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Noticing the Minuitae
Can we (re)converse with more-than-human species, and appreciate ever-changing, symbiotic, interconnected life on a smaller scale to our own? Life exists on multiple scales and speeds, but many of us are tuned into interactions that occur on the human point on these scales. How can we use noticing and radical curiosity to challenge dominant paradigms of anthropocentrism? The paper evaluates how through the process of collecting moss and carving stone I discovered new ways to connect with moss. The work is influenced by sympoetic making, Indigenous and situated knowledges, eco-feminism, stone carving and photography practices. It is about moss, but what we notice and how we connect to it will vary wildly because our relationship to nature is personal. Through the art of noticing – whether river, rock, bird, insect – can we learn how to grapple with unknowns and better understand ourselves, our histories, current actions, and future possibilities?
This project is about “radical curiosity” and whether it can help us connect with the world around us (Tsing, 2015, ag144). To many, the word radical means to shock or to exist outside of accepted frameworks. Whilst radical does mean to disrupt, the etymology of the word also means to proceed from the root. When the world around us seems to move at an incredibly fast pace, it is disruptive to be slow, to stop and to notice. The project is also about asking questions, grappling with unknowns and interspecies wondering, which may have potential to help us to better understand ourselves, our histories, current actions, and future possibilities. I will examine some alternative modes of design that seek to unsettle and challenge dominant paradigms of anthropocentrism.
Can we reconnect to our sense of place by noticing the minutiae? How can we care about things if we don’t notice them? Life exists on multiple scales and speeds, but many of us in the Global North are tuned into interactions that occur on the human point on these scales. Moss and lichen are pioneer species – some of the first inhabitants to take up residence on trees, rocks, gate posts, churches, pavements, even arid deserts in the case of lichen (Broad, 1989). Through their cycles of birth, life, and death across deep time, they begin to create foundation soils in which other species can grow. Lichen can also act as indicators of air quality, metals, sulphur dioxide, Ozone and nitrogen compounds, fluorides, aromatic hydrocarbons, and microfaunal biodiversity (Richardson, 1992). If we could learn to read them, they could teach us more about the world around us, they could sound alarms or point towards wellbeing, that may benefit not just humans in urban spaces, but all life.
As ecosystem engineers of microhabitats, can lichen and mosses facilitate connection to the more-than-human and more-than-individual world? But how do we converse with them? Do our familiar languages and methods of communication prevent us from learning the languages of more-than-humans? Can adapting our senses to cultivate “new terminology” that emphasises “connectedness instead of dualist divides” help us to build empathy and see our mutual entanglement(s) (Nurmenniemi, 2020, p.165). What would this mean for meeting the challenges of the Anthropocene?
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Output
The project output is a photo of a moss sitting in an indentation carved to its shape. It is an attempt to create a niche for it to be at home in, on a stone where other mosses grow. When I look closely at the piece I see the leaves look like flowers, twisted at the ends like rope. Sometimes the moss is lush and green, like a tiny forest viewed from above, at other times it is dry and as though its life is held in suspended animation, waiting for the rain. There is an accompanying text but it is not essential that the viewer reads it, as the photo invites the viewer to form their own personal insight and connections with the moss(es) and stone.
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Could you learn to read in a different way?
If you took away all the letters and words that tune us in to the human and
dial down the more-than-human.
Many of us are so attuned to human frequencies in sound, sight, and time
that we don’t notice lives living on different scales to our own.
Over multiple generations we have forgotten the languages of more-than-
humans.
Many sounds lost their familiarity.
The hum of the bee replaced by the lawnmower, the sound of the wind by
the car and the ebb and flow of the seasons by the 6 o’clock news.
I see a prediction for the weather today and I forgot how to read the signs
for myself.
Concrete jungles bind us in captivity.
Motorways cut across the land.
Earphones distract us from those we are entangled with.
Of course, these things can bring us joy.
But they are not everything, and not everyone has forgotten.
What happens when we stop to notice, look closely, or tune our ears into
sounds humans did not create?
Pioneer species like moss and lichen form foundation soils in which other
species can grow. These are built up so slowly that we might not be aware.
Despite our anthropocentric daydreaming, life is everywhere and whether
we realise it or not, we are mutually entangled.
What can you hear when the letters disappear?
When you focus your eyes to a different scale and notice, actually notice,
perhaps what you see cannot be unseen.
