What would a more caring approach to environmental policies look like? This was the initial guiding question for this project on the sociodigital futures of rivers.
We wanted to work with art-based methods, to explore embodied and emotional relationships to rivers. We wanted to do so with a transdisciplinary group of people, all interested in rivers for different reasons. The mix involved social and environmental scientists, community organisers, policy-makers and artists.
The funding offered by Brigstow, allowed us to organise our first workshop. On a cold February day, we gathered at Netham Lock and began the day exploring some sensory tuning practices with Simon Whitehead. We then discovered an incredibly rich sound landscape with Kathy Hinde. Kathy took us on an audio-walk, connecting and augmenting the sounds of the river with its history and biology. We then walked to the Barton Hill UoB microcampus. There, Emma Blake Morsi invited us to question how we think about futures of rivers from a variety of perspectives, using AI generated prompts to map our thinking.
One of the things that stood out for all participants was the uniqueness of starting these conversations from a space of experience, emotions and embodiment rather than from a purely discursive and intellectual set-up. Many of the feedbacks we got highlighted how this approach recalibrated how they thought about rivers.
In particular, in a context of ever-growing environmental datafication, the workshop raised a lot of questions around how a river is known and how to value different forms of knowledge (local, situated, embodied as well as objectified through data) in environmental policy-making.
From this set of question, we would now like to bring this project to its next stage, taking inspiration from experiential design methods. It would involve more in-depth explorations of what sociodigital futures scenarios our different “river experts” (in the wider sense) imagine for natural bodies of water. We would then like to work on materialising these visions to embody fragments of these possible futures. This phase could involve immersive experiences through sound creations, embodied experiences and/or virtual or augmented reality technologies. In the final phase, the engagement of participants with the immersive experience would lead to further conversations about the implications of these futures and what could materialise them in practices within communities, research and policy-making.
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