What can artists/creative practitioners contribute to interspecies relations informed by notions of care and repair? This article reports on the interconnections between wildlife wilding/rewilding and creative practice in Australia, wherein wildlife rehabilitation contributed to a methodology for the creation of interactive art sculptures. I propose that a creative practitioner’s direct engagement in rewilding practices can lead to the design of human artistic expression that can be valuable to the lives and needs of other species. This research takes a mixed methods approach that involves both computational creative practice and enrichment design, where creative practice is diffracted through the lens of being a flying fox rehabilitator performing daily care duties in a care aviary/crèche. I include a discussion of flying fox–human relations in Queensland, Australia, a discussion of rewilding as it relates to flying fox rehabilitation organisations, and discuss the creation of a series of interactive artworks called the Quantum Enrichment Entanglers (2021–2022) that can be seen as the original non-traditional outcomes of this research.
(Re)wilding creative practices: Lessons from wildlife care
Dr Alinta Krauth (Universitetet i Bergen, Norway)
2023 Conference