Lessons from a Multispecies Studio: Uncovering Ecological Understanding and Biophilia through Creative Reciprocity

A collection of nonfiction, first-person writings about creative collaborations with local animals and ecologies.

In this highly original book, Julie Andreyev explores agency and consciousness through her encounters with other lifeforms-companion dogs, wild birds, mineral beings, plant life, and forest communities-to illuminate the ways creativity can play a part in generating a renewed sense of wonder and kinship with nature. Drawing from her extensive work in interspecies collaborative art, each chapter weaves together personal reflection, interdisciplinary research, and critical thought with new media, sound, generative, indeterminacy, and other art methods. The threads converge on this main point: the need to move away from anthropocentrism and towards ecological understanding through reciprocity and biophilia. The local journeys in each chapter are guided by more-than-human ways of knowing, which provide an expanded sense of the world and underscore the imperative to act. This book invites readers to step into other worlds, re-sense life, and re-think their relationship with the planet and all of its inhabitants. In proposing an expanded field of aesthetics, Andreyev offers new applied approaches from interspecies art to help shape and evolve human outlooks, emotions, and actions.