Confluences: Material into Digital

In this workshop, we’ll explore the capacity of water to make connections, and how those currents and confluences – geographical, narrative, conceptual, chronological – might be represented and interrogated through digital platforms and tools. We’ll also share and reflect on our own embodied, human experiences with water, examining the challenges of translating deeply material / sensory encounters and somatic knowledge into the digital realm.

What kinds of confluences might be possible between the material and embodied and the digital or virtual? What is lost in digital representations of water, and how could we develop tools and approaches to recuperate these properties and experiences? We’ll begin the workshop with a practice-based activity, to help us think playfully and creatively, remind us of the embodied experiences involved in encountering water, and open up metaphorical ways into exploring confluences.

Note: Please bring along a small bottle of water from a watercourse / body of water you are currently researching, or which means something special to you.

The Present: A discussion of structures, initiatives and challenges

A shared engagement with the Word Steps soundscape by artist Camilla Fanning and walk along the banks of Dublin’s Grand Canal. [Download on your smartphone here]

Aqua projects in the time of climate change

Literature portrays human actors in different, even contrasting, relations with the river stretching from “living with water” to “war on flood”; or it describes how people adapt to changing environments or have problems with adjusting to them.

The Odra river is a particularly interesting case, firstly because of being a border river between Poland and Germany, especially intertwined into a nationalistic and regional discourse; and secondly, because it is a flooding river. Through literature it is possible to adequately address a question about the differences and similarities between Polish and German culture in adapting to such hazardous aquatic phenomena as floods. However, in our literary studies, we also took into consideration the catastrophic discourse, which blurs the anthropocentric knowledge on rivers and indicates the aquacentric modes of recognition in the time of climate change.

Apart from the Odra project, experiences from a project on sea-level rise and flooding in times of climate change at the Baltic seacoast will be discussed. On the example of the cities of Lübeck and Rostock, we will show two surprising photo-collages stemming from the local media discourse in Lübeck and Rostock, each representing the specific local perceptions of sea-level rise. Since the results of the research project once has attracted high media attention in Germany, we will not least explain why this was possible.

The Future: A discussion of publication, collaboration and cooperation