Exercises in Mimetism, Mimicry, Mimesis, and Metamorphosis

Lecture | Vortrag
MEAM Conference 2023, Université de Liège & Online, July 3-4 | 03./04.07.2023

Becoming plant. Becoming leaf. Becoming stone. Passing as another animal, not of one’s kin. Appearing dead. Appearing alive. Yes, we can do that. Some of us at least. Many do so. For different goals and purposes, uses and ends. In some cases even purposeless, occasionally, for joy and fun.

Mimetism, mimicry, mimesis, metamorphosis: This workshop invites you to explore them as ways of imagining, sensing, thinking, communicating and living together – and as tools for multispecies research.

As part of the warm-up, I will introduce and discuss, together with methodological perspectives, a selection of inspirational examples from different species, arts and cultures that will allow us to further explore the field, and I will offer related exercises to get into practice.
Afterwards, we will share our experiences and insights: Together we will test and discuss a set of exercises, and in case we find some of them suitable and promising for our multispecies research, we can keep them in our toolbox.

tags: alltagskultur, alltagstechnologien, art & science, biosciences, biowissenschaften, communication, ecology, everyday culture, everyday technologies, green, grün, knowledge cultures, kommunikation, kunst & wissenschaft, material, material culture, materielle kultur, media, medien, ökologie, perception, tools, urban cultures, urbane kulturen, wahrnehmung, werkzeug, wissenskulturen