Tag Archives: Nature

Your world is different from a pigeon’s – but a new theory explains how we can still live in the same reality

Catherine Legg is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Deakin University.

“My areas of research include philosophies of language, mind and mathematics. I have long standing interests in the American pragmatists, particularly Charles Peirce, and currently co-edit the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry ‘Pragmatism’. I maintain a side-interest in artificial intelligence, having previously worked as an ontological engineer. I’m also very interested in philosophy of education, and am involved with the Philosophy for Children movement.”

The Jellyfish Who Lost Hope

Nicholas P. Money (Nik Money) is a gentleman of letters, mycologist, and professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is the author of popular science books that celebrate the diversity of the microbial world. His latest book, ‘Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines’, reveals our dependence on the fungi from the billions of yeasts in the gut microbiome, or mycobiome, to the mushroom colonies that support plants and spin the carbon cycle.

The Wash

Jane Scobie is sculptor working on environmental issues, her research areas include biodiversity, extraction and ocean literacy. Her MA work explores the Strandline, a ‘living system’ as material, model and metaphor to understand our relationship with the ocean in the context of climate breakdown. Jane uses materials and processes with a low environmental impact and has a circular creative approach to design – remaking and re-using work.

Foraging as a way of life

Maria Medina-Schechter (born Pasadena, California, 1976), is a bio artist whose work is informed by the natural world, including Middle Age illuminated manuscripts, scribes, and recipes. She is inspired by Hildegard of Bingen, a German mystic of the High Middle Ages. Maria works primarily with bio materials, mycelium, tree resin, and foraged botanical materials. Her early work involved the use of living organisms, such as bacteria and fungi, as art materials, creating sculptures and installations that were alive and growing. In the 1990s, she began to integrate digital technologies into her work, exploring the relationship between virtual and organic.

Humans weren’t the first engineers, doctors and farmers – bacteria, plants and animals have lots to teach us

Predrag Slijepcevic is a Senior Lecturer in Biology, Brunel University London

“I am a bio-scientist interested in the philosophy of biology. In particular, I investigate how biological systems, from bacteria to animals and beyond, perceive and process environmental stimuli (biological information) and how this processing, which is a form of natural learning, affects the organism-environment interactions. I aim to identify those elements in the organization of biological systems that lead to forms of natural epistemology, or biological intelligence, that may qualify them as cognitive agents.
In particular, I specialise in analysis of chromosomes and study of structures at chromosome ends called telomeres. My other interest is animal behavior developed while studying veterinary medicine. I have lately developed interest in insects and their propensity to develop technologies.”

Animal consciousness: why it’s time to rethink our human-centred approach

Patricia MacCormack is Professor of Continental Philosophy, Anglia Ruskin University.

Patricia has published extensively in the areas of Continental philosophy, feminism, queer theory, posthuman ethics, animal studies and horror films. The REF test rated all her work at 4*. Her work has been cited and reviewed internationally resulting in many invites to HEIs to speak both to Faculty and public lectures. Her monographs Cinesexuality, Posthuman Ethics and The Animal Catalyst collection have been key reading on curricula internationally, including Monash University, Brock University, UCSB and universities in Europe, North and South America and Australia.

The Fox & The Tarn

Garry Kennard is a painter, writer and founding director of Art and Mind (www.artandmind.org). A fascination with how the brain reacts to works of art has lead Kennard to research, write and lecture on these topics. With Rita Carter and Annabel Huxley he devised and directed the unique Art and Mind Festivals which attracted leading artists and scientists to explore what light the brain sciences can throw on contemporary culture.

From control towards vulnerability

Claire Morgan is an Irish artist, born in 1980 in Belfast.

“Being alive can be beautiful and horrific. Every living thing is in this state of constant transition. I am intrigued by those simultaneous senses of spiritual communion and unpalatable intrusion that come about through awareness of our connectedness, and of our vulnerability.

My practice has been focussed on how we humans understand and interact with the rest of the natural world, and our unwillingness to acknowledge our absolute lack of autonomy or control. I look at humans as animals, and the complexity of our intellectual dislocation from the landscape that sustains us. We behave as individual entities with fixed identities, but the reality is less clear.”

Paying attention to space

Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva is a contemporary visual artist working across varied media of sculpture, installation, video, sound, photography and architectural interventions. Her materials range from the extraordinary to the ordinary and the ephemeral or discarded to the highly precious; they have included organic materials, foodstuffs and precious metals, such as caul fat to gold leaf. Central to her practice is a response to the particularities of place; its history, locale, environment and communities. She is interested in how the exchange of knowledge might develop through collaborative working and in the contexts of landscape, heritage, science and community as offered by each location.