This essay puts forth a theory of “affective ecologies” encompassing plant, animal, and human interactions. The authors’ formulation of “involution” favors a coevolution of organisms that act not on competitive pressures but on affective relations. Drawing in particular from—and challenging—Darwinian and neo-Darwinian accounts of orchid-insect contact and controversial research on plant communication, Hustak and Myers demonstrate the interdependence of seemingly unrelated life forms. The evolving entity within this framework is not an individual organism but a community of organisms in communication with one another, exemplified by the transmission of information through chemical signaling among plants, which forces readers to question what it means to communicate. This relationality also begs a reconsideration of the dynamic between a human subject who conducts an experiment and an animal or plant object of study, which the essay approaches by showing how Darwin became a participant in his own orchid experiments. Taken together, these feminist readings of ecological and evolutionary phenomena result in the dissolution of species and even kingdom boundaries.
Professor Rees’ expertise lies at the intersection of anthropology, art history, the history of science, and the philosophy of modernity and concerns the study of knowledge/thought. More specifically, he is interested in how categories that order knowledge mutate over time –– because of humans, microbes, snails, the weather, AI or other events –– and in what effects these mutations have on conceptions of the human/the real.
The main areas of Professor Rees’ research have been the brain sciences, global health, the microbiome, and AI.
altering the direction of thinking about the world
In the last 20 years his work has continually returned to political, social and philosophical questions of the way we live, think and act as a society…
methods of historical ecology
on narrative, writing, visual thinking and multimedia storytelling
writing that exemplifies literary excellence on the subject of the physical or biological sciences and communicates complex scientific concepts to a lay audience.
Churchill has an active political conscience, and is a restless experimenter with form.”
create collective systems of meaning and memory.
We must re-learn the ecological.
“Ideas that come from words, language and books are at the heart of my practice. I explore ways to express visually our relationship with writing, reading, speaking and the acquisition of knowledge. This might be with a painting, a collage, the arrangement or alteration of a found object or a film; or a collection of several of these.”
Lyon looks to plants and their human histories to learn and share the ways the webs of relations are disrupted and destroyed by ecolgoical collapse.
In working against human individualism and exceptionalism I look to plants and their human histories as my teacher. Through the image, I make representations of how we are together, with the hope that we might see each other as intimately connected—the falling of one is the falling of us all. As Joy Harjo of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation writes, “Remember you are all people and all people are you” and further that people should be extended to “beings.” How might we re-learn the ecological?
Lyon makes visible representations of the way humans and non-humans during our contempoary moment of ecological collapse are interdependent, webs, networks, connected,
“representations and consequences of human-animal encounters”
She is invested in the body as a site of relation, working to materialize the nature and consequence of relationship in our contemporary moment of ecological collapse.
Calista Lyon is invested in a cross-disciplinary, collaborative and socially engaged practice that reimagines forms of storying that might serve non-human and human worlds in our contemporary moment of ecological breakdown.
her work is concerned with “the hinges that open and close what is apparent and what is disappeared; what can ben seen and what is in the shadows; what can be said and what is whispering inaudibly; what is true and what is a lie; what is rational and what is magical; what is real and what is surreal; what is conscious and what is unconscious.” ghostly matters
telling the stories of science and the natural world; share stories related to plants, landscapes, gardens, and the natural world – in the broad sense - in new and engaging ways.
“the fact that this world is boundlessly mysterious and unknowable.”
”in such a way that I can actually give a concrete form and shape and pattern to something that another part of me recognizes to be deeply un-pin-downable; ineffable. And it’s the paradox, again, between the ineffable and the “effable,” the mysterious and the concrete, that is the driving tension for how I seek to live my life from moment to moment.”
Through a cross-disciplinary, collaborative and socially engaged practice I investigate the ecological, cultural, political, historical and economic relations that go unknown and unnamed in a place, prompting questions around care and human response-ability.
an artwork, a theoretical frame, a praxis—
She is invested in making the veiled and invisibile, the unknown and unnamed seen, felt and experienced.
activity and inquiry
The Unknown and the Unnamed is about the practice of learning to know a place.
“In this extended meditation on the relationship between place and intimacy, the body and the word, Carl Phillips walks among trees to explore what can and cannot be known.” emergence magainze
she is invested in learning and revealing the complex interactions that make ecosystems.
interconnections and entanglements
the social practice of producing knowledge
addressing themes of community, relation and interconnectdenss,
Working with the archive—image, text, sound, body, voice, memory, object—Lyon translates and interprets adding critical knowledge to the world and he community.
Sharing and articulating forms of knoweldge and representation
Her practice rooted in research, observation and curiosity.
Creating encounters and experiences around ideas of community, relation, and interconnectedness in animal, plant and the body.
Questions around human response-ability.
The politics of knowledge and its production.
critical to the project of knowledge construction
The work is about the expereince of learning and the production of knowledge.
“investigation of the political, ecological, historical and economic roots as well as consquences of those positions”
Who we are and how we should live.
Lyon questions forms of representation and visibility.
Lyon has more recently become invested in the expeirnce of performance.
“Neoliberal reformers have put competition at the core of the daily business of life, and digital connectivity has replaced physical conjunction in the sphere of social communication: so the psycho-cultural conditions of empathy have been undermined.”
In our current technological age, where digital connectivity has replaced the physical in social communication how might ancient notions of science, the sharing of a story be a political act?
In our current technological age, our social communication has shifted from the phsical to the digital. How might ancient notions of science, the sharing of a story, body to body, or the between community members be a political act/gesture?
marginalized history
expansive neoliberal forms of competition
Calista Lyon is an artist and research who works with photography and moving image in an expanded context
Who draws from, works with and creates archives, typologies and index’s.
