Writer and theorist Mackenzie Wark suggests that “Disparate times call for disparate
methods” (2015). In addressing the theme of ASPERA 2025, this panel proposes how
experimental and disparate methods can address questions around interspecies
relationships and navigating unsettled lands.
Creative practice scholars and filmmakers, Liz Burke, Catherine-Gough-Brady, and
Christine Rogers work with experimental practices in responding to and making work
about place and the nonhuman. These methodologies and methods are various, and
responsive to calls to decolonise our practices, to decentre the human, to prioritize
other kinds of thinking and knowing that are more responsive to life beyond-human.
Burke asks viewers, on their couches, to watch her non-linear essay film about people
and their dogs, and respond to the adventure of “leaning forward” and interacting while
viewing. How do people, and their dogs, watch, and engage with a non-linear film? How
do people participate in a film while still being outside the film?
Gough-Brady argues that film language is human-centric, for example, the mid shot
refers to a relationship between the (mostly human) body and the frame. Once she is
filming something without eyes, it becomes di\icult to use this language to describe
her shot choices, and she asks, ‘What is a mid-shot of a mountain?’
Rogers, following Gough-Brady’s lead, turns her lens to the sky, exploring and
experimenting through a collaboration with a poet, Jane Frank, how to frame the
limitless space above us. She discovers that a full-frame sky speaks of absence, that it
calls out to belong, to be anchored to the edges of the land. Further connection, but
also disconnection, occurs when the words of the poems are written on the sky in post-
production. Rogers asks ‘how can belonging with place be created and expressed
through the frame?’