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Agency of Moss
The original idea for my project was to carve a message into stone and infill the letters with moss. The aim was to see if I could enable the moss to capture the human viewer’s attention so they could think about the perspective of another species. However, through the processes of collecting, making and connecting I realised in my attempts to locate the voice of another species, I was not really listening.
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I realised early in the process of collecting moss that I should only take bits that were unrooted and try to sense whether they would allow me to take them or if they wanted to stay. We are not typically used to this way of being in British culture, and it did feel strange to me at first. Kimmerer speaks about the honourable harvest, which includes asking the plant for permission to take, in which she uses the left side of her brain to read “the empirical signs to judge whether the population is large and healthy enough to sustain a harvest, whether it has enough to share” whilst the “intuitive right is reading something else, a sense of generosity, an open-handed radiance that says take me, or a tight-lipped recalcitrance that makes me put my trowel away” (Kimmerer, 2020, p.178). The honourable harvest is not just about how to take, it is also about reciprocity and giving a gift of thanks, this could be “gratitude”, “ceremony”, “land stewardship”, “science”, “art” or “everyday acts of practical reverence” (ibid, p.190). I noticed that a lot of moss falls from the roof of my house onto the street below and realised these stranded urban mosses might be better suited to the project than forest mosses.
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An internet search returns suggestions for mixing moss and natural yoghurt in a blender to encourage growth. This technique seemed too violent for a project which is about inter-species connection. Instead, I tried to handle the moss gently. I used scissors for my first interaction with the moss but switched to using my hands to break it apart more delicately. This approach was reminiscent of conservation work on peatlands, where mosses are broken apart by hand to move them to an area of bare peat. Yet breaking the shapes the moss had formed naturally to try to get it to fit into letters still did not feel right. I changed my approach to carve indents in the stone that are shaped to the individual moss to allow them to retain their existing form. The piece still had letters, and it is possible that moss or lichen will colonise these one day, but they are not being made to. It is acknowledged that the project is an experiment and despite efforts to minimise it, these processes might still cause harm to the moss and microfauna.
Frankjaer favours sympoietic making over designerly approaches to creation that subdue “the world with brute force into the desired state”, by shifting her methods in her work with plant participants to develop “subtle relational empathy” and alter processes that the human designers “could not always completely comprehend” (Frankjaer, 2019, p.84). Through the process of collaborating with mosses on this project, I gained some similar insights, as shown in the final output which does not remodel mosses to fit anthropocentric ideas.
In developing the final piece, I carved the text ‘LETTERS DISAPPEAR’, which were intended to stand alone rather than be occupied by moss, but I realised as the piece is about looking more closely, at the moss itself. St Pierre observes that “animist awareness brings a fierce questioning of Modern Western priorities in design” (St Pierre, 2019, p.25). Effectively, the letters I carved remain but are not the focus point of the piece. I had to get to know the stone itself and learn that rushed movements could lead to mistakes, the stone required patience, care and noticing. It allowed me to craft the intended shapes when I applied this kind of focus. Carvers can take years of practice to build knowledge and familiarity with stone, they have to learn how to connect to it on its terms. An unspoken element of reverence for the stone is required in order to work with it.
Agency of Humans
The project is intended to be an exploration into interspecies imagining. Timothy Morton observes that the root of ecological thinking is being open to ambiguity; that it might be in the realms of indistinct feelings that we can find the foundations for care for the more-than-human, where it wasn’t felt before (Morton, 2018). To be able to stop and notice could be said to be a necessary radical act for some and a luxury for others. The project does not assume that everyone will have the time, mental space or inclination to
notice or care, but it may sow some seeds of wonder about our entangled lives and fates for those that do.
Hopefully the moss will grow and thrive regardless. Whether the moss stays in the indents or grows into the lettering cannot be controlled by humans. Nor can the speed of growth, it may take years for it to establish, if at all.
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Why Should We Care About the Minutiae?
The project focuses primarily on moss and lichen as access points into life on a small scale. Most microzoa cannot be seen by the human eye but awareness of the plants that support them as habitats can open our minds to their existence.
We often try to make sense of more-than-human processes through anthropological concepts, such as scientific or economic reasoning. Robert Macfarlane suggests that a new language for understanding more-than-human species is needed – “one that doesn’t automatically convert it to our own use values…Perhaps we need an entirely new language system to talk about fungi…We need to speak in spores (Macfarlane, 2020, pp.110-111).
