Part 1

Leena & Oula Valkeapää, Alia Malley, Charli Clark, Judith van der Elst, Avner Peled, Stephan Dudeck, Matthew Biederman, Marko Peljhan, Netta Norro, Jose Marcos Perez

The following was the brief around which this group gathered and conducted its investigations:

Complex ecological networked systems can be observed, read and navigated by employing Intuition and Technology. Artists, hunters and herders, tactical media workers and scientists will be joining forces to develop, deploy, use and question enhanced sensing systems and methods. This could lead to new and surprising insights and construction of semantic territories, in which the gaze and measurement become knowledges and are projected back onto the land in order to structure completely new vectors of meaning,...

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by Maren Richter

‘Hybrid Species’ was introduced by Antti Tenetz, the host of the group Encounters in a Layered Landscape (‘my probands’), on our first walk together. For him the wolf has become such a hybrid species, once being useful for the herders to keep the animals together, but since herding technologies have changed, the wolf has turned into a threat. Social hybridity, as the wolf example could be also called, turned out to be a key term for the Second Order Group (SO) of the third edition of Field_Notes on Hybrid Matters.

The gentle landscape in the North of Lapland around Lake Kilpisjärvi itself is quite poor of animals, at least in autumn. One can find a lot of blue(berried) bird shit but rarely birds. Seeing a Hawk Owl on our first day was therefore quite an encounter. I...

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The Owls are not what they seem – second, third and fourth order observations

Lea Schick, Jens Hauser, Anna-Katharina Laboissière, Maren Richter, Hannah Star Rogers, Miguel Santos, Tiina Prittinen

First day on the Field_Notes trip: We are hiking through layered landscapes with one of the groups at the Hybrid Matters Field_Notes. Still strangers to each other we are talking, listening, photographing, recording, and pointing out and gathering things as we walk along the human-reindeer carved paths towards a World War II plane crash site. Suddenly we stop, bodies and voices are lowered and assembled, and gaze at a naked birch tree where an owl is posing nicely for us. Cameras are clicking and binoculars are generously traveling from eyes to eyes. Nine people, who are not yet familiar...

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Mapping Hybrid Ecology

Antti Tenetz, Theun Karelse, Maia Iotzova, Lori Hepner, Anssi Laiho, Piibe Piirma, Peter Flemming

This group explored the landscape around Kilpisjärvi. Part of the focus of our group was to find and study the layers of Hybrid ecology; where biological, technological and cultural layers are coexisting and influencing each other in the landscape. Our team set out on several days of fieldwork in the Kilpisjärvi environs. Each group member uncovered layers of the landscape through their own perspective and practice, exploring the sonic, political, microbial, visual, and invisible aspects of the layers.

On the first day, the group's host Antti Tenetz guides us on a walk through sites that show traces of human influence in what we would normally perceive as pristine...

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PostNatural Field_Notes

Richard Pell, Lauren Allen, Laura Beloff, Åsa Ståhl, Andrea Roe, Cathrine Kramer, Zack Denfeld, Erik Sandelin

We envisioned our week at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Research Station to be one of exploring and questioning what it means to draw a line around a biological entity or grouping. As the founders of the Center for PostNatural History (www.postnatural.org) in Pittsburgh, PA, we have found it useful to set a very clear definition for what we mean by ‘PostNatural’: living things that have been heritably and intentionally altered by humans. This includes organisms that have been domesticated and changed through processes of selective breeding, such as dogs, chickens, and agricultural crops, as well as organisms that have been genetically modified, such as many...

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Antye Greie-Ripatti, Till Bovermann, Dinah Bird, Anja Erdmann, Kristina Lindström, Vygandas Simbelis, Caspar Ström

As humans we inhabit a hybrid ecology and so are also a part of the biological and technological ends of our world. If this is so, one can also say that it is our responsibility to connect both peripheries in order to develop ethical and respectful forms of co-existence and ideally beneficial interaction.

During the field_notes field laboratory, the (sonic) Wild Code Team investigated notions of coexistence, communication and potentials for interaction in the hybrid ecology surrounding Kilpisjärvi. By immersing ourself into the vast and raw landscape of Lapland around Kilpisjärvi, we researched and tested for possibilities to enable the landscape to speak for itself.

After...

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This blog post was first published in Makery by Netta Norro

Field Notes Hybrid Matters is a bi-annual arts & science field laboratory organised in one of the northernmost corners of Finnish Lapland, Kilpisjärvi. We asked Netta Norro, the coordinator for Changing Weathers, for her field notes.

Finnish Lapland, correspondence

This year’s edition brought together 40 artists and scientists from 15 countries to work on pre-selected sub-themes. The field laboratory was organised by The Finnish Society of Bioart at the University of Helsinki Kilpisjärvi Biological Station, in collaboration with the Changing Weathers project.

Hybrid Matter is anything that has a physical and technological aspect and as such is a product of intentional and un-intentional human activity. People with...

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