More Than Sense is an ongoing artistic research project that explores the sensory impacts of human activity on other living species. We were initially interested in nocturnal ecology, but this focus is shifting as we become more aware of the scale and sensory impact on other living species of all kinds of anthropogenic noise.Â
Since 2022, our work on More than Sense has thrown into sharp contrast the differences between urban habitats, our city edgelands, and the pristine or sublime landscape, whether a forest or rural idyll. Nocturnal life easily illustrates this divide visually, a temporality that alters between the harshly lit landscape of suburbia, and the sublime depth of a remote darkness, deep and still. Both are our zones of interest, that highlight the challenges of human activity on other species, unending and invasive, day and night.
Through fieldwork, making, visual and ecological research, we have been shining a (UV) light into the pitch black associated with dark skies whilst we locate a pause in the last remaining sites of urban sanctuary for nocturnal species in towns and cities. This is not just a space for biodiversity, it is also an opportunity to think of time through other species experience of our world. So, in terms of light pollution, we adjust temporally, to the night as a sanctuary, an anthro.pause.
For the time being, More than Sense is an unfolding nocturne, drawn in by the temporal zone that bleeds across the senses and between the edges of sleep and reason. Between the dreams of humans, birds and those that come alive whilst others rest.
Art that summons solutions for an ongoing ecological transformation requires greater cultural awareness of human derived pollution, to understand the complex fragility of shared ecological habitats so that we can make more than sense of the need for co-evolutionary politics (ecological / social) that address futures for all living species.
We thank those who have invited us to speak, make and work with them; zone2source(NL) Mondrian Foundation(NL) Nieuw en Meer(NL) CREAM(UK) Srishti Insitute of Art and Design, Bengaluru(IN), Kochi Muziris Biennale, Kerala(IN), University of Reading(UK), Exeter Visual Ecology(UK) Natural History Museum(UK), Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew(UK) University of Westminster (UK), World Biodiversity Forum, Davos (CH).