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As multi-species beings, Lichens may appear to thrive on a sharing economy. Goward suggests that “lichens are fungi that have taken up agriculture” (Goward, 1994, p.17). Rather than viewing more-than-human processes on our
terms, this could be flipped to see what we might be able to learn from them. Lichens call into question the notion of the individual and could “potentially offer a queer way out of heteronormative narratives of human and more-than-human sexuality and sociality by decentring heterosexual biological reproduction as the only way that life (re) produces” (Griffiths, 2015, p.39). The insights from this could have profound consequences to human social structures, health, and wellbeing.
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Moss provides a home for microfauna not visible to the human eye, including tardigrades (Journey to the Microcosmos, 2019), also known as water bears, they appear as multi-legged creatures in a puffy suit and move not unlike a cat pawing the air or an astronaut floating about in a space station. They can survive in extreme conditions (Møbjerg et al, 2011). Sphagnum mosses form peatland when they decompose in anaerobic conditions, creating one of the Earth’s largest carbon stores, and therefore carry huge value to mitigating climate change.
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Ways of Seeing
Tsing et al talk of “haunted landscapes, that relentlessly trouble the narratives of Progress, and urge us to radically imagine worlds that are possible because they are already here” (Tsing et al, 2017, p.G12).. It might seem scary for some people to consider our interdependence on other beings. We have crafted a world that encourages dualism and sanitation from the messiness of entanglement and reliance on other beings.
We might live busy and stressful lives, perhaps we go to the supermarket and do not grow or hunt our own food or spray chemicals into the cracks in our patio to prevent any unwanted plants or ants’ nests taking hold. Other beings can be a nuisance, perhaps I might try to bat them away and continue with my day, undisturbed by them, but at what cost?
Whyte talks about the importance of kinship and reciprocity in the Potawatomi and other indigenous cultures, which each have unique ways of knowing. Kinship relationships can be with “humans, plants, animals, fishes, insects, rocks, waterways, or forests” and are built on qualities such as “trust, consensuality, transparency, reciprocity, and accountability” (Whyte, 2020, p.268). These ideas could be valuable in collective evolution out of neoliberal capitalist models which are centered on humans as individuals. Riedy notes the importance of finding “sufficient common ground across these diverse voices to overturn neo-liberal capitalism without losing plurality” (Riedy, 2020, p.109).
In Tham’s metadesign yarn meditation, she encourages participants to consider the scales of “me, we, world and back again” through a meditative project (author’s interpretation shown in figure 12) (Tham, 2022). The meditation involves a process of looking deeply internally and externally which encourages the reader to consider that we may have our own views, but it is not possible to entirely detach ourselves from others. If we are to develop empathy for the external, we also need to do so for the internal, and vice versa. Thich Nhat Hanh explains we “inter-be with all the non-human elements within us and around us…without minerals, plants, and animals, how can there be human beings?” (Thich, 2021, p.23).
Language?
Abram notes that animism is a common thread throughout traditionally oral indigenous cultures, and argues that this is “a kind of default setting (to use a technological metaphor) for our species; that in the absence of intervening technologies, the human senses spontaneously encounter the sensorial surroundings as a field of sensitive and sentient powers” (Abram, 2019, p.183). Kimmerer observes that “learning the grammar of animacy could well be a restraint on our mindless exploitation of land…we don’t have to figure everything out for ourselves: there are intelligences other than our own, teachers all around us. Imagine how less lonely the world would be” (Kimmerer, 2020, p.58).
Within human languages, innumerable concepts exist which don’t have direct translations between cultures. These inform how we see and interact with the world and the realities that are created. Akama discusses how design in Japan has co-evolved with the Japanese concept of ‘Ma’ (SocialDesignSydney, 2018) – which roughly translates as empty (but not absent) space. Kimmerer explains the Potawatomi word ‘Puhpowee’ as “the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the Earth overnight” (Kimmerer, 2020, p.49). If we had words for such concepts in the English language, might it change the way we view ourselves in relation to the world around us and other living beings, perhaps “a world with a democracy of species, not a tyranny of one” (Ibid, p.58).
