Animated Landscapes, 2010
DIY Citizenship, Art Gallery, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON
Collaboration with Saoirse Higgins

Animated Landscapes was a collaborative research-creation project that explores how rural and urban environments can be sensed, interpreted, and reimagined through playful, participatory technologies. The project investigates the fragile balances that shape local ecologies by inviting participants to design and build their own sensory instruments; hybrid tools that combine analogue techniques, simple electronics, and speculative design.

Situated within an ethos of critical playfulness, Animated Landscapes proposes an expanded form of citizenship rooted in attentiveness rather than authority. By constructing DIY instruments that measure, translate, or sonify environmental conditions, participants are encouraged to engage directly with the material realities of specific sites: soil, air, sound, vibration, movement, and human presence. These instruments do not claim scientific objectivity; instead, they foreground situated knowledge, curiosity, and embodied learning.

The project brings together art, design, and technology as a way of opening the methods of the natural sciences to non-specialists, positioning sensing as a shared cultural practice rather than an expert-driven one. Through collaborative discussion and collective inquiry, Animated Landscapes centres new relationships to place; relationships based on listening, care, and responsiveness. In doing so, the work reframes landscape not as a static backdrop, but as a dynamic, animated system shaped through ongoing human and more-than-human interaction.