Sensing the Lough workshop by Ami Clarke
A Field Trip to Lough Neagh

Friday 8th August, 11am - 4pm
Location: Oxford Island Lough Neagh Discovery Centre and the local area

This workshop will consist of a field trip to the Oxford Island Discovery Centre on the edge of  Lough Neagh, where we will consider ways of ‘sensing’ the lough through various technological means. It will also serve to connect and expand the networks of creative, environmental and legal groups that have a desire to nurture radical ways for rethinking sustainability, in such a vulnerable eco-system as Lough Neagh. 

This event connects with Ami’s ongoing project Meeting The Lough On It’s Own Terms, which will be exhibited at PS2 Gallery from Thursday 7th August until Saturday 27th September with other events planned during this time. See pssquared.org for full details. Please try to come to the exhibition launch on the day before this workshop.

Meeting The Lough On It’s Own Terms focusses on fostering new perspectives about climate change, by decentring the human amongst a multi-species perspective. With an emphasis on ways of ‘sensing’ via technological means, we might call this a more-than-human approach.

Coming from a posthuman research background, Ami is keen to emphasise the concept that we ‘emerge in synthesis with our environment’ that includes whatever technologies we have to hand. This complicates readings of what is ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ in any usual sense, by acknowledging that technology, from ‘language’ to our ‘smartphones’, affords us different capacities: to sense, to speak/communicate, and to whom, and starts to point to the limits of what it is possible to even think, in any given era. As tool users, we, as humans, emerge through prosthesis.

On the day

We plan to meet at the Oxford Island Lough Neagh Discovery Centre where we will begin with general introductions amongst all participants and the project.

A collective writing wall will be in place to contribute ideas that might arise during conversations.

We will be introducing a water monitoring sensor that we will try deploy in the water at various locations to take readings of pH values. We will also consider other means of sensing and data collection, inviting the question what does it mean to ‘sense’ the lough in alternative ways, and how various forms of sensing can be repeated, developed and documented over time to accrue data for analysis on the state of Lough Neagh and it’s rivers.

These questions might be:

• How might technology afford us ways of sensing life at different scales to our

• own?

• What happens when humans can sense other species at a microbial scale?

• How might different ways of sensing the lough inform new practices?

• How do we ‘read’ what other species might be telling us?

• If we are collecting data, then what does it tell us?

• What does a Ph reading of water tell us about pollution, for example?
  https://www.fondriest.com/environmental-measurements/parameters/water-quality/ph/

• How might different ways of monitoring nutrients tell us of conditions within the lough?

• What other technologies (not necessarily powered by electricity) - so other ways of thinking and practising that might include ritualised and performative actions, act to recalibrate our relation to nature? (such as older indigenous knowledges might practice; pagan, herbalism, permaculture).
  We will be exploring this further in the sonic ritual jam on Friday 5th September with John D’Arcy & HIVE choir, Sonic Arts at PS2 gallery.

• Other ways of sensing: developing new technologies – might be as simple as the act of sampling the water every day for 10 years to gauge the diversity of creatures living in the lough. It’s an entirely analog practice, but tells us about the diversity of life in the water, providing data that could be very useful for us to analyse…

This workshop is free to attend, please email richard@digitalartsstudios.com to register your interest.

Participants must be able to cover their own travel costs where appropriate, bring their own food/drink and suitable clothing for the weather. Lifts may be available from Lurgan Train Station to travel to and from the Discovery Centre.