Who uses the archive, the document, the image as material (or as forms of knowledge and material), creating, translating and re-arranging, prompting questions around representation in a moment of ecolgoical breakdown. Prompting questions
As the pictorial narrative progresses, from labor through delivery, the women's postures increasingly blend into one another, creating a collective body that strains and releases in unison.
In addition to the photographic sequence, My Birth—a facsimile of Winant's own journal—includes an original text by the artist exploring the shared, yet solitary, ownership of the experience of birth. My Birth asks: What if birth, long shrouded and parodied by popular culture, was made visible? What if a comfortable and dynamic language existed to describe it? What if, in picturing the process so many times over and insisting on its very subjectivity, we understood childbirth, and its representation, to be a political act?
My work is made collaboratively.
Collaboration is integral to Waterhouse’s practice, informing and shaping the trajectory of his projects as the work forms through conversation and engagement with those represented and the communities in which they live.
It is about creating a form or exporation and learning, both in construction and sharing with a public.
experience of sharing knowledge live performance vs. not.
Relation, relationship, deep ecology.
Lyon works with memory, remembering and loss
she works to visualalize/materialize the reality of inteconnection, the nature of relationship, the reality that we make each other. etc.
form of address.
has reinforced the why of a creative pratice—as centrally a practice of knowledge acquisition, production and transfer.
broader issues concerning knowledge production and how bodies manifest and are acknowledged in societies.[4]
Lyon investigates how scientific disciplines, archival practices and politics of memory coalesce to learn and unlearn the nature of relationship.
The document. the technology of document or sharing. technologies of seeing of revealing and of sharing.
A practice of curiosity and learning. Learning and unlearning the impacts of...
The emotional labor of knowing, and how that knowing can be shared as a form or education or experience.
The photograph and memory, the mnemonic and memory. Learning, re-remembering and sharing.
for interspecies intimacy, “things are being named before they past out of existence.”
More recently her practice has involved works that live as a form of address,
Questioning the radical possibilities of society—the tension between competition and cooperation, the individual and community—Lyon works within the frame that liberation is only possible through an understanding that we are inherently part of and connected to one-another.
Primarily working in photography, Lyon investigates to what extent complex natureculture assemblages be visualized.
Working primarily with images both materially and as a tool for memory/memorization. Lyon draws from archival and historical documents, , Lyon is invested in visualizing complex natureculture ecologies that primarily go unseen and unnoticed.
for interspecies intimacy, “things are being named before they past out of existence.”
“how is harm going to be something we live with” alphabet poem podcast
Talk about form and how I use it.
Interweaving hybrid forms of storytelling
Calista Lyon is an Australia interdisciplinary artist and researcher living and working between Columbus, Ohio and Tallangatta Valley, Australia.
Her practice combines photography, the moving image, non-fiction narrative writing and sculpture through performance to reimagine forms of storying that might serve non-human and human worlds in our contemporary moment of ecological breakdown.
Her work is invested in the research of knowledge and forms forms of address used across cultures and time, looking and working toward a form we most might need now.
Working primarily in photography, Lyon is invested in hybrid performance forms that create an experience and presence of sharing, knowledge transfer and responsibility.
Drawing from diverse epistemologies her research is influenced by vernacular, Indigenous and local forms of knowing and by scientific thinking, including theorists, historians and ethnographers of science.
Lyon is committed to the primacy of speaking and listening, body to body, as a form of giving and receiving that has a deep history in oral cultures as foundations of art making as a form of memory and knowledge.
Lyon works in collaboration with the human and the non-human, the living and the dead to speak to the history and memory of place. Through practices of observation and recording—by both Lyon and her collaborators—she attempts to share the complexity of deep ecology.
Calista is invested in the body as a site of relation, working to imagine, represent and activate the body—both human and non-human—as part of a larger being or ecology. She is invested in learning and experimenting with the radical possibilities of society—the tension between competition and cooperation, the individual and community—with the belief that liberation is only possible through an understanding that we are inherently connected to one-another.
Her practice is rooted in an exploratory form of research coupled with observation and recording that works to materialize the relations and entanglements between bodies, history, knowledge and knowing.
She works to explore and understand the dominant forces that make up our societies, working to reveal these webs through an intricate and deeply personal look to our interior lives. with an intimacy and understanding of how those forces are impacting the most vulnerable.
In previous works, Lyon has invited a farming community to join together in the act of walking to build a social fabric; she has documented and shared the individual wave of the people of Green River, Utah. In collaboration with choreographer and artist Ann Carlson, she photographed the gestures of one hundred employees at UCLA— from facilities management staff to gymnasts, a vice chancellor to an astronomer. She has amplified the voices of Ohio’s threatened species, sharing the sound portrait of the Silver-Haired Bat and the Massasauga rattlesnake among others; and she has photographed the residents of a small farming community and used their portraits as invitations to share a conversation.
Carlson spent a year in residence building an orchestral work made entirely of gestures and performed by individuals from across the university campus; from facilities management staff to gymnasts, a vice chancellor to an astronomer, from students to Taiko drummers.
Born in Nagambie, Australia, in 1986, Calista Lyon received a Diploma of Art in Applied Photography from Melbourne Polytechnic in 2006. Relocating to the United States in 2012, she received a BFA in Studio Art from California State University, Los Angeles in 2015 and an MFA in Photography from The Ohio State University in 2019.
She works to reveal memories, knowledge and narratives and that are mostly hidden from our public lives—carried within our bodies—the memories of our interior lives.
Angela Davis once wrote that, “Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.”
It is in this space, between the “forces at work in society” and the “experience of our interior lives” that forms the basis of my work.