In the Garden: Listening, Learning, and Animating the More-than-Human

This presentation explores the intersection of expanded animation, ecological consciousness, and interspecies communication through In the Garden: Giggles in the Greenery, a collaborative multimedia project within the graphic anthology Anima Mundi. Bringing together 12 artists across disciplines, the project engages with the sensory and symbolic dimensions of entheogenic plants through animation, sound, and visual storytelling, evoking more-than-human ways of knowing. Drawing on historical, mythological, and spiritual research, the project engages with animation as both an artistic and epistemological tool—one that enables us to listen, translate, and speculate on knowledge beyond the human (Schultes, Hofmann & Rätsch, 1998; Lehner & Lehner, 1960).

Inspired by Jane Bennett’s (2010) concept of vibrant matter, which emphasizes the agency of non-human entities, In the Garden considers how materials themselves participate in shaping knowledge. This idea resonates with animation’s capacity to render the unseen visible, offering a speculative means to explore the communicative and epistemological capacities of the more-than-human world. The project also reflects Ursula K. Le Guin’s (2017) assertion that speculative storytelling allows us to question dominant anthropocentric narratives while fostering a deeper attunement to the ecological systems we inhabit.

At its core, Anima Mundi is rooted in the recognition that intelligence and communication exist in forms entirely different from our own (Bridle, 2022; Kohn, 2013). By embracing both publication and animation, the project creates artefacts that invite audiences to engage with the ways plants, fungi, and minerals communicate across time, space, and symbiotic relationships. The first installment, In the Garden, specifically explores entheogenic plants and their historical role as guides and mediators of consciousness, offering an alternative framework for understanding interspecies interactions (Tsing, 2015).

This presentation will showcase both the publication and the animated film, examining how animation—through its ability to visualize the unseen—can function as a conduit for interspecies storytelling. How can artistic research, through embodied and sensory practices, expand our capacity to know beyond the limits of human language (Ingold, 2011)? How might collaborative processes with other artists, materials, and living beings open new ways of perceiving truth and interconnectedness?

Through speculative storytelling and artistic research, In the Garden investigates how deep listening, embodied knowledge, and animation’s unique capacity for metamorphosis can reshape our understanding of truth, interconnectivity, and ecological awareness. By attending to the voices of the more-than-human world, this project aligns with the symposium’s broader questions about how knowledge is shaped through media and how artistic practice can offer forms of resistance to dominant, anthropocentric frameworks.

Ways of Knowing: practice as research, material resistance and re-presented reality in expanded documentary form.

This symposium delves into the dynamic intersections of artistic research, practice as research, and expanded documentary forms. We aim to explore how knowledge is produced and what it means to truly know something in the context of creative practices. How do we engage in processes of knowing, deeply and intimately, through sensory, embodied, and experiential methods? How do these processes of research—whether in audio-visual media, animation, or documentary—transform our relationship with the world and shape the forms through which we communicate our findings?

We will focus on the concept of material resistance—how materiality, environment, and the media we use inform and challenge our perceptions of reality. How do we work with provisionality and metamorphosis ? We are interested in exploring how expanded animation and expanded documentary can create new, layered ways of communicating knowledge and resistance through audio-visual media.

Join us to explore, question, and expand your own understanding of how we know and how we can communicate knowing in the context of artistic practice, expanded media, and creative resistance!