Periodic Reporting for period 2 - THINK DEEP (Thinking Deep-Novel Creative Approaches to the Underground)
Berichtszeitraum: 2022-01-01 bis 2023-06-30
THINK DEEP pioneers a creative practice driven interdisciplinary approach to the underground.
It begins from the dual premise that, firstly the underground (or subterranean) is both the site of current environmental
concerns (e.g. extraction), and the setting for developing solutions to these concerns. But that secondly, currently
we lack approaches that adequately understand the underground, its current use and conservation, and its future
possibilities. Underground scholars have long argued that what is needed is an interdisciplinary approach, as yet,
however, where interdisciplinarity has been achieved, it has largely brought together science and social science.
Unconventionally, THINK DEEP situates creative practices (such as visual art or participatory theatre) together with
arts and humanities theories as the cornerstone of an interdisciplinary response to three pressing underground research
problems:
1. How to sense the underground, an often inaccessible environment?
2. How to contend with varied underground imaginations, which shape underground understanding, use and
conservation?
3. How to understand the speculative nature of ‘knowing’ the underground?
It will address these problems through global case studies from three fields of underground research: geoscience,
underground urban studies, and geoconservation.
Its unconventional ambition enables THINK DEEP to deliver a timely and distinctive new contribution to
underground scholarship that will transform the field’s future research directions. Furthermore, the project’s
pioneering approach will bring about a step-change in relations between creative practices and research more
generally. In understanding and evaluating the creative practice and research relations that sit at its heart, THINK
DEEP enables ground-breaking understandings of these relations, and of their profound possibilities with respect to a
range of research fields, including those which engage pressing environmental issues.
It begins from the dual premise that, firstly the underground (or subterranean) is both the site of current environmental
concerns (e.g. extraction), and the setting for developing solutions to these concerns. But that secondly, currently
we lack approaches that adequately understand the underground, its current use and conservation, and its future
possibilities. Underground scholars have long argued that what is needed is an interdisciplinary approach, as yet,
however, where interdisciplinarity has been achieved, it has largely brought together science and social science.
Unconventionally, THINK DEEP situates creative practices (such as visual art or participatory theatre) together with
arts and humanities theories as the cornerstone of an interdisciplinary response to three pressing underground research
problems:
1. How to sense the underground, an often inaccessible environment?
2. How to contend with varied underground imaginations, which shape underground understanding, use and
conservation?
3. How to understand the speculative nature of ‘knowing’ the underground?
It will address these problems through global case studies from three fields of underground research: geoscience,
underground urban studies, and geoconservation.
Its unconventional ambition enables THINK DEEP to deliver a timely and distinctive new contribution to
underground scholarship that will transform the field’s future research directions. Furthermore, the project’s
pioneering approach will bring about a step-change in relations between creative practices and research more
generally. In understanding and evaluating the creative practice and research relations that sit at its heart, THINK
DEEP enables ground-breaking understandings of these relations, and of their profound possibilities with respect to a
range of research fields, including those which engage pressing environmental issues.
The work performed to date has focused on three key areas.
1) Assessment of the challenges of understanding, using and conserving the subsurface
Desk based research and ethnographic work on a range of subsurface research and practice (including geoscience, geoconservation and urban studies) has develop a series of conclusions:
a) The subsurface demands modes of knowledge that often challenge (e.g. ambiguous, hidden, unsettled, circulatory, speculative) normative epistemologies and might require different research methods.
Foci include- the exploration of cutting-edge technologies of subsurface sensing, how cultures around the world might ‘sense’ the underground through ritual and belief systems. It also includes a survey of the ideas of the imagination within and of the subsurface around the world (from ideas of hell and concerns with how to cultivate positive aspirational underground futures).
b) Questions of subsurface animism and life: We have considered how scholars and practitioners write and talk of the subsurface and its life forms; from non-human and organic life to inorganic life- or the ‘geos’ of rock and stone- as well as spirit worlds.
c) Ideas of everyday/ordinary subsurfaces: Augmenting the sublime and deep time registers, we have been exploring the ordinary and everyday ways that people engage with, understand and imagine the subsurface, including through infrastructures, their histories, failures and speculative possibilities.
2) Consideration of the current state of the art, and the need for future development in relations between creative practice and research
Following a literature review of the research turn within creative arts practices and the creative turn within research practices, we are exploring shared intersections and critical vocabularies for creative practice and research, including themes around new research mediums and research aesthetics.
3)The identification and fieldwork on case studies which use combinations of research and practice to respond to challenges of knowing the subsurface.
Case study work has begun, key foci include:
Subsurface urban futures: Work in Singapore and Phnom Penh exploring questions of subsurface infrastructures and subsurface urban futures.
Geoconservation: Working with app and VR/AR developers that develops innovative heritage and conservation efforts around the subsurface and with geoheritage sites in North England to develop embodied encounters with the caves.
Geoscience: Working in sites in Italy, New Zealand, the UK and Europe experimenting with new forms of art that engage with geoscience and geophysical processes.
Subsurface lives and livelihoods: Including work on the small scale and artisanal mining industry in Cambodia, as well as work on Mongolian shamanic beliefs is exploring the practices of lives lived in the subsurface.
Outputs include: book chapters and journal articles, key notes, workshops, conference sessions, new bodies of installation and site-specific earth art, exhibitions and residencies, including participating in the major exhibition Hollow Earth (2022-3).
