 So, now we have Kat, Kat is an artist and she's making different kinds of installations and performances that explore how we humans connect to the environment. And she's going to tell you about that. So give her a warm applause, please, for Kat. Good. Hello, everybody. Thank you very much for the introduction, Kata. Thank you for coming to see my talk and hello to the people online. Thank you for tuning in online. So I'm going to be talking to you today about the approaches that I have been developing or some of them that I've been developing to explore the connection between ourselves and the environment. I'll be discussing installations, as Kat said, that work on the body to create an emotional response in humans to non-humans. And I'll be talking about workshops and performances where participants use techniques drawn from lots of different disciplines to investigate sort of different aspects of what we might consider outside world. So I want to give you a couple of preambles so that you know where I'm coming from. And one of those is that I'm going to be talking a lot about ourselves and the environment because that's what all my work's about. But I want to be quite clear on the fact that actually the work is interrogating those boundaries that we sort of consider there to be between ourselves and the environment. And so we have these conceptions of boundaries that are partially conceptual, partially real. So for instance we've got the skin, you know, and so the skin on one scale, you know, if I tip water on my skin I see the water mostly sort of wash off. But on a microbial or a molecular scale, actually my skin is very, very permeable and it's letting in and out things that aren't what I consider to be myself all the time, right? And so then my body is actually really quite a lot in constant flux. And so that kind of exploration of the diffuseness of the boundaries between the self and other are actually fundamental to the work that I do. And so when I talk about, you know, myself and the environment, excuse the hateful air quotes, actually what I'm talking about is those things with very, very permeable boundaries that are constantly being redefined and that's why the subtitle for the talk is multiple nonages and redefinition of the self because that's what I'm exploring with all this work. So I'm going to try and skip the slides on. I've had a bit of a computer malfunction. There we go. Let's just do it this way. So the second preamble is, and I don't like being anchored to things very much, but the second preamble is to explain sort of where I'm coming from in less conceptual terms. And so I like to think of myself as a person. And I also have the amazing opportunity to be anchored as a cultural fellow at the University of Leeds Cultural Institute where I'm a cultural fellow in Arts and Sciences. I also have been for this year the artist in the Arctic for the Friends of Scott Polo Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, Bonham's and One Ocean Expeditions who sent me into the Arctic this year and I'm going to be talking about that a little bit later. And I have a long-term residency at the Department of Chemistry in University College London and I lecture and I'm going to be talking about one of the projects that I work on with my students. I lecture at the Bachelor's in Arts and Sciences at University College London as well. And so one of the reasons that it's important to tell you about all of these anchors is because a lot of the work that I do is facilitated by or funded by some of these institutions and the people that I work with at these institutions are hugely instrumental in shaping the work that I do. So props to them, they're awesome. So this is the central question that I'm interested in and I hope that you're also going to be interested in it and the way that I've been trying to answer it. So we know a lot about environmental issues in general and specifically climate change. There's a lot of data out there, there's a scientific consensus about our parts in contributing to climate change and other environmental issues and yet in every scale from individual through to global governance we are not making significant inroads into tackling these problems and I know that sounds terribly judgmental but really it's about time we did something, don't we think? So I was wondering like is there something else that we need to know to galvanise ourselves into action and how do we need to know it? And this is a personal question for me as well, right? Because I've been working on environmental problems in one capacity or another for my whole career and I've been engaged with environmental issues since I was a child. So and yet still sometimes I fly, I don't take the train sometimes, I'm not blameless like many of us are also not blameless. So it's partially, you know, a personal exploration into these issues that I'm going to be talking to you about today. So, on to the kind of first approach. One of the things that I was really interested in is the role of emotion in kind of creating a different type of knowledge within ourselves. One that perhaps might motivate us a little bit more than the facts that we're bombarded with quite often. And when it comes to questions of climate change and other environmental problems often we have these responses that are kind of demarcated as either anxiety or disgust, you know. These are what are considered to be our primary emotional responses to these kinds of issues. And I was wondering is there a way to create a more sympathetic and a more sophisticated environmental relationship with the environment. And so one of the kind of concepts that really underpins this work is this idea of touching the other and as you can see there's been a lot written on it and this is a fantastic quote from Karen