Remote Sensing 2

Remote Sensing was a platform to share knowledge, approaches, and challenges in fieldwork, with a focus on places, communities, and collections. In late April 2022, the second Remote Sensing symposium took place at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London. Organised by BA Illustration Course Leader Dr Rachel Emily Taylor and Senior Lecturer Sara Ortolani, the event was a development on the themes from the first symposium—which took place in April 2021, during a national lockdown in the UK amidst the COVID-19 pandemic—and explored the changing significance and understanding of field work and research during a period of enforced isolation and remote access. The 2022 symposium, which simultaneously took place in-person and online, considered the changes and the progress made by curators, visual communicators, and researchers as they have reflected on and incorporated into their practice the forms of knowledge making that came out of the pandemic settings. The event concluded with a ranging, vital and somewhat meta presentation and conversation between Dr Timothy Morton and Dr Sheena Calvert titled ‘I’m Not Here’ (enabled by now-ubiquitous online meeting software), which discussed the phenomena and philosophical significance of remote-ness in participatory practices and more widely.

In this publication, a number of symposium presenters provide context and insight into their research put forward in the symposium in April 2022. They are: Drs Maja and Rueben Fowkes, who spoke about their experience in exhibition-making in more-than-digital worlds and here present ‘Ecological Uncodings: Decolonising Digital Futures’, abridged from an article from Springerin no.3 (2021); Dr Dylan Yamada-Rice, whose talk explored socially-distanced games and play as a means of remote data collection and here presents a concise look at those subjects and research from their presentation, detailing how they engage research participants remotely; and Futuress (Maya Ober and Nina Paim), who spoke in conversation with Paul Bailey during the symposium, and who brought questions about democratising design education from their position as the then-editors of Futuress, a self-described ‘hybrid between a learning community and a publishing platform’. Futuress’ contribution here is a glossary of key terms and ideas that it also a guide and an invitation to join them in the ‘space’ they have created.

In an open call intended to augment the symposium prompts and the conversations that took place on the day, several papers and essays by writers, academics, and visual practitioners are also presented here. Responding to the core prompts from the 2022 symposium—how pandemic restrictions produced modes of knowledge-making and how we can move beyond the restrictions into a new understanding of research and field work—and taking a range of formats that include visual essays and in-depth reviews of practice, the open-call contributors are: Angela M Bowskill, ‘Multi-Modality: Sensory Ethnography in Lockdown’; Pat Wingshan Wong, ‘Barter Archive: Billingsgate Fish Market’; Karen Piddington, ‘Sheepology: Nonhuman Encounters’; and Dr Fadi Shayya and Dr Matthew Flintham, ‘Engineering the Landscape: Tracing Militarised Accounts of the Landscapes in Utility Patents’.

Lastly, responding to the theme of translation as a research method for illustration, specifically drawing from the Remote Sensing directive to consider the processes and methods that enable practitioner research to continue and adapt in a post-pandemic world, and to expand on the critical need to make space for new forms of knowledge-making, a number of students from MA Illustration course at Camberwell College of Arts (who were studying at the time of the symposium) present here key examples of their personal visual research methods for illustration. Some of the methods in this publication represent formative, incomplete, even failed methods that took place in the course of a project, but all of them had a significant role in informing the thinking and form of a final project outcome. The MA Illustration students (now graduates) are: Zilan Zhao; Yuchen Bian; Marília Arruda Pereira; Yitian Li; Yurou (Romi) Qian; Tianling (BG) Xu; Qingchun Zhang; and Beth Blandford, who also developed a practical workshop during the symposium derived from their translative research methods. Beth’s reflections and insights from this experience are also included here.

To bring together the range and diversity of contributions, this publication is collected into three open prompts that draw from ideas raised during the 2022 symposium: a remote space is not neutral, can a remote space ever be neutral?; listening as a remote space; and imagination as a remote space.

• https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/...