Technecast

Continuing the Technecast’s miniseries on Nature, we hear from the poet, composer, sound artist and techne PhD researcher Rowan Evans. He introduces a recording of a poetic performance that recounts an instructional sequence about translating bird calls through Old English, which was recording running through Leigh Woods in Bristol. We then spoke to Rowan about the methodology of absurdity, magic and play; his doctoral research on contemporary poetic encounters with early medieval languages; and about the epistemological limits of language to contain non-human nature. We hope you enjoy!Rowan Evans is a poet, composer and sound artist. His most recent chapbook is The Last Verses of Beccán (Guillemot Press, 2019), which won the Michael Marks Award for poetry. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2015 and a selection of his work appears in Penguin Modern Poets 7: These Hard and Shining Things (Penguin, 2018). Rowan is editor of Moot Press and artistic co-director of the performance company FEN. He is currently undertaking practice-based PhD research in modern poetry and early medieval language at Royal Holloway, University of London.rowan-evans.com

I am Summer Phillips and my work is a symbiosis of art and science, utilising a multi-disciplinary approach to ask key environmental questions arising from human perceptions and subsequent behaviours. My current writing is a series of short, interlinked science fiction stories based on perceptions and creations of world: exploring the topics of speciesism, altered ecologies and parallel universe theory. I am interested in how our perception of animals, a branch we also reside upon, affects how our world could be re-built, to either thrive or decay.Story collection in progress: “Millimetre” – Interlinked speculative fiction tales based on perceptions & creations of world: exploring the topics of speciesism, altered ecologies & multiverse theory.Websites in progress: www.summermeadowphillips.com & www.speculativewild.comUniversity Profile: https://www.kingston.ac.uk/research/research-degrees/research-degree-students/profile/summer-phillips-206/

This Technē Cast episode addresses the theme of ‘touch’ and the different ways of thinking the tactile sense is subjected to in Western culture. Whilst touch is central to our aesthetic experiences of food, sex, music, art and design, it is also shrouded in taboo and loaded with negative associations. This episode touches on all these debates – the perceived neglect of touch, touch hunger, and the impact of sensory marketing, haptic technologies, and COVID-19 on our tactile encounters – and expresses hope for a rehabilitation of the sense of touch and our feelings of connection with the material world.Sophie Declerck is a AHRC technē Doctoral Researcher in the Institute for Design Innovation at Loughborough University London. Her research interests span sensory design, design aesthetics, and semiotic meaning-making practices. Her PhD project explores the meanings, material expressions and affective atmospheres of tactility with the aim of formulating an aesthetics of touch to inform the design of material artefacts. Sophie holds an MA in History of Design from the Royal College of Art/V&A Museum, and brings to her research an academic background in Classics, Applied Linguistics and Photography.

From sensory experience to emotions, from the crossing over of tactility and aurality to the crossing over of love and grief.This itinerary is explored through lonely train journeys that encounter Susan Sontag’s 'In America', Pablo Picasso’s 'Science and Charity'; Connie Palmen’s 'Logbook of a Merciless Year', Nick Cave’s Skeleton Tree Live Tour and the philosophy of tactility of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Luce Irigaray.It all begins with taking the pulse: listen to your heartbeat by placing two fingers on your wrist.Sylvia Solakidi is a PhD researcher at the Centre for Performance Philosophy, University of Surrey. She writes about experiences of time with the help of theatre and music performances, visual arts and literature, as well as through the writings of phenomenologists, anthropologists and performance scholars; she never forgets her experiences from Greek medical laboratories, where she used to work as a Biologist.

Edwin Gilson is a first year doctoral researcher at the University of Surrey, studying representations of the Anthropocene and regional mythology in the contemporary fiction of California. A BA and MA graduate in American literature, Edwin is particularly interested in modern environmental US fiction. In this podcast, he presents a summary of his initial PhD research into the relationship between the Anthropocene's physical realities and the enduring mythology attached to California nature - as reflected in 21st century environmental fiction.Music by David Fesliyan. Photo by Jeremy Perkins.

In this episode Selin Genc collaborates with Orestis Lepine to interweave prose and music to explore the feeling of vertigo she suffers during her artistic process. Drawing on various creative traditions such as Land art, Colour Field Painting, speculative fiction, and cartography, she attempts to chart her predicament and find traces of analogous experiences in the works of others. The literary references mentioned in this podcast can be found in Italo Calvino’s ‘Collection of Sand’, 'Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings', and Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘Dreamtigers’.Selin’s visual works can be viewed on her website https://selingenc-art.wixsite.com/portfolio

A professional storyteller since 2015, Jon is fascinated by the connections between folklore, history, landscape and identity - which he is pursuing through his PhD at the University of Brighton. In this podcast, he discusses "eco-storytelling" (the use of myth and folktale to promote environmental awareness) and illustrates how its reach can be broadened through lessons from oral history theory and subculture studies. If we are storytelling beings, what stories do we make to address urban life? How can these be brought to bear to enrich our understanding of place and its connections to ourselves?Twitter: @jonmaseFacebook: "Jon Mason Stories and Music"https://jonthestoryteller.com/https://research.brighton.ac.uk/en/persons/jon-mason

Ruth Hansford talks to Professor Bran Nicol, Head of the School of Literature and Languages at Surrey, about cultural “extramural” psychoanalysis and its enduring themes. In the early days of lockdown, over Zoom, they explore hysteria, otherness, language, performance and narrative, intimacy and “extimacy”, and how these can be seen in Hitchcock’s 1954 film Rear Window, a film that also resonates for our contemporary confinement. It includes reference to Laplanche and Pontalis's 'The Language of Psychoanalysis' (Routledge, 1988). Photo credit: Nicholas Heath

In this episode, doctoral researcher Nat Reeve unspools the spiralling weirdness in the art and poetry of Elizabeth Siddal (1829-1862). You might know Siddal as the face of Millais's Ophelia, but this episode explores her own creative work. We'll wander through some of her works, close reading relentlessly as we go, and trace how they reimagine compositions, retell stories and queer their medieval source material. If you've an interest in Pre-Raphaelite paintings, illuminated manuscripts, macabre ballads and a creative process best described as 'dismembering', the ensuing twenty minutes are decidedly for you.Music also by Nat Reeve, from Ophelia, a musical about the feral creative process behind the eponymous painting.Image © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

The common terminologies used by soundscape ecologists to describe different types of sound are (broadly speaking) animal sounds, human sounds and elemental earth sounds. Liz K. Miller presents her key findings from her thesis to show how these categories fail to capture the soundscape of trees, asking where the sounds made by trees fit into this lexicon and study of sound. Trees are an essential part of the ecosystem but, as yet, have no place in our classification system. Liz presents beautiful soundscapes and field recordings from Blackheath Forest in the Surrey hills and Clocaenog Forest in North Wales, leaving us with the rustling of leaves and creaking of bark alongside birdsong and soaring aeroplanes overhead. Presenting a new category for these familiar yet often overlooked sounds, Liz asks what can we learn from listening to trees. ***Liz K Miller (b. 1983, Hexham) is a London-based audio-visual artist and researcher. She graduated from Edinburgh College of Art (BA), Camberwell College of Art (MA), and was a print fellow at the Royal Academy Schools (2013 to 2016). In 2018 she was awarded an AHRC TECHNE scholarship to undertake a practice-based PhD at the Royal College of Art in the School of Arts and Humanities.