Barad which is to say what if it is only in the encounter with the inhuman, the liminality of no-singness in all its liveliness, its conditions of impossibility that we can truly confront our inhumanity that is our actions lacking compassion. So I thought maybe if we want to foster a bit more compassion for the environment maybe I should try touching the inhuman or the non-human in the case of the work that I'm going to be telling you about now. And so I want to tell you about the coral empathy device which is my attempt to touch the non-human that is coral. The coral empathy device is an immersive installation. As you can see it's worn over the heads and the aim of it is to indeed engender empathy with coral in the marine environment. It's not aiming to replicate the conditions of coral in the marine environment. What it's trying to do is to look at specifically anthropogenic consequences for coral and then to create an environment for humans that should engender a similar type of response without anthropomorphising coral or ascribing to it emotions that are human in any way. So I'm going to tell you more about the coral empathy device shortly but first I want to show you this video which I think should, because it's something that you have to experience and generally it should be in an embodied way but you're sitting in a lecture hall and we don't have it here so this is the best proxy that I hope will clarify with a bit of context. As you can see the coral empathy device takes you into this kind of environment where you're surrounded by sound and you're also surrounded by smells and vibrations and that's what you experience when you put the helmet on. I'll talk a tiny bit about that in a little minute but I just wanted to clarify sort of why coral, why did I pick coral for this and actually so coral for a start is an icon of our environmental impact, this year was the second year in a row where there was a significant bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef and without sort of time in between these bleaching events the reef doesn't have an ability to recover itself and so you get a kind of increased complete death of the coral reef and that's happening partially because of climate change and warming but it's also happening because of acidification and plastic pollution in the environment and so it's in this kind of beauty that it has and precariousness it's this fantastic kind of, I don't want to use the word fantastic because it's too happy, it's this very powerful icon of anthropogenic impacts on the environment. We also have a huge amount of kind of literature about coral and it's meaning to us but one of the things that I find kind of most evocative about it is the fact that in some ways it can be considered as quite a nice analogue for or metaphor for humanity as well we have a relationship to it even though it looks nothing like us in as much as you know coral is a steward of a lot of marine life you know the coral reef so wonderful ecosystems that foster lots and lots of different species it's they're very biodiverse and just like we're stewards of our environment you can consider that coral is a steward of its environment too. Similarly you know we as humans are actually not just human cells I'm sure you've all heard all of the statistics flying around about you know how much of our body is also a microbiome full of bacteria and fungi all working together and coral lives in symbiosis with algae in much the same way and the just as our microbiome can affect our decisions and our ability to digest and you know lots of other things about keeping us alive and the way that we live coral has this symbiotic relationship happening within it all the time as well and you know what that speaks to for me is a kind of reliance on the other that's actually you know materially embodied right so the other thing about coral that I think is super interesting and it's the case of a lot of marine life and that's one of the reasons I've been focusing on marine life for the past couple of years is that coral has a decentralized nervous system and I think that's quite interesting when you're when we're thinking about kind of social structures for humans you know because we have we work as an organism ourselves all together you know and I think that kind of thinking about our own decentralization moving away from thinking of ourselves as brains with a body that helps move the brain about but also thinking more about us as individuals as part of a whole is part of the kind of step change that really might be quite useful if we want to change our attitude towards living in the world and then maybe you know live in a more sympathetic way with the outside world including other people in it and including non-human entities as well and so one of the reasons that I take away so with the coral empathy device as you saw in the video it goes black when you put it on you can't see anything when you put it on and one of the reasons that I did that was because I wanted to focus on kind of on other senses to investigate and experiment with the concept of embodied knowledge show embodied knowledge is it's a phenomenological thing where you think about doing without representing so it's kind of what you might call but probably shouldn't instinctive or automatic reactions in some ways but it's more about responding to the physical environment without creating a mental model with how about how you're going to respond beforehand now embodied knowledge is super interesting in and of itself but shogo to who is a very interesting Japanese phenomenologist has been writing about how embodied knowledge helps to create sympathy empathy with the other through integral reality and as he says here in this reference paper through these embodied interactions into subjective meanings