The Art Lab is part of the project "Our Planetary Garden" (11.2021-), awarded with the Austrian Citizen Science Award 2022. We frame the act of Biodiversity Monitoring as a community garden that can be experienced by different multitudes, as a community garden where participants share new angles for environmental narratives, and the sensory aspects to consider and experience as stewards of the land, and how to grow liveable worlds.


The Art Lab involves a range of collaborative exercises, inquiries, experiments, readings, screenings, and exploring art as an inherently multidimensional and spatial part of biodiversity data. Biodiversity as an object, as projection, as display, as a gauge, as structure, as installation, as sound, as architecture. We will also investigate more terrestrial, yet equally literal, types of space and how they relate to the human body: letters, words, paragraphs, pages, screens, rooms, buildings, and cities.

Our aim for farmers in this workshop is that, with greater interdisciplinary, contextual, and proprioceptive awareness, you will work towards developing “critical spatial practice” as land stewards of the environment.

Outcomes


— A repository of non-normative techniques for making art and design that experiment with new forms of disseminating biodiversity data

— Explore different modes of sharing and exchanging ideas within the classroom

Objectives

• Build a greater spatial awareness for people involved in biodiversity stewardship and young people at schools operating in the real world (which, as we all know, is both physical and digital)
• Develop an understanding of the relationships between the human body, proportions, scale, movement, behavior, and the various spaces and infrastructures (physical, digital, psychological) in which art operates
• Further our knowledge and experience of the many ways in which art connects and interacts with related activities and disciplines including design, digital media, industrial design, interiors, architecture, and urbanism
• Challenge canons precedents of how we have been abstracting, interpreting, articulating, elucidating, and presenting uncertainties

Agenda

10am-10:15am	Welcome and introduction — Ice breaker: What is your favorite part of mornings?
10.15am-11:00am	I. A reflection of the meadows through space, use, and sound. Characterizations of local meadows from three points of view: space/physical environment (the tangible elements of the space, infrastructure, buildings, materials, urban furniture), use, and sound using keyword mapping. Based on a preliminary thematic coding of the transcribed data, we put together a list of one hundred keywords and phrases – direct quotations from the interviews. The participants are split into two groups; each group is given two sets of the same keywords, additional blank cards where they could write new keywords as well as modifiers (‘too little’, ‘too much’, etc.), and six sheets of paper where they could stick their keywords.
11:00am-12:00pm	II. In groups of 3-4, they present their “findings”. Groups record methodologies used in each group (on the mural?). They list the places they are investigating and general approaches to responding to the prompt.
12.00pm-12.30pm	Break
12.30pm-13.00pm	I. We perform an augmented soundwalk to allow attendees to listen, using headphones, to recordings of representative snippets of what the participants shared on their auditory experience while walking through the meadows.
13.00pm-14.15pm	II. Participants present their findings, and we group them in areas. III. The closing exercise is connecting the findings into a timeline of