Sensing an Inland Wetland: Glitches, Patches and Mosaics

About the seminar

This talk reports on research investigating multimodal sensing for wetland environments, in collaboration with the Commonwealth Environmental Water Office Flow-MER program. Audio recorders, time-lapse and motion-triggered cameras gathered data over a four month period at a wetland in the western reaches of the Murrumbidgee river. The resulting website, Mosaic: Life on the Western Lakes, experiments with approaches to structuring, presenting and narrating this data.  

Distributed sensing is increasingly used to measure and manage living places, and in a range of other social and cultural practices. Critiques from the social sciences frame this sensing as panoptic biosurveillance, or a continuous, extensive field of capture. In practice, as this work shows, sensing is place-based, patchy and discontinuous, rife with glitches and contingencies. Data gathering practices sensors, classifiers, protocols and their design and deployment create bounded, selective views of an ecological complex. These views in turn shape ontological categories and hierarchies of value and attention. Combining approaches from the environmental humanities, STS and design, this work asks how we might see, or see around, the edges of such digital patches. How might such fragments be reassembled, and how might such mosaics entangle us with the extensive and troubled relations of living places like this?

About the presenter

Mitchell Whitelaw is an academic, writer and maker with interests in digital design and culture, data practices and digital collections. His scholarship is practice-based and collaborative; he has developed public digital projects with partners including the Atlas of Living Australia, the State Library of NSW, the Commonwealth Environmental Water Office and the National Gallery of Australia. His current research investigates environmental and biodiversity data, and digital design for a more-than-human world. Mitchell is Professor of Design in the School of Art and Design at the Australian National University.

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Getting there

Room 3.08, Level 3, 
CDU Danala Education and Community Precinct, 
54 Cavenaugh Street, 
Darwin. 

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