are created and directly shared between the self and the other without being mediated by mental representations so this is what I am trying to aim for with the coral empathy device using an artistic implement to create these mediated interactions between the human who's experiencing it and the other which is a bit of a step but I think it's been working we'll see yes I think that's probably all about shogo and so if you want to be quick plug if you want to see more about the kind of background to this approach that I've been talking about I just over Christmas this paper that I wrote about has been published in the Oxford artistic practice based research platform and this is looking at kind of a deeper look at the philosophy and a deeper look at embodied knowledge and validation of an approach that attempts essentially to create a way of communicating that is non codified so by which I mean not using language and not using the same kind of visual language that we often use particularly when we're trying to communicate about environmental issues so there have been other projects that try to create empathy with with the natural world and you're probably familiar with lots of them and a lot of them rely on visual stimuli over other embodied stimuli and my aim with the coral empathy device fundamentally was to explore what the other senses can bring to that by removing codification and looking at non measurable and tacit knowledges so and I'm going to be talking a little bit more about that kind of approach shortly but first I want to tell you a bit more about the kind of research that happened in the background to create this work and how that feeds into another approach that I use so the coral empathy device was initially conceived out of a workshop that was convened by Robertino Shebyanich for Pixel Festival. It was called the pixel deep dive underwater interception and as part of it four of us got together to run this workshop and we were looking at acoustic pollution and micro plastic pollution and so with the director of the Ur Institute Geno Shuchich I created these well we started on the on the path to create DIY chemistry protocols that could be used to look at micro plastics in the environment so I don't know who's familiar with DIY science but nobody's like looking like they're wanting to jump about and say that they are so DIY chemistry essentially is taking chemistry out of the lab and putting it into the public realm where people can do certain types of chemistry using chemicals that you can get off the shelf or off the internet rather than needing a sophisticated lab with lots of different licenses to do it and so Geno and myself both have scientific training in way way back and so we decided to have a cracker seeing if we could extract micro plastics and analyze them without the use of a sophisticated lab so we started off trying to work on kelp you know seaweed it was a bit difficult because of the like the strengths of the the biological framework in the cells so what we ended up doing was moving across to fish guts and because fish guts are a lot easier to break down and you get you know these larger identifiable particles that the fish have ingested and so we set up sushi roulette which is a project looking at micro plastics in fish and it's a multi-day workshop which in which participants are invited to work with us to use household products that can be like peroxide for dyeing your hair or drain cleaner which is has a hydroxide in it to digest the fish guts and then filter and extract them and then analyze the different size and try to use a column a density column to identify what kind of plastics those might be and fundamental to this approach is that we we do all of the DIY science we can't compare it to using the chemicals that you need to get from a lab and then we talk about the topic as a whole and the kind of socio-cultural aspects of it and then at the end of the workshop we co-design with the participants a pop-up exhibition that's open to the public and the documentation you see here is from a a workshop that we did in Norway at SNET conference in collaboration with Pixel Festival and and we used locally sourced Norwegian fish and and perhaps not surprisingly but rather sadly we found quite a lot of of micro plastics in the fish guts but then you know if you've been watching the news recently that's not at all a surprise because it's in all our tap water anyway so best to drink it out of no maybe not right so but this approach this bringing DIY chemistry together with other disciplinary approaches and then adding in co-creation is something that I've been using also for another project that I want to tell you about which is the other project mentioned in the abstract for this talk which is vital flows and vital flows is a a kind of a two-parted projects and the topic of vital flows is food and our relationship to food now all of the projects that I'm talking about here do in fact relate to to climate change and the environment you may not think that the food stuff does but it really does because what because food has a massive carbon footprint food provision has a massive carbon footprint and it's an enormous factor in social inequalities and health and this is the main reason why I wanted to focus on food it's the most easy to understand example of this diffuse boundary between ourselves and the outside world that there is because whenever we eat we take the outside world inside ourselves and then you can fill in the other end so that's vital flows and vital is the processes that we use and flows are my own artistic interpretations from partaking in those processes so I'm going to talk about vital first and there's some growing documentation on vitalfood.org about the different processes and the different tools that I'm developing