More-than-Human Dérive is inspired by the Situationist International’s artistic strategies, including their flaws. Dérive, or ‘drift’ is an invitation to people to “drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there” (Guy Debord).
More-than-Human Dérive interweaves more-than-human stories and perspectives to imagine our shared feral futures. Through drifting, we might augment sensing and knowing what surrounds us to include more-than-human stories, ‘voices,’ and perspectives by exploring new and (re-)mixing existing ways of being-and/as-moving(-with).
Digital data and algorithms increasingly play a key role in making sense of the present and making future decisions. “[T]hese algorithmic futures … include interactions in which citizens are reduced to patterns of data in automatized and modulated governance processes. As algorithmic decision-making is increasingly embedded – often without sufficient consultation with those who may be affected by it – in and across the public and private systems, participatory imagining and designing of such systems demands that we address complex new questions” (Choi, Forlano & Kera) in what we do.
The initial version of the More-than-Human Dérive drew upon Urban Forest open data managed by the City of Melbourne and now also includes urban tree datasets from cities like Helsinki and Barcelona, as well as specific places like Hyytiälä (SMEAR II) and Cerro Seco (Ciudad Bolivar). Other “creatures” than trees can also be added to the map. By inviting people to share stories using different kinds of media, sensory impressions, and personal expressions, we hope to entangle existing datasets with ones that question and obscure the currently collected and available – mostly quantitative – data about creatures in, around, and as different places.
Some data are deliberately made ambiguous. For example, some creatures appear on the map during specific local times; the whisper locations are randomly distributed within two degrees latitude and longitude of one of the thirty Global Cities, in a hope to raise questions about power, values, and structural inequalities in the global landscape.
With More-than-Human Dérive, we hope to playfully encourage people to join us in this questioning through drifting across cyber-physical spaces, so that we can create spaces for different relations, to imagine and co-create more-than-human futures. We believe this requires us to become feral creatures. We found inspirations from and applied the “drifty” ways the Situationist International challenged the established urban systems through creative engagement. We are hopeful that further iterations of More-than-Human Dérive will deepen and diversify means of troubling across scales, and importantly, imagining and care-full action towards more-than-human futures.
Credits and acknowledgements
We respectfully acknowledge the Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung people of the eastern Kulin Nations, upon whose unceded lands Melbourne’s Urban Forest and this project is situated. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging, whose knowledges and ongoing practices of care for Country have been attuned to the ‘more-than-human’ for tens of thousands of years.
A ‘forest’ of humans, their experiences, and knowledge has informed, shaped, and provided rich humus for this project to grow in. We are particularly grateful to our participants and contributors who joined us over three initial workshops to tangle and untangle ideas of drifting, forest encounters, and explore different ways we might invite others to encounter feral urban creatures.
Feral Creatures Currently Roaming
Jaz Hee-jeong Choi (RMIT, Australia)
Lachlan Sleight (RMIT, Australia)
Andrea Botero (Aalto University, Finland)
Markéta Dolejšová (Aalto University, Finland)
Workshop participants and project contributors
Marco Amati (RMIT, Australia)
Cristina Ampatzidou (RMIT, Spain)
Isabel Beavers (SUPERCOLLIDER, US)
Andrea Botero (Aalto University, Finland)
Ruth Catlow (Furtherfield, UK)
Kelly Chan (RMIT, Australia)
Allison Chan (Peril Magazine, Australia)
Ying-Lan Dann (RMIT, Australia)
Markéta Dolejšová (Aalto University, Finland)
Giuliana Leslie (City of Melbourne, Australia)
Siobhan McCarthy (RMIT, Australia)
Juli Sikorska (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)
Hui-Anne Tan (City of Melbourne, Australia)
Ana Tiquia (RMIT, Australia)
Eva Tausig (Superflux, UK/India)
Helen Walpole (RMIT, Australia)
Funding and support
This project was also supported by CreaTures, a three-year EU Horizon 2020 project under grant agreement No 870759. CreaTures explores the power of creative practices to move the world towards sustainable futures.
The original version of the More-than-human Dérive was supported by Melbourne Knowledge Week, City of Melbourne, and the European Union.
Event Partners
RMIT University, Australia and Europe
Aalto University, Finland
Supported by