1) Assessment of the challenges of understanding, using and conserving the subsurface
Desk based research and ethnographic work on a range of subsurface research and practice (including geoscience, geoconservation and urban studies) has develop a series of conclusions:
a) The subsurface demands modes of knowledge that often challenge (e.g. ambiguous, hidden, unsettled, circulatory, speculative) normative epistemologies and might require different research methods.
Foci include- the exploration of cutting-edge technologies of subsurface sensing, how cultures around the world might ‘sense’ the underground through ritual and belief systems. It also includes a survey of the ideas of the imagination within and of the subsurface around the world (from ideas of hell and concerns with how to cultivate positive aspirational underground futures).
b) Questions of subsurface animism and life: We have considered how scholars and practitioners write and talk of the subsurface and its life forms; from non-human and organic life to inorganic life- or the ‘geos’ of rock and stone- as well as spirit worlds.
c) Ideas of everyday/ordinary subsurfaces: Augmenting the sublime and deep time registers, we have been exploring the ordinary and everyday ways that people engage with, understand and imagine the subsurface, including through infrastructures, their histories, failures and speculative possibilities.
2) Consideration of the current state of the art, and the need for future development in relations between creative practice and research
Following a literature review of the research turn within creative arts practices and the creative turn within research practices, we are exploring shared intersections and critical vocabularies for creative practice and research, including themes around new research mediums and research aesthetics.
3)The identification and fieldwork on case studies which use combinations of research and practice to respond to challenges of knowing the subsurface.
Case study work has begun, key foci include:
Subsurface urban futures: Work in Singapore and Phnom Penh exploring questions of subsurface infrastructures and subsurface urban futures.
Geoconservation: Working with app and VR/AR developers that develops innovative heritage and conservation efforts around the subsurface and with geoheritage sites in North England to develop embodied encounters with the caves.
Geoscience: Working in sites in Italy, New Zealand, the UK and Europe experimenting with new forms of art that engage with geoscience and geophysical processes.
Subsurface lives and livelihoods: Including work on the small scale and artisanal mining industry in Cambodia, as well as work on Mongolian shamanic beliefs is exploring the practices of lives lived in the subsurface.
Outputs include: book chapters and journal articles, key notes, workshops, conference sessions, new bodies of installation and site-specific earth art, exhibitions and residencies, including participating in the major exhibition Hollow Earth (2022-3).
Our work is moving thinking beyond state of the art in the following ways:
1) The challenges of knowing, understanding and conserving the subsurface:
We have focused on evolving the understanding of the challenges the subsurface poses to questions of sensing imagining and speculating. This includes re-orientating attention from the registers of the sublime and deep geologic time, to questions of more shallow, everyday and ordinary subsurfaces. It has also involved ongoing conceptual work on the imagination, including considering ideas of the ambivalent imagination.
2) The possibilities of creative practices to respond to these challenges by evolving the means to sense, imagine and speculate on the subsurface
Case study work is already demonstrating the value and importance of creative practice for exploring some of the challenging aspects of subsurface research and practice. This includes the productive intersection of creative practice and technology, in hard to access subsurface areas, whether these be geoheritage sites, or whether these be complex geophysical systems. The conjunction of creative practice and scientific and technological practices of sensing the subsurface is developing some interesting solutions to some intractable problems of how we know the subsurface.
Creative methods are helping address some of the challenges of ‘rendering visible’ subsurface pasts, presents and futures. This includes everything from the emerging value of geoliterary practices in framing subsurface futures, to the potential of creative methods in helping tell controversial stories of subsurface livelihoods in the small-scale mining sector. Emerging work explores how creative practices might offer the means to help ‘surface’ the netherworlds of shamanic cultures in which the stories encountered in these underworlds are only every partially known, can not be remembered after the journey event or must not be shared.
3) The relationship between creative practice and research
The project is exploring the value and prospects and challenges of creative practices as offering ‘new mediums’ for doing research) and the need to develop new infrastructures for these ways of working. It is not only exploring these new infrastructures needed but also actively experimenting with developing them.
1) The challenges of knowing, understanding and conserving the subsurface:
We have focused on evolving the understanding of the challenges the subsurface poses to questions of sensing imagining and speculating. This includes re-orientating attention from the registers of the sublime and deep geologic time, to questions of more shallow, everyday and ordinary subsurfaces. It has also involved ongoing conceptual work on the imagination, including considering ideas of the ambivalent imagination.
2) The possibilities of creative practices to respond to these challenges by evolving the means to sense, imagine and speculate on the subsurface
Case study work is already demonstrating the value and importance of creative practice for exploring some of the challenging aspects of subsurface research and practice. This includes the productive intersection of creative practice and technology, in hard to access subsurface areas, whether these be geoheritage sites, or whether these be complex geophysical systems. The conjunction of creative practice and scientific and technological practices of sensing the subsurface is developing some interesting solutions to some intractable problems of how we know the subsurface.
Creative methods are helping address some of the challenges of ‘rendering visible’ subsurface pasts, presents and futures. This includes everything from the emerging value of geoliterary practices in framing subsurface futures, to the potential of creative methods in helping tell controversial stories of subsurface livelihoods in the small-scale mining sector. Emerging work explores how creative practices might offer the means to help ‘surface’ the netherworlds of shamanic cultures in which the stories encountered in these underworlds are only every partially known, can not be remembered after the journey event or must not be shared.
3) The relationship between creative practice and research
The project is exploring the value and prospects and challenges of creative practices as offering ‘new mediums’ for doing research) and the need to develop new infrastructures for these ways of working. It is not only exploring these new infrastructures needed but also actively experimenting with developing them.