Communicating with Non-humans: A New Visual Language

In the 21st century, visual communication has widened significantly to embrace new platforms and technologies, including multi- and hypermedia, augmented and virtual reality, and, ultimately, artificial intelligence (AI). These new platforms and technologies have profoundly altered the visual tools of pedagogy and exhibition communication, both areas targeting the way(s) we envisage and shape our futures.

In communicating visually, a rich variety of formats and (re)presentations can be employed to support human participatory experiences with non-humans. Non-human agency, which can be very specific and identified in a tree or a river, is recognized in both new materialist philosophy of science and Indigenous studies scholarship. Ontological discussions in Indigenous studies go even a step further and recognize its ethical implications. From the Indigenous point of view, the limited space of human-only thought can be seen as an expression of the colonial tactics of violence against Indigenous territory.

Non-human agency opens up a venue for shared authorship and visual communication with non-humans. Through visual communication, images are in focus and words may become obsolete, opening avenues for knowing differently. In this context, bioart and biodesign, areas of practice and research that include non-human living organisms in creative processes, are both a step forward and a step backward: they are innovative in the exploration of nature as a source of creative encounters of humans with non-humans, but return to a communication sphere that predates the introduction of machines (first mechanical, and later digital mediators) in human imagining.

Contributions to this Research Topic will reveal, in written and visual form, a wide range of successful (or failed) co-authorships of artists, art educators, and non-humans. They will be based on studies exploring the objectives, processes, and outcomes of practices and collaborations; or provide models for a creative coexistence of humans and non-humans. Makers, artists, designers, and researchers will become experimenters, collectors, and natural agents to present multifaceted explorations in studios, laboratories, or residencies, working across fields and disciplines, and co-authoring with non-humans.