What Iāve done
This workshop begins with an exploration of the humanāfood ecologies of Kirkgate Market. Through sensory practices, digital tools, and multispecies ecological thinking, we investigate the entanglements between humans, foods, and technologies.
Market Sensory Exploration
- Move through the market following our senses.
- Use our phone to document encounters.
Presence and Absence
Who/what is here? Who/what is missing?
Ecological Origins
Where do foods come from? Who grows or processes them?
Information and Knowledge
What do labels tell us or hide? How do digital tools mediate this?
Embodied Experience
How do hunger or fullness influence sensory experience?
Digital Mediation
How does our phone shape what we notice?
Speculative Listening Practice
Listening to the ālandscape ecologiesā of spices and ingredients, tuning into their origins and ecological relations.
More thoughts
Digital media offers significant advantages but also limitations when representing a market. Photos, videos, and recordings amplify sensory awareness and ecological connections, yet they often privilege the visual and flatten multisensory experience. They may also obscure labour, supply chains, and inequalities behind what is displayed.
Reading references (Turnbull, 2024)
- Digital objects, technologies, and techniques are therefore deeply engaged and involved in ecological politicsā¦ Media are not simply channels through which content passes; they are environments that shape practices, relations, and possibilities.
- Digital media reorganise how we sense, measure, and engage with environments.
- Ecological approaches emphasise materiality, embodiment, and sensory relations, countering purely representational understandings of digital media.
- Digital devices participate in our sensory worlds, shaping not only what is recorded but how things become sensible in the first place.
- Ecologies help us see relationships as co-constitutive: beings, technologies, and environments emerge through their entanglements.
- Digital ecologies foreground more-than-human relations, recognising technologies, insects, infrastructures, plants, and atmospheres as participants in shared worlds.
- Digital practices transform how environments are made perceptibleāwhat becomes amplified, what becomes muted.
- Doing digital ecologies requires working with and through environments, experimenting with sensing, recording, and intervening.