Institutional Fieldworking:
Workshop and Alternative Data Analysis (ADA) Roundtable
Thursday 23 November 2023
Experimental Studio, Lipman Building, Northumbria University
Jamie Allen/Feral Practice/Patrick Randolph-Quinney/
Kate Randall/Nastassja Simensky/Rob Smith
It is unsurprising that in an age of ecological and social precarity there has been an increased awareness of the significance of interdisciplinary integration within academic research. Diverse collaborations and productive exchanges between multiple backgrounds and fields of research are not only addressing common concerns but collectively exploring alternative methods and approaches. For decades conversations between art and other disciplines have developed into formulated interdisciplinary engagements. Similarly, the disciplines of environmental and forensic science are inseparable from interdisciplinary research; recognising the value of multiple perspectives and practices to not only confront critical environmental and climate issues but for new knowledge making and understanding. But what are the approaches that artists have adopted to transfer their practices into an interdisciplinary knowledge-producing milieu and how might a convergence between two inherently interdisciplinary fields – environmental science and artistic practice – afford greater interdisciplinary understandings in relation to ecological thinking?
Institutional Fieldworking is a one-day event supported by Northumbria-Sunderland AHRC Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT), that brings artistic research together with multi-disciplinary environmental science research (modern and palaeoenvironments, climate modelling, forensic, anthropology, archaeology and taphonomy). The daytime will include several workshops that aim to offer an exploration of interdisciplinary working, methods and collaborations within academic and practice-based research. They will also consider how multiple perspectives on fieldwork(ing) activities might intersect creatively and ecologically. An evening Alternative Data Analysis (ADA) roundtable invites several researchers across disciplines to share and analyse their data as an opportunity to explore new convergences and understandings. With a distinct focus on environmental and ecological thought both sessions ask how an exercise in ‘institutional fieldworking’ might enable equitable practice and space for conceptual collaborative exploration and interdisciplinary exchange.
Image credits: Top left to right: 1) Image courtesy of Patrick Randolph Quinney (Professor of Forensic Science, Northumbria University 2) Jamie Allen, The Flows Shall Not be Contained, 2021 3) Image courtesy of Nastassja Simensky Bottom left to right 4) Feral Practice, M-Ant-Ra, 2019/2022: HD video and installation of painting-forms 5) Rob Smith, Planktochrome, 2022 6) Image courtesy of Nastassja Simensky
The workshops (09:00 - 17:15) are aimed at postgraduate and post-doctoral students/researchers with an interest in practice-based research methods. Refreshments and light lunch provided.
The Alternative Data Analysis (ADA) roundtable (18:00 –20:00) is open to all.
Leading through artistic practice, the workshops propose Northumbria University as our ‘field.’ In this space we will investigate cross-disciplinary research and practice through four workshops and an Alternative Data Analysis (ADA) roundtable, engendering a ‘thinking-and-doing together’ that aims to generate more than the sum of its parts:
Rob Smith
Phytoplankton: micro-scale actants, geomorphic effects
This workshop will centre around an apparatus that monitors the exchange of carbon dioxide gas between phytoplankton and the participants in the room. This will provide a starting point for discursive activities that consider how these microscopic plants can scale into geomorphic agents, and the processes through which our interrelationships with them can emerge.
Image: Rob Smith, Planktochrome, 2022
Feral Practice
A multi-species campus
A workshop that engages with the site of Northumbria University and it’s more-than human entities to expand relations and converse across different categories of knowledge and understanding.
Image: Feral Practice, Slippery Segments workshop, Open School East 2019. Image credit Jules Varnedoe
Patrick Randolph-Quinney
The hidden life of bones and stones.
This workshop will focus on exploring some of the materials that fieldworkers use to reconstruct environment and activities of people in the past. Using form and function in both fossils and material culture, the workshop will focus on accessing the embedded properties of bones and stones through hands on tactile exploration of some of the oldest technologies known to humankind, and the production of Palaeolithic rock art.
Image courtesy of Patrick Randolph-Quinney (Professor of Forensic Science, Northumbria University)
Nastassja Simensky
Leaky Transmissions: Interdisciplinary methodologies between the fields of contemporary art, archaeology and heritage.
Drawing on 'transmission' and 'interference' this practical workshop will use sound recording to think beyond artistic tropes of ‘excavation’ or ‘ruin’ to reflect on the discipline of archaeology itself, as one of a range of modes of knowledge production that can inform embedded, place-specific, spatial and experimental art practices.
Image: Nastassja Simensky, Ythanceaster: Atoms on the Wall, 2022, moving image (still). Image courtesy the artist.
An Alternative Data Analysis (ADA) Roundtable
(18:00 – 20:00) Experimental Studio, Lipman Hub, Northumbria University, Newcastle
Jamie Allen/ Kate Randall
We live in an era of ‘Big Data’ where processes of digitisation and datafication are embedded in all realms of existence and activity. As such, multiple ethico-political issues surround the creation and production of data that we use in our lives and in our research.
This round table discussion is an opportunity for people across disciplines to come together to think playfully, expansively, and critically about the data, datasets, media and fieldwork methods that they use. The workshop aims to produce new perspectives to help us think about ideas of global urgency such as ecological precarity or social crisis. As a starting point, artist, Jamie Allen and scientist Kate Randall, will each, in turn, analyse their data by focussing on an artefact that resonates with their research, sharing anecdotes and stories from fieldwork, processes, and collaborations. Collectively, we will then ask questions and seek new convergences and threads of thinking through data.
Top image: Jamie Allen, These Flows Shall Not Be Contained, 2021.
