Uncivilising the future : imagining non-speciesism

We live in a world where animals are killed and abused in numbers that are entirely beyond comprehension. This killing is ubiquitous and omnipresent, and yet largely invisible to most people. Once we come to the realisation that the normalisation of animal oppression is something that we oppose, envisioning futures that abandon “speciesism” requires an almost unimaginable rethinking of our current society. Yet, resistance and alternative practices do exist. These forces consist of alternative opinions, attitudes, practices, senses, meanings, and values which are not considered to be the norm; however, these can somehow still be accommodated and tolerated within a particularly effective and dominant culture. In this modest approach towards non-speciesist utopias that invites serious moral consideration of animals as the most marginalised beings of all, I aim to bring those under-emphasised, hidden, and alternative perspectives to light in order to make them more valid and more real as practices that counter hegemony. By paying attention to existing philosophies, personal experiences, emotional accounts, and shared thoughts, this text highlights alternatives and possibilities for artists (or others) to imagine and shape futures that are utopian—not just for humans, but for animals as well.peer-reviewe

Unsettling Participation by Foregrounding More-than-Human Relations in Digital Forests

The question of who participates in making forest environments usually refers to human stakeholders. Yet forests are constituted through the participation of many other entities. At the same time, digital technologies are increasingly used in participatory projects to measure and monitor forest environments globally. However, such participatory initiatives are often limited to human involvement and overlook how more-than-human entities and relations shape digital and forest processes. To disrupt conventional anthropocentric understandings of participation, this text travels through three different processes of unsettling to show how more-than-human entities and relations disrupt, rework, and transform digital participation in and with forests. First, forest organisms as bioindicators signal environmental changes and contribute to the formation and operation of digital sensing technologies. Second, speculative blockchain infrastructures and decision-making algorithms raise questions about whether and how forests can own themselves. Third, Amerindian cosmologies redistribute subjectivities to change how digital technologies identify and monitor forests within Indigenous territories. Each of these examples shows how more-than-human participation can rework participatory processes and digital practices in forests. In a time when forests are rapidly disappearing, an unsettled and transformed understanding of participation that involves the world-making practices of more-than-human entities and relations can offer more pluralistic and expansive forest inhabitations and futures. © 2023 Michelle Westerlaken, Jennifer Gabrys, Danilo Urzedo, and Max Ritts

A Dialogue Concerning ‘Doing Philosophy with and within Computer Games’ – or: Twenty rainy minutes in Krakow

‘Philosophical dialogue’ indicates both a form of philosophical inquiry and its corresponding literary genre. In its written form, it typically features two or more characters who engage in a discussion concerning morals, knowledge, as well as a variety of topics that can be widely labelled as ‘philosophical’. Our philosophical dialogue takes place in Krakow, Poland. It is a rainy morning and two strangers are waiting at a tram stop. One of them is dressed neatly, and cannot stop fidgeting with his closed umbrella. The other was caught unprepared by the morning downpour and water is dripping from his worn, soaked jacket

Becoming with : towards the inclusion of animals as participants in design processes

In this exploratory paper, we advocate for a way to mitigate the anthropocentrism inherent in interaction-design methodologies. We propose to involve animals that live in anthropic environments as participants in design processes. The current relationships between animals and technology have an inevitable impact on their well-being and raise fundamental ethical questions concerning our design policies. Drawing from the work of Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, we argue for a situated approach in which we reflect upon concrete design contexts. We explore the notion of becoming with as a conceptual framework for the intuitive and bodily understanding that takes place between humans and animals when they encounter one-another in shared contexts. Adopting a research through design approach, we further explore this notion by reflecting upon two different participatory design projects with two dogs. We found these reflections to offer valuable perspectives for designers to analyse and discuss their iterative processes.peer-reviewe

