Embodied Science, Small Data, and Weedy Resistance with the EPA
What visual, poetic, material, and performative interventions might help us face climate challenges and environmental (in)justices in our lived spaces?
Visualizations of data are integral to scientific inquiry and pedagogies.
Yet in the Anthropocene, how do visual storytelling and artistic interpretations make climate and environmental data legible to diverse publics?
What visual, poetic, material, and performative interventions might help us face climate challenges and environmental (in)justices in our lived spaces?
reflect on the artistic tools mobilized to explore the ecologies of data, which includes its creation, archiving, visualization, and use
how socially engaged art practices inform collaborative, public initiatives like Data Refuge.
how their own artistic practices illustrate the broader stakes of storytelling in the Anthropocene, while grappling with the challenges related to translating environmental and climate data.
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Explain Embodied Science
EXPLAIN SMALL DATA
explain Weedy Resistance
know and engage commonly overlooked and undervalued ecosystems?
How might we counteract hierarchies of knowledge that marginalize ways of knowing that fall outside of Western science?
How might we combine disciplines like ecology, choreography, and socially engaged art to advocate for ecological justice?
- The Environmental Performance Agency (EPA), is an artist collective founded in 2017 and named in response to the proposed defunding of the US Environmental Protection Agency. Appropriating the acronym EPA, our primary goal is to shift thinking around the terms “environment,” “performance,” and “agency” – using artistic, social, and embodied / kinesthetic practices to advocate for the agency of all performers co-creating our environment, specifically through the lens of spontaneous urban plants, native or migrant.
Through interactions with the more-than-human world in damaged ecosystems, we use what we call “public fieldwork” to question the data that’s been handed to us, generating new, novel streams of information: small, embodied data with a hybrid genesis and expression.
From species lists born of soil germination tests to the rate of weedy seedling emergence from sidewalk cracks, information flows into spreadsheets and databases, scores and sculptures, all issuing from our embodied research practices
It’s here that we work to sensitize ourselves beyond simple yes/no binaries, exploring sensorial, bodily and affective situations where confluences between the human cellular body and plant cellular body become a site for inquiry.
Taking choreographic directives from weedy plants, we engage questions around vegetal philosophies, colonization, immigration, botanical science, cultivation and gender.
- followed by a focus on our approach to collecting and processing information from our local habitat.
- Using the act of “filtering” {note i say filtering through an act of transmission) as a means of conveying how we sort and classify the rich range of of multisensorial data that is available in any eco-social landscape, we present a series of diagrams that map our approach.
Throughout we place an emphasis on broadening and deepening the meaning of “data” through creating situations that sensitize the body to the process of filtering information, leading to a range scores and approaches for being active in the landscape. In this context, we develop a multi-layered understanding of data drawing on intuitive exchanges between the body and the land, the wisdom of wild urban plants, and the patterns we sense as we engage in categorizing, naming, mapping, listing and spreadsheet making
In an era when data on climate change and environmental justice are disappearing, hidden or politicized beyond recognition, what does it mean to demand an expanded vision for what information might be relevant? WHAT IS RELEVANT>>..
cultivation of our bodily wisdom...How can opening the sensory field to multispecies inputs and bodily wisdom help us ground abstract data in everyday life?
“The EPA’s neighbor Milton, who has a Truck Repair business, did not get a new lease from the landlord. After 15 years in business he was forced to move. He has found a temporary place but told us that this is not easy and he may have to leave New York. Milton loves plants and we decided to rescue one of his wild plants since we know the landlord will come with the bulldozers, as he did with the other yard, and concrete the place. We transplanted the plant to the EPA Urban Weeds Community Garden.”
image of urban weeds garden map?
photographic map of the ground Christopher!!
dancing