with vital so if you're interested like the some of the stuff I'm going to be talking about is is up there and it's going to be you know updated more as time goes on and the yeah so I have been iterating on these processes through using them in collaboration with a community two communities so I turned this project into an undergraduate course at university college London for the arts and sciences bachelors and and we ran the first go of it last year and I'm running it again next month with a whole new intake and what we do is use not just DIY chemistry but but also other techniques like forum theater and foraging urban foraging and co-creation and mindful aesthetic eating and cultural exchange and co-creation did I say that already to explore our relationship to food and so the DIY chemistry part I should say is it's not looking for nasty things in food like the I decided with vital flow is that I wanted to celebrate I wanted to celebrate our relationship with food because there's a lot of scamongering and maybe it's time for something happy you know like it's funny I was thinking the other day I think I turned into a bit of a hippie because I was thinking you know what if we just loved each other more wouldn't that be nice yeah also that's my approach for this with food as well like what if we just celebrated the nice things about it and kind of enriched ourselves that way so what I'm looking at with the with the DIY chemistry for food is micronutrients things that are important for our health but that aren't reported on the back of a on the back of a packet you know so I developed two protocols that work fairly well for extracting micronutrients and I used we use a DIY spectrometer to characterize what we get out so we're looking at lycopene and groups of polyphenols from tomatoes and grapes respectively and it's just a start right but you can see a link off of the vital food website there's a link to the public lab documentation of the development of those protocols but essentially we're using engine starter fluids and surgical spirit to do the extractions and using a DIY spectrometer to analyze the results with spectral workbench and there's a comparison between a laboratory spectra using a UV viz machine in the UCL chemistry labs versus the DIY spectrometer and like it's a good start I think but one of the key things about sort of doing all of these processes including you know including the forum theater including cultural exchange and food diaries is that these are techniques that help to give us a sense of agency in the world because we're generating knowledge for ourselves by doing it and that's one of the reasons that I'm so committed to DIY and citizen science because it really changes not only the world of science but it changes the person who's doing it too and you get a greater sense of agency in doing it and I think you know like that's where this project stems from I wanted to find something that made all of these wonderful things that I'd been experiencing through going to hacker spaces and learning about DIY science and learning about artistic research I wanted to make that all accessible to other people who maybe hadn't come across it yet and so I thought this setting up a suite of workshops that I could do with communities which is what I do in other parts of my work too might be a good way of starting to make that sort of accessible and so we run the workshops seven workshops with the young people you can see on the top right we're out foraging in Bexton Park in east London we were working with students at Newham sixth form college and they they were super great Newham is a tricky place because it's not super well off and it's an urban food desert which means that you have to walk a lot further to get to fresh fruit and vegetables than you do to have to get to like a fast food shop and one of one of our students actually like right at the start one of the students from Newham sixth form college said that he was able to tell just by tasting it which shop the fried chicken he was eating was coming from so he'd become like really like super expert in identifying like the source of the food that was most commonly coming into his life at the end we created this exhibition which ran for a few days and what was really interesting was that you know like for the first run of this project I didn't bring in a lot of political aspects you know even though like for me it's a highly political project but what really surfaced was from the from the experiences and from the participation was this idea of accessibility of different types of food so and we didn't talk about Newham being a food desert we healthy food desert we didn't talk a huge amount about global supply chains but actually you know the the installation in the bottom right is all about accessibility of food and it covers everything from financial accessibility to cultural accessibility to physical accessibility and on the top right that's the banana journey and it's about the global supply chain and the financial considerations of banana importing and what the impacts are on the environment for that so you know these are these were the relevant questions for the young people I was working with and what was really gratifying was that it did seem to enrich how they were thinking about food so when we started off in the first workshop with the young people at Newham 61 College I asked like what are the most what's the most important thing about food and universally they answered it was the calorie content and calorie content is a highly well calories are a highly political unit right so the calorie was actually devised to be considered to be representative of the amount of fuel that a food has in it not the nutritional content not the taste just the amount of pure energy and that's