Sensing + Sensing, Sensors, Archives, Databases

We invite early-career researchers, artists, designers, architects, scientists, writers and practitioners to join our network. We are open to collaborating with individuals and collectives who are developing a critical and creative practice that traverses disciplinary boundaries. Our current areas of interest include - but are not limited to – the following interconnected fields:

Ecology
Geology
Urbanism
Infrastructure
Geography
Geopolitics
Ethnography
Cartography
System Theory
Cybernetics
Sense-making
Enactivism
Cosmology
etc.

For more information, please refer to the document available here:

Metamorphic Zone begins from the co-production among practitioners across diverse disciplines, taking words as shared departure points and thresholds through which practices meet, translate, and transform. From writing to editorial, words here are not vessels of meaning but mediators of relation, inviting new forms of dialogue across fields and sensibilities. Through collaborative writing, we encounter the multiplicity of worlds that words seek to hold together.

There are two ways of rendering our choices for the inquiry into existence, a state of bifurcation: one is the real but meaningless matter named nature – or the material; the other is the meaningful but unreal symbol named culture – or the mind. However, these two are in a relationship of shaping and being shaped by each other. To overcome the oppositional yet inseparable relationship of this bifurcation, one might recognise that the world is composed of hybrids of both the natural and the cultural. The world acts in multiplicity. Words are one of these agents, with semantic capacities that contribute to mediating our relationship to the world.

From the Nature of singularity to the World of multiplicity, we must learn to inhabit the metamorphic zone. Metamorphism is a fundamental attribute of the world itself; it can be understood as any entity, agency, or phenomenon undergoing transformation, whether human or non-human, material, or immaterial. Within this condition, different actors exchange features, leading to new distributions of agency.

Metamorphic Zone thus exists as a living field of correspondences, an ongoing co-production where practitioners, ideas, and worlds continuously encounter and reshape one another. From metaphor to metamorphism, words are actors that navigate us within the world where existence and signification are synonyms, embedded as properties of all agents.

This project has taken form through the effort, enthusiasm, and generosity of each contributor. In this shared process, discussing, learning, and working together have been invaluable.

The intention behind Metamorphic Zone emerged from an intuition to assemble a shared glossary – one that could articulate how we inhabit, think, and act together in the Anthropocene. The name draws on the legacy of Bruno Latour, whose work reminds us that metamorphosis is an epistemic condition: a simultaneous transformation of knowledge, perception, and the world we inhabit.

Responding to the challenge of bringing practitioners from varied disciplines into conversation, the project seeks to cultivate a network in which ideas evolve through encounter, knowledge is generated through dialogue, and collaboration becomes a shared response to shifting conditions.

We are grateful for the insights and guidance of Ann-Sofi Rönnskog and John Palmesino, whose teaching at the Architectural Association significantly informed the development of the project. Thanks to our friends Shuhang Clarice Cao, Sheer Gritzerstein, and Hiroaki Yamane for their inspired ideas and support.

Our initial contributors, including Kunlin He, Kristiina Koskentola, Lucia Rebolino, and Dr. Catherine Russell, have been generous in their engagement. We are especially grateful to web designers Pianpian He and Max Harvey, and to web developer Mianwei Wang, whose thoughtful work enabled the realisation of the digital platform.

Hearing workshop in Altamira, Spain (for Mediating the Void), Valentin Bansac, 2024. — *Hearing* workshop in Altamira, Spain (for *Mediating the Void*), Valentin Bansac, 2024.

“Urban intelligence involves site-based experience, participant observation, and sensory engagement. We need new models for thinking about cities that do not compute.” For media theorist Shannon Mattern, in A City Is Not a Computer (2021),the act of sensing represents much more than what sensors do. Sensing is the bodily exploration of our environment – the body being human, animal, machinic, or more. It involves all senses and offers the possibilities for “noticing” – a mode of attention that redistributes agency between human and non-human observers – as an alternative way to comprehend what surrounds us.

Working with do-it-yourself sensors and participatory communities, researcher Jennifer Gabrys, in How to Do Things with Sensors (2019), develops a kind of collaboration of minds between so-called "artificial" and “natural” intelligences that build an infrastructure of nerves for environmental sensing through citizen engagement. For Gabrys, “practices of monitoring and sensing environments have migrated to a number of everyday participatory applications”. With sensing comes the notion of monitoring, and thus simulation. Via simulations and with the collaboration of algorithms, humans project certain representations of the world, or the worlds we live in, which therefore inform how we understand them. Monitoring becomes operational, giving citizens potential for active participation in the making of their surroundings.

In Accumulation: The Art, Architecture, and Media of Climate Change (e-flux Architecture, 2022), the editors argue that “The climate is not the weather. Weather can be experienced, but to understand climate, media is necessary.” This sentence encapsulates the universal attempts by human societies to monitor, write, comprehend, store, analyze, and predict the sensory information that characterizes the ever-evolving nature of the ecosystems we inhabit. However, what we sense and archive remains subject to how this information is collected and through which technologies it is measured; for Michael Hamilton and his colleagues (2007), “environmental knowledge is co-produced by sensing infrastructures”. In that regard, these practices and technologies turn ecological relationships into media – sensed, archived, and computed in turn.

Sensing exceeds what sensors do: it is the embodied, attentive, and often collective act of noticing what formal monitoring infrastructures are not designed to register. Sensors, by contrast, are the material mediators that translate this noticing into data; their dissemination and calibration constitute a practice as much as a technology. Archives transcend mere collections of elements, yet the explosion of digital content risks privileging the calculable over the transmission of sensitive knowledge that defies quantification. Databases are the infrastructure through which queries travel; far from neutral containers, they actively construct what we consider facts. Together, they trace our relationship with what we consider the environment – through present, past, and therefore future ecological entanglements between humans and non-humans, through practice and technology, via simulation and storytelling.

Valentin Bansac

Matteo Bettini

Michaela Büsse

Shuhang Cao

Benedetta Ferrari

Haoge Gan

Sheer Gritzerstein

Kunlin He

Kristiina Koskentola

Kan Li

Alessio Pinton

Lucia Rebolino

Dr. Catherine Russell

Sensing

Valentin Bansac

Sensing, Sensors, Archives, Databases

Valentin Bansac