Sensing, thinking, and making

Local Alternatives explores the transformative agency of the environmental arts in responding to the onset of climate change, biodiversity loss, and the digitisation of urban spaces. It offers a platform for cultivating diverse engagements with the environmental arts across international cities, including the experiences of children, young people, artists, designers, educators, curators, policymakers, and urban citizens from all walks of life. Our creative experiments are ongoing and open-ended, often led by children and young people's sensory investigations, concerns, and imaginings of their local environments. We are interested in how the environmental arts can contribute to creative community responses and adaptations to global environmental challenges at the local level. We co-develop and co-produce this work to feed into public exhibitions, social interventions, future projects, collaborations, and networks. By mapping and mobilising environmental arts initiatives across educational, cultural, and community sectors, we aim to shape urban policy and planning for more creative and sustainable cities.

Local Alternatives involves partnerships between the Manifold Lab at Manchester Metropolitan University, the Creative Agency Lab at RMIT University, and an expanding network of museums, galleries, youth collectives, community arts organisations, studios, Labs, and schools in diversely situated urban communities and environments.

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Emerging Technologies in Urban Spaces

How do emerging technologies help us generate new kinds of environmental art, research, and education in urban spaces?

Our creative experiments explore how 21st century digital technologies are reshaping our shared urban environments. We are interested in exploring technologies that sense the city outside the bandwidth of human perception. Digital sensors can pick up aspects of the environment that would otherwise be invisible to us, such as micro-pollutants in the air, or the body's unconscious responses on the surface of the skin. 360 video cameras and mixed reality interfaces provide new perspectives on the spatial practices and environments of the city. Immersive artworks, installations, and social interventions can invite urban citizens to experiment with sensory technologies in public spaces.

creative experiments

sensing memory

Manchester-> Berlin-> Stockholm

How can we use new cinematic technologies to sense the city as an archive of memories, and perhaps even sensing memories of the future?

sensing carbon

Melbourne

How can we use recycled materials to create a 'carbonscape' based on urban climate data, and envision climate responsive architectures for humans and non-humans alike?

sensing strata

Manchester

How can creative experiments with strata help us sense the effects of climate change on everyday life?

sensing climate

Manchester

How does our awareness of climate change shift our images and imaginings of the Earth?

sensing atmospheres

Manchester

How does art shift our sensation of time and the feeling of a shared atmosphere or climate in urban gallery spaces?

sensing inheritance

Manchester

How is our sense of natural and cultural inheritance shifting in times of climate change, biodiversity loss, and ubiquitous technology?

sensing touch

Montreal-> Edinburgh

How can we use emerging technologies to sense the tactile qualities and potentials of urban environments?

sensing suspensions

London-> Manchester

How can improvised and live art practices create 'suspensions' or glitches in everyday times and spaces of the city?

sensing time

Manchester

How do we sense local environments through different scales, speeds, and durations of time?

sensing place

Manchester

How do artistic practices open up new possibilities for sensing and belonging to local places?

exhibitions

We are developing an ogoing series of public exhibitions based on our work in the Local Alternatives project.

Our first exhibition, called Superpositions, was held at Birley Art Gallery in July, 2018.

Remixing Thick Time opened at the Whitworth Art Gallery in May, 2019.

Inheriting the Anthropocene opened July 18th, 2019 and ran through March 2020 at the Manchester Museum.

collaborators

David Rousell (Manifold Lab/Creative Agency Lab)

Liz de Freitas (Manifold Lab, MMU)

Michael Gallagher (Manifold Lab, MMU)

Mark Peter Wright (resident artist, MMU)

Laura Trafi-Prats (Manifold Lab, MMU)

Riikka Hohti (Manifold Lab, MMU)

Maggie MacLure (Manifold Lab, MMU)

Anne (Dan) Harris (Creative Agency Lab, RMIT)

Kelly Chan (Creative Agency Lab, RMIT)

Anna Hickey-Moody (Creative Agency/CRIMP, RMIT) MPavilion, M_Curators (Melbourne)

Jett Janetzki (M_Curators, Melbourne) CERES Community Environment Park

Mycelium Studios (Melbourne) Andrew Goodman (La Trobe University)

National Gallery of Victoria Michele Stockley (NGV)

Catharine Cary (RCA, London) Andreia Penaloza Caicedo (RMIT)

Aviva Endean (independent artist, ArtPlay) Justin Marshall (independent artist, ArtPlay)

Local Alternatives has been funded through the Creative Agency Lab (RMIT), Manifold Lab (MMU Strategic Opportunities Fund), a Research Accelerator Grant (Research and Knowledge Exchange, MMU), a Researcher Development Fellowship (MMU), Leverhulme Artist in Residence Grant, Säätiöiden Post Doc Pool (Finnish Foundation), and in-kind contributions from Z-arts, the Whitworth Art Gallery, and Manchester Museum.

We are also connecting the project internationally through partnerships and exchanges with ITU Copenhagen, Roskilde University, Andromeda Gallery, University of Barcelona, University of British Columbia, the Tapies Centre, and the SenseLab at Concordia University.

Suzanne Smith (Z-arts)

Z-artists (age 5-15)

Whitworth Young Contemporaries (age 15-25)

Hannah-Lee Chalk (Manchester Museum)

Sally Thelwell (Whitworth Gallery)

Rabia Begum (Whitworth Young Contemporaries)

Jonas Fritsch (ITU, Copenhagen)

Kristine Samson (Roskilde University, Copenhagen)

Signal and ArtPlay (City of Melbourne)