Listening to the Mississippi
With Monica Moses Haller

Participatory ecology walk: a desire path leading toward an answer to the question, “what is the seedkeeper’s teleology?”
With Michael Swierz

Experiencing the Anthropocene is multidimensional and requires using novel human and non-human sensoriums to apprehend it. Attuning oneself to the transformations of the Anthropocene is therefore not only an intellectual, but also an embodied, affair. But how is it that such embodied experiences can be shared or even communicated to one another online? Also, how do each of these sense modalities produce different ramifications for how and why certain transformations are registered, and others not?

During The Shape of a Practice, Monica Moses Haller presented a guided listening session, using underwater recordings to generate a perceptual account of the Mississippi River through sounds that enable one to enter its historical, social, and environmental materiality. Michael Swierz, whose work synthesizes aspects of poetry, visual art, and interspecies communication, then introduced the concept of participatory ecology by interrogating pan-species interrelations and global stewardship through embodied inquiry.