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This paper introduces the Feral Map, an open online map that brings together different creative practices questioning the dominant extractive, technocentric rendering and legitimising of particular algorithmic futures. Building on its initial development drawn upon open urban tree data, it invites people to explore and engage with their surroundings in creative, unfamiliar ways and share their experiences in the form of stories, using different kinds of media, sensory impressions, and personal expressions. These stories can be offered to existing places and local “creatures” (such as animals, ambiences, and glitches) or become new creatures on their own, emphasising mattering and entanglements: that change is the only constant in life. Through this, the map obscures the currently available–mostly quantitative–data about a place, and can help to raise questions about power, values, and structural inequalities that shape the place and its future. The Feral Map has been evolving to include such stories and creatures–or messy data–from different creative, practice-based research projects. Our paper presents the theoretical framing of the Feral Map and its design, how it has been transforming along with the involved projects, as well as our learnings from the process and possible future directions.
We share insights from our practice-based experimentation with ‘feral’ ways of sensemaking in the context of creative transformational practices. Drawing on three art and design research projects, we discuss how feral ways–open-ended, spontaneous, welcoming indeterminacy – may foster more-than-human co-creation of knowledge and data, and nurture shifts from anthropocentric ‘making sense of’ to relational ‘making sense-with’ other-than-human creatures. Through our cases, we illustrate how experimenting with feralness can foreground issues of power, agency, and control in the currently human-centric discourses around data, technology, and sensemaking in eco-social transformation. Our insights may nurture critical more-than-human perspectives in creative eco-social inquiries.
The essays collected here are based on two decades of engagement with the residents of the slums of Govindpuri in India’s capital, Delhi. The book presents stories of many kinds, from speculative treatises, via the recollection of a thousand everyday conversations, to an account of the making of a radio documentary.Zig-zagging through the lanes of Govindpuri, Listening into Others explores the vibrant sounds emanating from slum culture. Redefining ethnography as listening in passing, Chandola excels at narrating the stories of the everyday. The ubiquity of smartphones, sonic selfies, wailing, the ethics of wearing jeans, the crossroad rituals of elections, the political agency of slum-dwellers, the war of the sexes through bodily gestures, and conflicts over ownership of both property and sound generated in the slums — these are among the many encounters Chandola opens up to the reader.Slums are anxious spaces in the materiality, experience, and imagination of a city. They are the by-products of the violent and exploitative mechanisms of urbanization. What becomes of the slum-dwellers, who universally, across centuries, cities and continents, befall similar fates of being discriminated, reckoned to be the scum of the earth, and a burden on society? By listening to identified others and amplifying their voices in their own vocabularies and grammar, Tripta Chandola’s praxis creates a methodological, political, and poetic rupture. Slums, she finds, are not anathema to the city’s past, present, or future. They are an integral component of urbanization and a foundational part of the city.With Listening into Others, Tripta Chandola poses the question: ‘Who owns the slum, and who determines which voices are heard? From where you are, listen with me.’
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Designing meaningful audio for interactive applications such as video games or sonic user interfaces, presents designers with several challenges. One challenge is the fact that the perception of musical meaning involves cultural or learned aspects when it comes to tonality (Huron, 2006; Patel, 2008). For applied music and sound design, as cross-cultural phenomenon, this cultural specificity appears to be a significant disadvantage. Nevertheless, the history of interactive music in video games and sonic user interfaces illuminates many successful examples of meaningful musical icons in classic arcade games such as Pac-Man (1980), Donkey Kong (1981), Super Mario World (1990) and Pong (1972) and the user interface sounds of operating systems.
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