Bottom Image: Kate Randall, fieldwork in the Hengill Valley, Iceland, Summer 2016. Photo credit: Hannah Prentice/Dr Bruno Gallo
Contributors to Institutional Fieldworking: workshop and ADA
Jamie Allen (he/him) is an artist-researcher and organiser occupied with the resonances between metabolisms, ecologies, technologies, infrastructures, and institutions. He makes experiments and research, writing and media, material artworks and events, encounters and workshops, talks and platforms for publishing and public-making. He is occupied with how technologies and media affect psychic, social and material and natural ecologies. Most often in collaboration, he creates experimental, extra-disciplinary extra-versions, evolving as texts, events, workshops, media and physical artworks. His work engages with infrastructures, science and technology and media studies through the means of experimental art, media and design in interaction with natural and human sciences (ecology, geology, geography, ethnography, anthropology).
Jamie was born in Canada, lives in Europe and is Senior Researcher at the Critical Media Lab Basel, having previously held posts as Canada Research Chair in Infrastructure, Media and Communications at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NXCAD), Head of Research with the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID), and Assistant Director of Culture Lab, Newcastle University, UK.
Feral Practice (Fiona MacDonald) is an artist and researcher who works with human and nonhuman beings as Feral Practice to create art projects and interdisciplinary events that develop ethical and imaginative connection across species boundaries. Often people set up a divide between human and nonhuman being, and between different categories of knowledge and understanding. Feral Practice aims to converse across these barriers. Their research draws on artistic, scientific and subjective knowledge practices to explore diverse aesthetics and create suggestive spaces of not knowing nature.
Rob Smith PhD is a visual artist and researcher based in Newcastle Upon Tyne. His practice applies digital tools and material processes to explore new approaches to sited and situated art practices and investigate complex understandings of human interactions with their environment. He has exhibited works, undertaken residencies and commissions nationally and internationally, showing work with Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, Siobhan Davies Studios, London, Den Frie Copenhagen & IMT Gallery and worked with many project partners including National Trust, Lux, Camden Arts Centre, Flat Time House as well as various academic institutions. He was recently awarded a practice-based PhD for his thesis, Composing Doggerland; How can the North Sea inform new approaches to situated arts practices in the context of the Anthropocene?
Nastassja Simensky is an artist based in Nottingham and Essex. Her artistic practice uses fieldwork to explore how complex issues around history and heritage, power and governance, ecology and extraction are crystallised in specific geographies. She often works collaboratively with artists and non-artists, including archaeologists, powerplant workers, musicians and ham radio enthusiasts, to make authored and co-authored artworks. Previously, these have included: place-specific performances on boats, in quarries, and inside a 7th century chapel; amateur radio broadcasts to transmit and publish text and image; sound work for radio and installation; films; and poetic texts. Her current PhD research, between Slade and The Institute of Archaeology (UCL), explores the potential of collaborative fieldwork between artists and archaeologists.
Dr Patrick Randolph-Quinney (Associate Professor of Forensic Science) is a Biological and Forensic Anthropologist from Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. He is Group Leader of Northumbria University's Forensic Science Research Group (northumbria.ac.uk) His broad interests concern form and function in the skeleton and the reconstruction of archaeological behaviour in the recent (forensic) and deep past. He is a specialist in the application of forensic taphonomy and thanatology (the science of death and post-mortem processes) into both forensic practice and the Evolutionary Anthropology of the deep past. He has a background in palaeoanthropology and archaeology and spent much of his early academic life working on the biological and cultural evolution of the genus Homo during the Middle Pleistocene. In recent years he has been working in the field of forensic anthropology and human identification. He has extensive casework experience in both forensic anthropology and archaeology in the UK and sub‐Saharan Africa, including archaeology of fatal fires. He is an experienced field worker and conducts fieldwork in Middle Pleistocene palaeo-archaeological deposits in the Limpopo region of South Africa and is Co-Director of the Makapansgat Archaeological Landscape Project.
Kate Randall is a molecular ecologist, Lecturer with the Forensic Science team at Northumbria as part of the Environmental Forensic Research Group. Within her research she extracts genetic information (DNA and RNA) from environmental samples (e.g., soil, plant roots, sediment, freshwater, air), identifying and quantifying communities, to study ecological responses across a range of geographical, environmental and management scenarios. Predominantly, her research has focused on studying the effects of climate change, urbanisation and agricultural management on microbial communities. An additional branch of her research focuses on the use of environmental DNA (eDNA) as a tool for biomonitoring key endangered species such as the freshwater pearl mussel. Her research spans spatial scales, from small and controlled lab settings, to semi-controlled mesocosms and large-scale field sampling, working within interdisciplinary fieldwork teams, travelling to a range of locations, from UK and Ireland to the Arctic and South Africa.
Both the workshop and ADA are organised by Laura Harrington, artist and postdoctoral researcher for CNoS (The Cultural Negotiation of Science) within the Department of Arts at Northumbria University. It is scheduled as part of the festival programme Institutional Fieldworking: CNoS@10, marking the tenth anniversary of CNoS research group. It builds on Harrington’s research interests in the capacity of artistic methods to support new forms of ecological thinking. It also expands on her work with CNoS, involving conversations between artistic practice and environmental forensic research, to support new shared knowledge making practices.
Institutional Fieldworking is a collaboration between The Cultural Negotiation of Science research group (CNoS) and the Forensic Science Research Group, within the Department of Applied Sciences at Northumbria University. It is supported by Northumbria University and funded by the Northumbria-Sunderland AHRC Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Art and Design, in which Harrington is an alumna. With thanks to Kate Egan, Fiona Crisp, Christine Borland and Patrick Randolph Quinney at Northumbria University.
For more information or if wanting to attend the workshop contact:
laura2.Harrington@northumbria.ac.uk. The workshop is limited to 10 places, ADA is open to all.
Events are free but please book for both.
