Abstract
What new questions arise when we work across the genres of artistic creation and scientific research? How can the art-science interface contribute to conversations around environmental issues? This talk engages these larger question via our project on the ecological worlds of London’s transportation canals. We will discuss our project’s mode of drawing together insights from moving image art practice, anthropology/geography, and aquatic ecology. As part of our presentation, we will screen an 18 minute art film, discuss data from our stream macro invertebrate study, and reflect on the benefits of transdisciplinary projects.

Bios
Sonia Levy is an artist and filmmaker currently based in London. Her practice engages contemporary socio-ecological urgencies at the intersection of art and science. Through this co-becoming of disciplines, she uses filmmaking to query science’s history of entanglement with the logics of Western colonial extractivism. Her work attempts to develop new practices of care that foster dialogue as a means to consider new worlds. She is the 2022 recipient of the S+T+ARTS4Water’s “The Future of High Waters” residency hosted by TBA21, and she was the 2021 commissioned artist at Radar Loughborough and Aarhus University’s Ecological Globalization Research Group. Levy was a participant in the 2020 Artquest’s Peer Forum ‘Rewilding’ at the Horniman Museum and Gardens. She has exhibited in the UK and internationally, including shows and screenings at Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris; Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris; ICA, London; BALTIC, Gateshead; Obsidian Coast, Bradford-on-Avon; Goldsmiths College, London; The Showroom, London; Pump House Gallery, London; ZKM Karlsruhe, Art Laboratory Berlin; HDKV, Heidelberg; Futura/Karlin Studios, Prague; Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge MA; Verksmiðjan á Hjalteyri, Iceland; and The Húsavík Whale Museum, Iceland. 

Heather Swanson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University, as well as Director of the Aarhus University Centre for Environmental Humanities (https://ceh.au.dk). With a long-standing interest in fish, rivers, and oceans, her current work broadly explores how political economies and ecologies are intertwined. She has been a core member of several research groups that focus on transdisciplinary methods and collaborations among the natural science, social sciences, and arts, and is a co-editor of Domestication Gone Wild: Politics and Practices of Multispecies Relations (Duke University Press) and Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Minnesota University Press). Her newest book, Spawning Modern Fish: Transnational Comparison in the Making of Japanese Salmon, is forthcoming from University of Washington Press in 2022.