Exploring practices between the arts, sciences, and humanities

Description

An event organised by the Remote Sensing: Ice, Instruments, Imagination research network.

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Convenors

• Lilian Kroth, University of Cambridge
• Amelia Urry, University of Cambridge

Summary

The ‘Remote Sensing’ research network is an exploration of the practices and technologies that work from a distance in the arts, sciences, and humanities. Taking the history of sciences in hard-to-reach places as our starting point, we work to develop shared methods for thinking and feeling our way across distance. How do we—scholars, artists, historians, scientists—get in touch with remote subjects? If we consider that remoteness is an inevitable (and perhaps under appreciated) aspect of work in the arts and humanities, we might find productive dialogue with scientific conceptions of remote sensing. In other words, when ‘going there’ is not an option, how can instruments, imagination, and embodied practices work to span the distance?

Throughout the 2022 – 2023 academic year, the Remote Sensing network has hosted a series of hybrid discussions, from which we will draw for a two-day exploratory workshop ‘Remote Sensing – Exploring practices between the arts, sciences, and humanities’ on 20 & 21 April 2023. Our aim is to explore disciplinary intersections by bringing together scientific ideas about the collection of environmental data with other approaches to ‘distant feeling’ from the arts and humanities, in order to think together about how so-called remote places are experienced and understood today. In particular, we see the workshop as an opportunity to foster active collaboration between participants through a series of exercises and conversations. We hope to articulate the history of remote sensing as a vital and consequential factor in our contemporary lives, which are shaped and understood through daily mediations across distance.

Engaging with these concerns over two days, we will explore different approaches through three discussion panels that will address the themes ‘Experiencing Remote Ice Before Remote Sensing’ (chair: Thomas Simpson), ‘Bringing Remote Sensing Down to Earth’ (chair: Mia Bennett), and ‘Sensing Oceanic Ecologies’ (chair: Anna Guasco). Additionally, in a series of four collaborative sessions, we will work on building collective visual and textual resources, and explore how our own imaginative approaches as scholars, artists, and individuals influence our understanding of distant phenomena, perhaps opening new avenues for research and creative work.