Multispecies Interactive Art

We are at a pivotal moment where conversations and practices in interactive art, and conversations and practices in multispecies ethnography, have a chance to come together in order to produce new moments of multispecies cultural exchange and aesthetic practices that reach provocatively towards the notion of Western society as a multispecies society that takes the agency and desires of nonhuman community others seriously. From this we can begin to ask questions such as what does interactive art made for multispecies audiences entail? And how does interactive art made for multispecies audiences benefit the species involved? How can its design be influenced by nonhuman agency?

Humans have long lived in multispecies communities in which the lives of other species are entangled in our human cultural practices of art, design, and aesthetics. But our historically humanist understandings of Western culture and community has meant that the direct agency of other species are largely left out of conversations regarding creative practices. the history of animal use in art is grim and not only largely rids other species of agency, but rids artists of the need for care or responsibility towards the animals involved (See: Baker, 2000). Furthermore, as the world becomes increasingly informed by digitally interactive technologies and interfaces, we are at risk of our sense of aesthetics becoming further tied to our own body’s sensorial abilities, rather than conceptualising such technologies to better function for multispecies use, desires, and preferences. How can we move towards thinking about interactive art and its practitioner processes from a multispecies perspective?

Questions of interactive art and its contribution to a concept of multispecies culture have been recently explored in intersecting fields including creative arts researchers such as Boyd (2016), Animal-Computer Interaction researchers such as French, Manchini and Sharp (2015), animal interaction designers such as Westerlaken (2020), and creativity and play researchers such as Jørgensen & Wirman (2016). Research across these fields of creative practice and new media point towards interaction as a form of multispecies aesthetic when performed in a morally justifiable way. Many authors in these fields point towards electronic animal enrichment design as a doorway to multispecies aesthetic practices and philosophical understandings of our multispecies world lead by the agency of nonhuman species.
My research/practice suggests that the experimental and burgeoning field of multispecies interactive art can be led by two key moral compasses: care and enrichment. My work offers up a potential direction for how to employ these notions directly within creative practice methods, interspecies interactive artforms by showing how multispecies aesthetics studies can be led by species-specific enrichment and care, resulting in a methodology grounded in the feminist ethics of care. Taking the entangled, messy, and tension-filled relationship between humans and keystone pollinator flying fox species in Queensland as an example of our multispecies community, my research and creative practice in technologically-enabled interactive art involves me as the artist becoming a long-term flying fox carer and conservationist for sick, injured and orphaned flying foxes who are rehabilitated and then rewilded. In the past few years, Australia has seen flying foxes become poster-animals for climate change, it has seen both flying foxes and myself evacuated from unprecedented bushfires, it has seen flying fox carers and researchers worry that they may unwittingly spread human Covid-19 into flying fox communities through physical closeness, and it has seen the culling and dispersal of many flying fox colonies, including threatened species, who happen to roost near humans. With this reality in mind, it would appear urgent that we focus conversations on human/animal contested relationships and how to live together more effectively. By turning positioning the creative practitioner as a government registered animal caregiver, I aim to address what happens to interactive art practice when its primary goal is to study the entanglement between species in highly contested relationships, and focus on the enrichment of nonhuman others in caregiving scenarios. Given that flying foxes in Australia are a wild animal that humans should not make direct contact with if not vaccinated and trained, interactive art is specifically seen by this project as a potential way to explore virtual and non-direct relations in a multispecies community. Two creative outputs will be focused on in this paper: ‘Bat:Human Interaction’, a series of interactive art toys made for use by both flying foxes in care, and humans, through a long distance WiFi multiplayer system, resulting in enrichment opportunities across species. And secondly, ‘The Bat Translator’, a machine learning-led online artwork that listens to and analyses Grey-Headed Flying Fox and Black Flying-Fox vocalisations in real time, translating them into on-screen digital art based on current scientific and carer understandings of flying fox communication methods.