Creative Ecologies
A practice of perceptual adaptation to place — conducted with whatever tools, analog or digital, artistic or scientific, best open the channels by which a place can be perceived.
The Work
How do humans perceive the places they inhabit? What channels of perception are open or closed in any given moment? How can technology, art, science, and conversation amplify those channels rather than overwrite them?
AI is collapsing the distance between idea and artifact at the same moment that the cost of paying attention to the specifics of any one place has never been higher. The risk is that powerful tools designed for general use will overwrite local knowledge, local language, and local ways of knowing. The opportunity is that the same tools, used carefully, can do the opposite: amplify perception, preserve specificity, and lower the barrier for communities to make sense of their own conditions in their own terms.
Two Registers
Science
Methods, tools, papers, posters, peer-reviewed publication, grants. Research programs in conversation analysis, multimodal transcription, AI-assisted qualitative coding, and place-based knowledge systems.
Art
Frameworks, enactments, documentation, exhibitions. Generative systems that other people can enact — designed for a specific place, open to anyone willing to attend to it.
Projects
Tools for Conversation
A methods and infrastructure research program treating conversation as spatial, embodied, and multi-party. Hardware, software, and analysis tools for capturing and studying natural interaction.
Local Conversation Studio
Place-based research on language, identity, and everyday interaction. Ethnographic field research combined with small analog interventions that facilitate intercultural dialogue.
Local Language Cards
Hand-held analog tools supporting intercultural adaptation in specific places. A bridge between linguistic research and participatory art.
Native Plant Garden Tours
A community choreography in which neighbors host visitors through gardens of native plants. The artwork is the organized attention of a community on the specifics of its own place.
Place Radio
Walker-activated listening environments built from public-domain audio tied to specific places. Layered auditory and historical attention, anchored to a map.
Global Paper-as-Place
A distributed material practice where contributors make paper from local earth and native plants, then document the place. The paper is a sample; the upload is the encoding of context.
Long Horizon
The long-horizon goal is the Center for Creative Ecologies: a network of locally-rooted nodes where locals and visitors meet to perceive the fullness of a place.
Natural history, cultural history, ecology, language, urbanism, art, and science held together as facets of one inquiry. The curriculum is the curriculum of perception. The faculty is anyone who can help a participant perceive something true about the place that day. The visitor adapts to the place, not the reverse.