Paper: overGround:underStory — more-than-human storytelling with silicon and carbon kin

Presented at ISEA 2024 in Brisbane. This paper investigates how creative practice can facilitate multispecies storytelling by positioning the practitioner as a medium or demiurge—an intermediary in a vast, unknowable network. In doing so, it invites practitioners to reflect on the Urban Field Naturalist's "Few Simple Steps": slow down, observe, record, ask questions, and share.

Abstract

This paper focuses on “overGround:underStory”, an ongoing series of experiments exploring the role of creative and speculative design and media art practice in understanding the uses and implications of established and emerging technologies within broader, more-than-human ecologies. It investigates more-than-human storytelling by positioning the creative practitioner as storyteller, medium or demiurge—an intermediary in a wider network. It looks to materials, methods, and contexts to seek an understanding of broader ecological networks in which we are all implicated—these networks being both physical and digital in nature.

Ultimately, this paper is part of an ongoing exploration of material practices that attempt to decentre the practitioner while at the same time remaining ethically and morally answerable to the outcomes.

Keywords: design research, more-than-human, digital ecologies, machine-learning, practice-based research, network ecologies

paper download: here