| Title | 1. WRITING A SONG FOR AIIA |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | SPECULATIVE FICTION IN AN ART-SCIENCE COLLABORATION |
| Contributor | Catrien Notermans(author) |
| Anke Tonnaer(author) | |
| Marcel van Brakel (illustrator) | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.63308/63878687083054.ch01 |
| Landing page | https://www.whpress.co.uk/publications/2025/03/04/meam-2/ |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Catrien Notermans; Anke Tonnaer; Marcel van Brakel |
| Publisher | The White Horse Press |
| Published on | 2025-07-01 |
| Long abstract | In order to rearrange our relation to a living planet, writer Amitav Ghosh (2022: 84) urges us to sing and narrate all beings into life, and in so doing to learn from other cosmological understandings of the world. Singing as a tactile mode of active and responsive engagement in the world is also proposed by anthropologist Tim Ingold (2002). His notion of a ‘poetics of dwelling’ refers to songs and poetic storytelling as ways of ‘art’-full living, with art not understood as a way of representing the world but as a craft of attentive living in and resonating with the vibrant presence of other-than human beings. In this contribution, the authors join these calls to ‘re-wild our language’ and ‘to sing the landscape back into being, as well as to sing one’s being back into it’ (Macfarlane, 2016). They do so by sharing their experimental song writing that they developed ‘to sing into life’ two significant nonhuman others. This song writing originated in an Arts-Science collaboration with the Dutch experience design collective called Polymorf. They combined ethnography with AI technology and speculative design. The first song was written for a speculative fictional being, called AIIA: an AI-animated planetary director and artistic composer of poetic dwelling in a more-than-human world. The second was written for the Waal, the river flowing through the city of Nijmegen. For this river song the authors did instant experimental fieldwork on human-river relatedness in the setting of an urban arthouse. Based on the input received from the audience, they composed a part-song that will eventually be performed at the riverside to heal and enchant the river, as well as inspire AIIA’s multispecies knowledge. In this contribution the authors reflect on this arts-science-society collaboration, and how it evoked their creative writing in multispecies ethnography. This chapter includes ten visuals from Polymorf that were co-created with AI in the process of song writing. |
| Page range | pp. 44–62 |
| Print length | 19 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
| Media | 10 illustrations |
Catrien Notermans is an anthropologist and associate professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen (The Netherlands). Her research line is on social relatedness with and beyond the human and focuses on the intersection of kinship, gender and religion in India, West Africa and Europe. Her most recent projects are on interspecies communication in women’s economic and religious activities in Rajasthan (India); and on storying human-river relatedness in the Netherlands. Her projects are based on visual, sensory and arts-based ethnography which are the methodologies she also teaches at the Anthropology Department. In 2022, Notermans co-founded together with Andrea Petitt, Véronique Servais, and Anke Tonnaer the international MEAM network for Multispecies Ethnography and Artistic Methods. In 2023, Notermans worked together with Anke Tonnaer in an Arts-Science collaboration called TASC (The Art of Science)to design a post-anthropocentric future for the city of Nijmegen.
Anke Tonnaer is an anthropologist and assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen (The Netherlands). Her research interests developed from long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Indigenous Australia, studying the intersection of nature and culture in tourism, to rewilding initiatives and the challenges of multispecies cohabitation and conservation practices in north-west Europe, especially the Netherlands. Her desire to narrate the more-than-human world in alternative ways alongside the rational dominant ways of ecology has brought her to exploring art-based methodology and sensory ethnography. In 2022, Anke co-founded together with Andrea Petitt, Véronique Servais, and Catrien Notermans the international MEAM network for Multispecies Ethnography and Artistic Methods, and was co-organiser of the 2022 and 2023 MEAM conferences. In 2023, Anke also worked with Catrien Notermans in an Arts-Science collaboration called TASC (The Art of Science) to design a post-anthropocentric future for the city of Nijmegen.