RELATIONAL
REALITIES
2024 - 2028
About the project

INTERMEDIATE
ZONES
2024 - 2028
About the project



Intermediate Zones

Introduction


The environment we live in is a communal effort of interacting human and other-than-human actors whose entangled activities form the currents that push the continuous unfolding of the world forward - the worlding of the world is always a becoming-with. To acknowledge this reality and act responsibly we need to problematize the blind spots of the human in perception, logic, assumption and account for our biases. We do this by exploring engagements with non-anthropocentric perspectives, where ‘decentering the human’ is a central concept. We explore this through the notion of Umwelt, and the potential overlaying the Umwelten of other-than-humans on our own Umwelt, generating ‘intermediate zones; between ourselves and the other-than-humans we share our world with. To realise these ‘intermediate zones’, we incorporate existing and emerging technologies to enhance our perceptual capabilities and to mediate between human, more-than-human and technological Umwelten. The main anticipated output is a series of interactive installations that serve as physical embodiments of the 'intermediate zones,' providing experiences that bridge human and more-than-human perspectives. 





Intermediate Zones

Digital Soil Chromatography


How can soil chromatography be digitized? Can we reshape soil chromatograms based on other data? Experiment using MAX-MSP.









Relational Realities

Introduction
The societal meanings we assign to nature have been shaped by a long cultural and economic history that has fostered attitudes of detachment and duality. Nature is perceived as something separate from humanity, existing primarily to serve a human-centered economy. This anthropocentric worldview treats nature as a consumable resource, reinforced through stories and political processes, and is visible how we engage with space.

The landscape, and the ways we divide, delimit, appropriate, and transform it, reflects this attitude. We treat non-human life as less valuable and justify this by cultivating a sense of human superiority, which also narrows our sense of justice. These attitudes have contributed to issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss, an unsustainable agricultural model, and a general alienation from our living environment.

This research seeks to break the duality between humans and nature and to explore the implications of adopting a more-than-human [MTH] perspective in landscape. Through intensive collaborations with spatial professionals, experiments in a living lab, and inspiration from other projects, we aim to develop tools and processes that enable landscape design to contribute to restoring the relationship between humans and their environment.
Recognizing that professionals operate within culturally informed ideologies, we also examine how stories, play, and rituals can have cultural impacts that extend beyond spatial disciplines. In this way, the research contributes to a world which is not only more just and sustainable but also one where humans feel a renewed sense of connection to a fundamentally shared world.