Situated knowledges through game design : a transformative exercise with ants

The increasing body of knowledge in fields like animal ethology, biology, and technology has not necessarily led to the improvement of animal welfare. On the contrary, it has enabled humans to exploit animals more functionally and on increasing scales of magnitude. Building on approaches that stem from posthumanism and critical animal studies, we argue that instead of aiming for more general production of scientific knowledge, what is needed to counter exploitation and oppression is an increased sensitivity towards animals that arises from local, partial, and ‘situated knowledges’. In the first part of this paper we articulate an argument that proposes how such knowledges can arise from the practice of game design as a form of ‘doing multispecies philosophy’. The second part of this work expands this notion with an understanding of design as a practice of configuring and prefiguring situations in which we can enter in a relationship of response and attention with other ‘selves’, in other words, with entities that are alive. To explore the practical consequences of this framework, in the third part of this paper we discuss a game design project that involves some unexpected designerly negotiations with a colony of black ants. We conclude that our wider perspective concerning notions of knowledge, (game) design, and selves could elicit changes in our empathy towards other beings and help us develop new ideas and knowledges that favour less anthropocentric futures.peer-reviewe

Felino : the philosophical practice of making an interspecies video game

This paper describes the design process of an interspecies video game that has its foundations in the field of Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI), but is inspired by philosophical notions and approaches including Jos De Mul’s work on biohermeneutics (De Mul 2013), Pierce’s theory of semiotics (Pierce 1931-35), and the work of Helmuth Plessner in the field of philosophical anthropology (Plessner 2006). Our approach serves to better design playful artefacts (video games among them) that take the animal's reactions and preferences into account in the research phase, the conceptualization phase, and the iteration phase of the design process. Our tablet game, called Felino, is merely a digital toy that aims at facilitating the emergence of ‘play’ between humans and domestic cats, and allows humans and animals to play together simultaneously. The design and development of Felino is not only informed by advancements in the field of ACI, but is first and foremost a critical artefact that materializes our philosophical approach, making it an object for critical evaluation.peer-reviewe

A dialogue concerning 'doing philosophy with and within computer games' - or : twenty rainy minutes in Krakow

In Davis Baird’s view, building – meaning doing, constructing as a heuristic practice – offers an opportunity to correct the discursive and linguistic bias of the humanities. [1] According to this view, we should be open to pursuing and communicating scholarship through designed artefacts, whether digital or not. It implies the idea that language is ill-equipped to deal with entire classes of knowledge that participate to humanistic inquiry [2, p. 78]. Following Baird, Ian Bogost similarly discusses the activity of constructing artifacts as a viable and much neglected philosophical practice that “entails making things that explain how things make their world” [3, p. 93] In a way that is perhaps better exemplified by academic fields that involve practice-based research or research through design, scholarly approaches that involve practical activities and various degrees of ‘action’ are becoming progressively more visible. Despite a growing interest in proposing and exemplifying the use of (playful) interactive digital environments as tools for philosophical enquiry and dissemination, what we mean when we talk about ‘doing philosophy’ with and within the digital medium remains largely undertheorized. Our interdisciplinary academic community invites a number of philosophical approaches and contributions to its ongoing discussions concerning computer games and philosophy. Year after year, we have interpreted and used verbs like acting, interacting, doing, or practicing in various ways, with various meanings, and for a number of often-divergent philosophical scopes [4]. With the objective of highlighting those ambiguities, our paper makes use of the literary format of the philosophical dialogue (similar - in terms of literary style - to the work of Socrates or Galileo Galilei). With this contribution, we propose a number of different perspectives to explore the following questions: how do computer games contribute to philosophical inquiry, and what does it mean to “do philosophy” with and within computer games? Our goal is that of bringing to the fore the fact that what we understand as philosophy, its methods and scopes, has a determining but often unnoticed role in the modus operandi of our community.peer-reviewe

Digitally complemented zoomorphism : a theoretical foundation for human-animal interaction design

From an interspecies perspective, we advocate for a theoretical foundation aimed at facilitating further research towards digitally mediated human-animal interaction. The proposed framework follows an approach we call ‘digitally complemented zoomorphism’ and recognizes ‘play’ as a free and voluntary activity that is shared by both animals and humans. As a result, three initial design guidelines will emerge. Our work is pursued in order to provide animals with stimulations which stem from a closer understanding of their perceptions and are not solely designed around human subjectivity.peer-reviewe