not even the energy that's bioavailable it's just the energy and it was done so that factory owners could work out how much fuel their workers needed to run through a day and that that's the origin of the calorie and it's not super representative of anything that's particularly useful for the person who's eating it and so what was quite interesting was that by the end of the course the young people's attitudes to food had changed quite a lot and this is one of my favorite quotes from one of the participants and I have a diversity of them that I can share with you if you're interested and I'm putting them in a forthcoming paper but this one this one I think is beautiful I now connect with my food and experiencing it experience it using my false senses it made my heart sing to to see that because I you know it really kind of felt like there was a new aesthetic appreciation at least that was coming into this young person's experience of food and that's what I was hoping for really was to as I say celebrate our relationship with food and understand it a bit better and in so doing understand what motivates our decisions about food and then you know we can make a better judgment on on what we want to do when we're that informed so that's ah yes right and so the tools this is just a useful slide for showing the tools you know that's co-design on the on the left we've got a dream food menu in the middle actually the dream food menus are really interesting in looking at the dynamics between people because we had groups that you know groups of sort of five or six people UCL undergraduates and New Vic students together and we had some that tried to imagine completely new recipes that synthesized everybody's likes and some that were like yeah we're just going to have a menu that everyone can pick what they want off it you know so but they all managed to find some sort of nice collaborative way of of creating this dream menu to keep everybody happy on the bottom right that's the UCL students putting together a DIY spectrometer and this is an example of the one of the protocols for extracting lycopene from tomatoes this is the layout that I used which is designed to be safe and informative and easy to follow and this is online and you know if you can think of any improvements or want to use it yourself then it's up there and it's all there to be used it's it's all creative comments so go ahead basically oh right yes so naked ladies no don't look at the naked ladies look at the picture in the middle while I tell you about flows which is the other half of vital flows and this is output that I was inspired to make it's an ongoing project so there's probably going to be more coming out after this next round of interactions through the workshops but one of the things that I was really kind of interested to look at was this super normal aestheticization of food moving it into the visual realm and you know as you know from what I've been saying about the Coral Empathy device I'm really interested in this the primacy that we give to visual and what that means for how we understand knowledge and you know this the the food porn hashtag is like has massive amounts of images associated to it on social media and so I went through and found some of these food porn images and I turned them into tart cards now for those of us who didn't live in London in the 90s tart cards are what we see these young ladies having made to advertise themselves in London phone boxes and these are I mean then nowadays they have a lifespan of about top 30 minutes in a London phone box like when I first moved to London years ago they'd be there like the whole phone box would be papered with them forever but so I thought it was a fun juxtaposition to use images of food porn to like star them out using the same aesthetic and to rig up a whole load of phone numbers with appropriate voicemail messages to to receive any telephone calls and then put them up in an intervention in central London so I did that last February and before you ask I haven't listened to the voicemails I'm not sure that I actually want to but I also promised myself that I wouldn't so so that was that's tart cards as the first intervention from flows and the second I want to talk to you about is the central eating talismans and the central eating talismans are all about this kind of flux and flow of the boundaries of the self through food and I want to read to you the poem that actually that the that the placards beneath the talismans are inspired by and it's called The Mystic by DH Lawrence so yeah warning poetry they call all experience of the senses mystic when the experience is considered so an apple becomes mystic when I taste in it the summer and the snow's the wild welter of earth and the insistence of the sun all of which things I can surely taste in a good apple though some apples taste preponderantly of water wet and sour and some of too much sun breakish sweet like lagoon water that has been too much sunned if I say I taste these things in an apple I am called mystic which means a liar the only way to eat an apple is to hog it down like a pig and taste nothing this is real but if I eat an apple I like to eat it with all of my senses awake hogging it down like a pig I call the feeding of corpses and I want to say thank you to Simon Barraclough who is a poet friend of mine who when he saw the central eating talismans pointed me towards this poem which I think more adeptly than anything I can do sums up actually what I'm aiming for with vital flows so those are the talismans and so there's a whole load of talismans you take them with you and keep it with you and when you eat you use it as an icon to remind yourself of this process that you're engaging in this kind of communing with the world that you're engaging in of course we do it