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Short abstract:

An interactive installation involving a virtual interface (an interactive website displayed on two screens and two tablets) and a physical interface for a multisensory experiment.

Abstract:

This Making & Doing session guides participants through the “Rootling” website, a creative resource on pigs. The display includes a virtual environment created in collaboration with designers and a sensory exercise for anyone interested in multispecies research. The website is part of a larger inquiry into what a porcine research method might embody, and how it might challenge epistemological practices under neoliberalism. The website interface is designed with specific attention to the process and aesthetics of searching, navigating, and knowing as inspired by pigs. Wild and domestic pigs rootle to learn about their environment, using their snouts to socialize and dig, feed and play, find comfort and explore. Using the website, “rootlers” are encouraged to learn about pigs through an omnivorous movement of discovery via text, images, memes, and scientific data. Content is neither ordered nor linear but interconnected in a messy and heterogeneous manner to facilitate unexpected lines of inquiry and unearth contradictory ideas. Participants are also invited to engage with the research method through sensual, tactile DIY interfaces which will stimulate ideas by foregrounding nonvisual cues. To help navigate the virtual and physical environments, guides will prompt “rootlers” to attune to their trajectories, intentions, and feelings while exploring. The session is intended to generate reflections on how ideas can emerge from seemingly simple origins and disparate content; how everyday rootling practices- sometimes protracted, intuitive, and playful- are devalued within academic research cultures; and the ways in which symbiotic thinking opens avenues for experimental approaches to social research.