Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the role of art and anthropological methods in a transdisciplinary project with regard to aesthetic potential of future landscapes. I argue that "envisioning" future landscapes must involve more than mapping visual elements, attend experience and feeling, understood as movement.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will present work in progress, emerging from my participation in a transdisciplinary project called agroforestry futures, funded by the UK treescapes program. An important methodological route to stakeholder and public engagement in this project are approaches which enable "visualisation" of the aesthetic potential of future landscapes, as well as economic and environmental information. However, I am increasingly convinced that the role of art and visual anthropology in planning and "envisioning" future landscapes must involve more than an exploration of varied visual elements. Key is how we might attend to experience, to feeling, and affect, here understood as a kind of movement, which necessitates going beyond explorations of what the future should look like.

This paper will discuss how this position, working with creative practices, offers new critical perspective on why people, places and nature matter, and generates outputs and methods that complement scientific understanding – exploring and challenging existing meanings and values, and creating new ones through the co-production of new knowledge and experience.

I will share recent visual research, iteratively developed through archival analysis and ‘anarchival’ workshops, co-devised and facilitated with commissioned artists, which aim to create "Stimuli" for co-production of "futures" - Speculative visual and multimedia materials to facilitate communication and knowledge exchange involving complex information.