Symbiotic Stories

In Summer 2022, I joined forces with critical designers Nirit Binyamini Ben Meir and Liina Lember for a one-week collaborative residency at spudWORKS art gallery. Set against the New Forest National Park, one of the remaining commons in the British Isles, we embarked on a period of peer-led learning and creative ideation.

Slowing down to tune into how we relate to our surroundings and the notion of the commons, we sketched, wrote, and shared emerging ideas. This process of inquiry and reflection led to the creation of a manifesto, which was subsequently incorporated into a course on Information Experience Design (IED) at the Royal College of Art.

We approached the topic of symbiosis as a prompt for rethinking home environments as shared with microbial and more-than-human communities. Our experiments with AI image generation as an artistic and speculative research method allowed us to rapidly generate visuals of altered home environments, which could then catalyse a discussion about commensual kinships across species.

We invite you to read our manifesto below slowly. Perhaps take a breath between each line...

We are grateful to spudWORKS for hosting our art-research residency and a-n The Artist's Information Company for supporting this project through their bursary program. A copy of the Manifesto can be downloaded here.