What Raven Saw - an overGround:underStory

The overGround:underStory project provides a platform for knowing through doing. A large part of this doing takes the form of the invitation we made to "slow down, observe ,record, ask questions and share" as part of the Urban Field Naturalist Project. How do we come to an understanding of the networks that are now woven between the physical and digital of more-than-human ecologies through centering these steps in creative practice based research?

Thinking critically about the technologies we are presented with as being 'inevitable' involves spending time with them in order to come to a deeper understanding of them. "What Raven Saw" is then described as a "more-than-human collaboration between myself and my silicon & carbon kin, including wombats, the local ravens & other bird-life, the GPT-3 large language model & the Stable Diffusion Model." This is a description that should be read critically and along side an understanding of the dangerous and unethical framing, positioning and development of these technologies (and the people behind them). [A brief outline of some of the networks involved here, and the money/power structrues involved - from Timnit Gebru in Wired] Part of the knowing through doing then is to prioritise how to not lose site of this critical approach when working directly with the systems under the critical lens.

video documentation for the spoken word / slide performance of "What Raven Saw [an] overGround:underStory". Performed under the 48:9 screen at UTS Central (Broadway, Sydney) for the School of Design's, Visual Knowledges research group's - "Visualising the Invisible: Image making in climate communication symposium".