Paper short abstract:

The stretching senses school explores the more-than-human world through collectively crafting immersive media with creative coders. Such playful VR projects can act as experimental devices for sensorial engagement with the planetary beyond knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

The stretching senses school is a Berlin-based learning community and a knowledge intervention on more-than-human perceptions stemming from the exhibition Stretching Materialities (Berlin, Sept 2021-Apr 2022). Young professionals and more experienced mentors were invited to become members of the “school,” bridging immersive arts, creative coding, and speculative ethnography to environmental concerns. Through fieldwork and learning activities, three VR experiences were crafted: the multi-scalar liveliness of limestone (Subterreanean Matters); the perpetual and atmospheric exchanges of the organic world (Leaking Bodies); the willow fibers as perceptive extension device (Antenna). The collaboration culminated into a festival with invited keynotes by anthropologists, philosophers and historian of science, during which the participants presented site-specific installations to the public.

The school has been ingrained into the “patchy hope” which Anna Tsing and others have found as a fragmented mode of optimistic reflexivity within the Anthropocene. Rather than heroic actions, the school takes playful and humble approaches, affecting their sensory faculties through coding and storytelling, redefining the real beyond the realm of power and knowledge. This paper will present the “patchy paths” of the collaborative aspects of our inquiry, which we understand a doubling-down investigation. The first level is a methodological one in the realm of the more-than-visual anthropology, experimenting through a collective investigation that doubles as creative process. The second level is a careful probing and patching of the creative coding scene with the environmental thinkers in Berlin.

See documentation of the project: https://stretchingmaterialities.pubpub.org/stretchingsensesschool