The installation presents our ongoing investigation of feral ways of knowing, being, and living-with diverse more-than-human ecologies. On display are feral data artifacts such as woven sashes, multispecies tattoos, short dérive films, and an eel trap, all which speak of environmental knowledge and cosmologies in various more-than-human habitats including Colombian chagras, Bohemian forest, Croatian wetlands, and the Gunditjmara Country. Participants are invited to spend time with the artifacts and delve into the stories – of feral relationships and care as well as power and structural inequalities – that they weave together.
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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.