It became apparent that the project should raise questions and wonderings rather than try to speak for the moss itself. Given the diversity of human philosophy and whilst many human and more-than-human needs overlap, there are likely immeasurable differences in thought between species, not ignoring our anatomically different bodies. The carving does not tell people what to think, it invites them to view moss in its intended form to try to connect across species. Riedy suggests that there is a need for projects that “provide space for participants to co-create their own futures and narratives beyond those provided by neoliberalism” (Riedy, 2020, p.109). A marker of success of the project is if viewers can connect to the moss, even if not tangible enough to put into words, a seed of empathy or connection could be grown from noticing.
Disrupting Norms Through Modes of Design
Superflux’s Refuge for Resurgence presents a multispecies banquet in which humans, animals, birds, plants, moss, and fungi gather around a table in a post-apocalyptic world and seek to imagine new multi-species inclusive ways of living (Superflux, 2021). This project is connected to their More than Human Manifesto, in which they outline their vision for how humankind can “think beyond itself” (Superflux, 2021).
This offers a creative vision for reorienting future trajectories in ways that are not limited to human priorities. Visions can only take us so far, but they provide important foundations, as Haraway observes “it matters what matters we use to think other matters with” (Haraway, 2016, p.12). Superflux note that “the awe of small things helps”, having starting point is key, but whether through mosses, birds or rivers does not really matter (Superflux, 2021).
Sally Sutherland speaks of the importance of considering “the unobserved, invisible, silences and silenced” in design decisions through the medium of noticing (Sutherland, 2019, p.61). Mcfall-Ngai highlights that the loss of unknown symbiotic partners may disrupt an entire ecosystem (Mcfall-Ngai, 2017). We need to find new ways to know when populations are healthy or if we are causing harm.
Ståhl & Tham discuss radically weaving post-anthropocentric knowledges and practices from “ethics, aesthetics, politics, creativity, pleasure, care, love” (Ståhl & Tham, 2018, p.243). The project contains and gently encourages creativity of thought in the viewer, and aesthetics are designed into the work through carving, in the shape of the moss and English language. I try to balance this handling of the moss with care, whether other viewers care is their decision, so is whether they feel love or pleasure from the connection, ethics and politics are entangled into the project, but they are sticky. I plant the moss onto the stone, but other than moving it, I am not able to control it.
Conclusion
Noticing will mean different things to different people; it is not presented as a solution but as a way of being in and with the world that might lead to alternative futures. In noticing we may discover entanglements that are beneficial or harmful to the symbiotic partners and anywhere in-between, but by being aware of them we can better consider their implications.
Through the process of making and connecting to moss I realise I can’t expect it to submit to my requirements. Instead, if I attend to it by noticing and nurturing it, for example by watering it, it responds by growing greener. If I forget and it hasn’t rained, its leaves retreat and it appears as if dying. I noticed that if I water moss with mature sporophytes, they will sometimes respond to the water, almost like they are stretching or dancing, but this is not guaranteed, and they do not perform to my will.
This project is about noticing life on the minute scale, but it’s also about noticing the more-than-human in general. Entangled lives are everywhere, even in our urban landscapes and our ways of seeing can (re)create our realities and shift our ways of being. It is hoped that the piece will open up wondering in human observers to form some seeds of empathy and connection to more-than-human life.
Through noticing beyond our own experiences, there are opportunities to change the way we view ourselves in relation to the world around us and other living beings. Through expanding these insights, might we design different outcomes that could be less human-centric?
References
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“Yoko Akama — Designing with: Participatory approaches to build resilience.“ YoutTube Video, 18:30. Posted by “SocialDesignSydney,” 10 June 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHyQqftz9c8.
Broad, K. Lichens in Southern Woodlands, Forestry Commission Handbook 4. London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1989.
Frankjaer, Raune. “Becoming-with Vegetal: Sympoietic Design Practice with Plant Partners.” In Design and Nature: A Partnership, edited by Kate Fletcher, Louise St. Pierre and Mathilda Tham, 79-85. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019.
Goward, Trevor. “Living Antiques: Tiny Lichens May Hold the Key to Protecting BC’s Ancient Forests.” Nature Canada Summer 1994: 14-21. https://www.waysofenlichenment.net/public/pdfs/Goward_1994_Living_antiquities.pdf.
Griffiths, David. “Queer Theory for Lichens”. UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies 19 (October): 36-45. https://currents.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/currents/article/view/40249.
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
“Journey to the Microcosmos: Eating, Hatching, and Crashing into the Moon: More About Tardigrades.” YouTube Video. Posted by “Journey to the Microcosmos.” 5 November 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA_gOZZhEdM.
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