What can we do to feel more in touch with the natural world? Is technology a barrier, or can it help us communicate and feel empathy with other species? Could technology help foster a sense of community between humans and nonhumans? If so, what might such a more-than-human community look like—or feel like, smell like, etc.? Whom would it include? And who decides?

Our project sets out to imagine a more equitable community of humans and nonhumans and to make it a reality in our everyday lives. The project is animated by two basic premises:

1. The spaces we inhabit are already more-than-human; we just need to learn to see (and feel) that humans are not separate from nature. We want to develop awareness and ideas for how these spaces can be playfully and creatively experienced as more-than-human communities.
2. Truly unusual interdisciplinarity must be inter- and multispecies (more-than-human) and predicated on playful (open-ended) interaction, not exploitation and extraction (of data, resources, etc.).

How can we break out of our anthropocentric worldview? Drawing on our shared expertise in engineering, ethics, ethology, language and representation, we want to develop an escape room format that unites technology, sense perception, and creative problem solving to stimulate the more-than-human imagination. Ultimately, we would like to take this on the road, to engage playfully with students, academics, policymakers and stakeholders in a variety of (unusual) settings (animal sanctuaries, zoos, farms, robotics labs, etc.).

A playfully designed multimedia and multisensory more-than-human-community experience combined with facilitated discussions will enhance the collective insight in our own communities and strengthen the desire to look for multispecies alternatives for the challenges that societies face.

Betweter Festival Utrecht - Experiment High-Five with a Non-Human

On 29 September 2023, the Imagining More-than-Human Communities team ran an experiment at the Betweter Festival in Utrecht. Attendees were invited to explore a new haptic interface and imagine what it would mean to interact with a nonhuman entity remotely via the medium of technology. We asked participants to reflect on how technology can help us feel more connected with the nonhuman world.

• dr. H.M.B. (Heidi) Lesscher
• dr. Kathrin Thiele

• Clemens Driessen
• Bernice Bovenkerk
• Irene Kuling

The zoo has always been the paradigmatic site for human-animal encounters in modernity. Authors, artists, and filmmakers have long been drawn to this space as a source of inspiration and as a means for reflecting on social, political, and global issues relating to class, gender, race, nationality, not to mention the myriad complex and often contradictory aspects of the human–animal relationship. The zoo is thus not merely a physical space but also a space of the imagination which both mirrors and shapes the broader cultural understanding of the natural world and our relationship to it.

Over the last two decades, in the context of growing public awareness of climate change and mass extinction, that relationship has been changing. During the same period, the zoo has become a focal point for a new wave of literary and cinematic representations which reflect the fears and uncertainties about the future, but also seek to imagine alternative, multispecies futures. Reading Zoos in the Age of the Anthropocene is a three-year research project supported by a VENI grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO), which takes these representations as as a lens through which to explore how the relationship between humans and the natural world is changing in the age of the Anthropocene.

For more details, please visit the project website: https://readingzoos.sites.uu.nl/