clarke

Climate Chaos: Lessons on Survival from Our Ancestors by Brian Fagan, Nadia Durrani · 2021

Experiments in Imagining Otherwise by Lola Olufemi, 2021

Can the Monster Speak?, Paul B. Preciado, 2021

Treatise on the Whole-World: by Édouard Glissant, 2020

The Twittering Machine, Richard Seymour, 2019

The Hidden Dimension, Edward T. Hall, 1966

Is There Any World to Come? Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, 2015