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Short abstract

We present insights into how people and pollinators respond to ‘living artworks’ planted as a network between domestic gardens. We explore the capacities of collaboration between art, ecology and STS to foster interspecies empathy and more altruistic urban ecologies.

Long abstract

The garden is often invoked as a metaphor for human relations with the natural world. A heterotopia of nature-culture, seeded with colonial legacy, it is a site where the biopolitics of killing and making live play out in the ubiquitous everyday of garden centres, plant names and ‘weed’ control. More recently, the garden has been proposed as a site to be re-imagined, a place for artistic intervention and ecological activism, for people to grow liveable futures.

We will present insights from an interdisciplinary intervention into the domestic gardens of 30 participants in a Cornish village; a collaboration between art, philosophy, ecology and STS. Using an ‘altruistic algorithm’ to design gardens for pollinators instead of humans, Pollinator Pathmaker (www.pollinator.art) is a living artwork by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg that aims to reconceptualise what a garden is and who it is for.

We have been studying how people and pollinators respond to such ‘living artworks’ planted as a social-ecological network connecting the community’s gardens. Unlike many Art-Science collaborations, this project was initiated by the artist herself. However, like many interdisciplinary experiments, the boundary work of navigating between disciplines, as well as the creative and relational labour required, has emerged as a key factor in how human and non-human participants engage with the project.

Our aim is to open up a broader discussion around ASTS interventions on the ground. And to consider the aims, scope and limits of what art and technology can achieve in nurturing the interspecies empathy required to cultivate resilient futures.