Abstract
Things simply push back. We had to grapple with this fact while working on our project Lichtsuchende and realising how things (which sometimes may feel inanimate) and their digital aspects continuously participate in the environments that they are part of and co-create, as well as in their own making. As researchers, we inevitably started to think about how we could better understand what was happening in this creative process and about how the combination of physical and digital agents and the entangled aspects of these and their complexities could be unpacked. How are we making these environments together? Through this process of inquiry a particular framework started to emerge which allowed us to explore and discuss the challenges and highlights of creating digitally (in our case an interactive installation) using a Latournian and an Ingoldian approach. Using Latour’s actor network and Ingold’s meshwork as theories helped us recognise the interrelations between the things in, within and outside the installation and their interrelations. We seek to understand the ways in which these two viewpoints can be applied as methodologies to unpack the factors involved in the creation of an artificial society and the emergence of a shared environment made of non-human and human things.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been supported by The University of Edinburgh’s Innovation Initiative Grant, New Media Scotland, SOCIAM: The Theory and Practice of Social Machines (EPSRC grant number EP/J017728/1), Edinburgh College of Art, Delft University of Technology, and the University of Kent. Special thanks also to Sean Williams and Owen Green for the intellectually challenging conversations that helped crystallise some of the ideas presented in this chapter, and to all the venues where the project has been presented (e.g. NTAA, ZKM, Lumen Prize; to name a few) and to the people that visited the installation and interacted with the Lichtsuchende.
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von Jungenfeld, R., Murray-Rust, D. (2023). Actor-Flower-Mesh-Work: Making Environments Together. In: Brooks, A.L. (eds) Creating Digitally. Intelligent Systems Reference Library, vol 241. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31360-8_8
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