Foreword

Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not remember the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection … The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. (Haraway 1991)

I've been a member of the Editorial Board of this journal since 1999, during which time the world of technology has changed, and changed again (and yet perhaps stayed curiously still). More importantly, the world around us, the world around me, has also changed. The fragility of the earth that we have so taken for granted, and so ravaged (particularly in the last fifty years or so, paralleling the rise and rise of technology and technophilia) has become far more apparent. To those who choose to listen.

Back then, my focus was on using hi/low-tech to capture the movement of dancers and translate that movement into a sonic environment which included music as well as poetic text, and it all felt very zeitgeisty and a little self-congratulatory. When I look back at this work through today's lens, I see something else. In this phenomenological exploration of the body and its periperceptive space, I see work utterly rooted in the physical: embodied, grounded. I was using analytical data in an utterly un-analytical way, developing and exploring and sharing with others on the same path a new way of expressing something of inner being. I would describe this now as an ecological way of working—a refusal of what was within the field becoming an increasingly codified and increasingly data-bound analysis of the moving human body.

In this special Arts & Ecology issue of the Journal, there are many echoes of this personal experience: on the one hand, Hoad uses very literal and immensely detailed computer modelling to ask questions (and make art) about the flight paths of birds; while Kim et al. use the same as a way of understanding animal/bird, using shamanic and other techniques to attempt to embody animal/human consciousness.

In the following pages, some of the brightest minds within the digital world talk about why and how their work and their world use ecological systems thinking and an ecological worldview. I find myself warmed and nourished by these pieces, noting that although the underlying technology has leaped and bound over many hurdles, the underlying discourse—the underlying questions and problematics for art-makers—remains very much the same.

The wealth of work represented here fully embraces Guattari's notion of a praxic opening-out to embrace wonder, enchantment and the richness of the world and its natural processes. There are many discussions of nature and the digital: almost all the papers in the edition deal with this in some way, from a dazzlingly broad array of perspectives. Technology (thankfully?) hardly gets a discursive look-in, although Lewis-King, Coles and Pasquier, Deery, Arnold et al., and Kadish and Dulic talk very specifically about their uses of technology. In the main, however, the technology itself becomes subservient to the ideas being explored: a vehicle, a tool, a mechanism. Discussions of the interface between technology, nature and the human range far and wide, with many exploring notions of embodiment (Lewis-King, Deery, Coles and Pasquier, and Kim et al. in particular) and almost all embracing notions of ecological practice as the basis of their discourse. The breadth of exploration here reminds us that the notion of the ‘ecological practice’ or ecological thought must be viewed a set of practices that enable artists to approach their work in ways that are in tune with and pay particular attention to the world around them. It is about approaching practice (and technology) with eyes wide open, about embracing the freedom to roam and drift, about paying attention to integration rather than alienation and about working dialogically and centred in an ethical imperative.

In their paper, Arnold et al. talk very specifically about ecology as an ‘expanded field of practice’. It is open-ended, contested (and happily contestable), rich and connected to the world, while a number of other papers explore ideas of the digital in nature, or working digitally within the natural world.

Many see these kinds of approaches to creation as inimical to digital technologies (Coles explores this in some depth): but of course, this is nonsense. The whole point of an ecological process is that it is an open process that embraces rather than shuns. Technology, after all, is merely a tool, a wherewithal, a sometime-crutch, an enricher. Without underlying ideas (and, I would argue, underlying ideals), however, it is nothing. A useless collection of hardware and code. Scrap-to-be.

Thank you to the reviewers who worked so hard to make this edition happen and of course to the authors themselves (particularly those whose work we simply weren't able to include). The specialist reviewer team were Dr John Drever (London), John Hartley (Falmouth and London), Dr Ruth Wallen (San Diego) and Shai Zakai (Tel Aviv).

If you want to explore further, beyond these pages, please visit artsandecology.info, or follow @artsecology.

ORCID

Richard Povall http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4985-0933