when we're breathing too but you know if we thought about that all the time we'd probably not get anything done so finally I want to talk to you about the project that I'm working on at the moment and I'm going to keep it quite brief but this the matter of the soul is the project that I began this year on my residency in the Arctic and I travelled to Baffin Island in Canada so the Canadian High Arctic as the first step in this project and I'm developing it now as part of my fellowship at Leeds and the matter of the soul is taking the approach used in the coral empathy device but instead of trying to create empathy with a non-human species it's trying to create empathy with an entire ecological region which is the Arctic and specifically trying to engender a feeling of dispersal and transformation and the focus is on dispersal and transformation because I wanted to think about melting in a different way and I wanted to think about migrating in a different way so the transformation between water molecules in water in ice and water molecules in seawater is a physical one the water molecules both comprise the ice or the seawater but are also affected by the emergent properties of multiple water molecules being in that state and you can consider that we humans act in the same way in our cultures so I think one of the reasons that I started thinking about this is because I emigrated here to Germany a few years ago and I noticed that there were forces acting on me but also that my presence and the presence of other migrants was changing things around me in the place where I lived and you can think about water molecules doing the same thing so you know I can specifically if you think about a water molecule in ice it's kind of sitting quite tightly held you know but it's still vibrating but you move it into water and it's got loads more motion it's kind of dancing around a lot more but it's also if you're talking about ice in the Arctic and seawater like it's also surrounded by lots of other agents that are changing how it behaves too you know because all of that sodium and chlorine flaking about all those ions are changing how it's behaving so I wanted to think about these these transitions without applying to them the sort of judgmental aspect that we normally give to effective climate change because I think that maybe that's quite a useful thing when we when we start to think about climate change actually and what our motivations are for doing things about it you know like I think it's bad but why do I think it's bad well I think it's bad mostly because in the end it's going to hurt human beings and irrevocably change the planet and and I think that you know kind of bringing ourselves back into thinking about you know like why do we care about it might be quite an interesting way forward so not very finely crafted brain thoughts coming out at you but that's because it's a work in progress so the aim with it is to use a load of recordings that I made when I was in the Arctic to create music that will be played through a sculpture in the same way as the choral empathy device a bit different and yeah and so that's that's going to happen over the next year I'm going to create it the the sounds that come out of so I'm measuring rather than making direct recordings of the water I am measuring the acidity the pH and the salinity of the water and then taking sounds from those measurements so it's also it's also a critique on the act of measurement as a way of engaging with the environment which is something that if you've watched carefully is actually an undercurrent in my work that kind of shows through in the other projects too so it's exploring that active measurement as well sonically and the sounds come out of yeah pH meters and conductivity meter that are hacked which we're initially hacked with the help of Simon Schaefer from Mono Shop in Berlin and I'm gonna play you a quite quick video that gives you an idea of some of the raw sounds so these are unedited sounds oh no hang on there we go which I hope you're gonna hear I'm gonna make a symphony out of that somehow um right and so without further ado that is me pretty much done and I'd like to answer questions because I've got time but just want to say before we get to that thank you to all of these people who are listed on here without them I wouldn't be here in front of you having had the opportunity to tell you about this work which I hope you found interesting and thank you very much for sticking with me and listening thank you very much cat we have eight minutes for questions if you have any I see there is a question in the IRC maybe we start with that and if you want to ask questions there are microphones here and there so just come to them and ask so the question from the internet is related to the beginning of to talk the part about the corals and I just read the question um in my understanding sentience is a prerequisite for empathy accurately showing compassion for an entity seems to require subjective evaluative awareness on the part of the being we empathize with would you agree and in light of that could you clarify your argument for coral sentience or in other words why does it make more sense to empathize with the coral than it would to empathize with the piece of chalk thank you very much for the question um uh you know considering that I'm now trying to empathize with an entire ecosystem I know I don't agree that there has to be sentience on the other end for empathy um my starting uh my starting point for empathy is to feel with and other um rather than to just feel for and other um but I don't think that sentience is a prerequisite for that okay thank you are there any more questions just come to the microphone please number one is next to you yes hi uh yeah first of all thanks a lot for your uh super interesting uh talk finally get a chance to actually discover your work we're friends we just never actually get to see each other and anyway learn about each other's work um so you're um yeah talking a lot about the you know sensual knowledge I don't know if you would call it that or just knowledge is that we acquire through diverse senses maybe less focused on the visual sense and I'm actually wondering because there's um well I'm aware of it since like the early 2000s this new like branch and academia that is you know the sensory turn and uh you know also going against well there's a certain like school that is in Montreal going against like you know visual like visualism and and I'm actually wondering like how you relate to uh I mean it's a it's a huge right it's a it's a huge feel but I'm yeah I'm wondering like how you see your work um relating to that and maybe maybe taking a stand or maybe you actually don't want to you know be a part of any of this movement at all I'm just curious I know it's a very large question uh but maybe you could give us like some some insight uh into that thank you for the question Lauren um so I guess yeah no it's I would say from the get-go that the works that I'm uh using to create empathy or to try to engender empathy are experiments rather than answers so they they're a form of questioning um and partially what I'm questioning is uh what the relation of these different senses has to our ability to know in different ways um and so you know I guess what you're referring to kind of relates to all sorts of things from like the the primacy of vision argument to uh different uh stratifications of knowledge and knowledge grids um which also relates to consciousness but I think what I I don't have a position on it except that um except that what I'm using is the basis for my experimentation is the work the phenomenological work um looking at embodied knowledge which is a multi sensory approach so I guess I'm playing with lots of senses and seeing both subjectively and hopefully um in collaboration objectively what answers I can find through those experiments um with the with vital there's a there's a real focus on multi sensory experience of food and um there is evidence definitely that if you pair up taste with other senses visual or um auditory senses it changes your taste perception and that's one of the things that we explore in the workshops and so um you know on that basis I would say that I'm more in the camp of uh appreciating more of the senses and appreciating the senses not in isolation any more questions yes take the microphone so um thank you for your talk there were parts of it that I mean the one particular part that I particularly resonated with me was um the poetry and it's interesting because with climate change we're often I think many people are intellectually able to engage with the topic but the challenge is often going from thinking to feeling which I look looks like something that's something that you're interested in and poetry often does that to me as does music do you find that to reach different audiences you know you've done you work with music you work with something that's more immersive and sensorial do you find that a particular medium works better or is that what what um how do you choose your medium in that context thank you for the question what a lovely question um so yes I I think that different approaches work with different people um I don't think it's very easy to generalize what's going to work with whom but um the two approaches that I'm really aiming for are these these embodied approaches and also experiential approaches um which are the workshops where we kind of explored multiple different modes of connecting with knowledge or generating knowledge um so I suppose uncritically one might call that a bit of a scattergun approach my hope is that what I do is a small contribution to lots of creative and non-creative outputs of people working to address this problem um and that I hope that people will self-select to engage with the things that touch them most in order to address it okay we have one more minute so one last question thank you for your talk I was just trying to summarize what you were saying for myself and I thought okay if I'm gonna try to tell what you're doing I could also say it's some kind of education about climate change and then I was wondering what is actually the difference between an artistic intervention and education so why is uh you use the umbrella of artistic here in this I hope this question is not offensive not at all um you have every right to raise any question that you see fit to um and uh no it's interesting because like obviously you know one of the projects happens within an education to educational environments right um I would say the difference is that I'm providing means by which to raise questions and seek your own answers in in that project rather than uh rather than kind of giving what I would consider a classical education I'm not I'm not educating people about climate change like there's a lot of information about climate change and it's all a lot clearer than what I'm doing which with uh with some of my projects is to try and work out how to create a more emotional engagement with it and with others is to try and work out how um investigating something for oneself changes the self so does that answer your question sort of um I don't know how to better answer it so maybe we can have a chat about it afterwards instead okay smashing end on the high maybe art can be educating too so maybe I'm not sure it's it's primary aim and it's certainly not my primary aim with this work either but well thank you very much for your talk I really would like to enjoy a fresh apple with my full senses away give a warm applause to cat Austin thank you