The work performed to date has focused on three key areas.
1) Assessment of the challenges of understanding, using and conserving the subsurface
Desk based research and ethnographic work on a range of subsurface research and practice (including geoscience, geoconservation and urban studies) has develop a series of conclusions:
a) The subsurface demands modes of knowledge that often challenge (e.g. ambiguous, hidden, unsettled, circulatory, speculative) normative epistemologies and might require different research methods.
Foci include- the exploration of cutting-edge technologies of subsurface sensing, how cultures around the world might ‘sense’ the underground through ritual and belief systems. It also includes a survey of the ideas of the imagination within and of the subsurface around the world (from ideas of hell and concerns with how to cultivate positive aspirational underground futures).
b) Questions of subsurface animism and life: We have considered how scholars and practitioners write and talk of the subsurface and its life forms; from non-human and organic life to inorganic life- or the ‘geos’ of rock and stone- as well as spirit worlds.
c) Ideas of everyday/ordinary subsurfaces: Augmenting the sublime and deep time registers, we have been exploring the ordinary and everyday ways that people engage with, understand and imagine the subsurface, including through infrastructures, their histories, failures and speculative possibilities.
2) Consideration of the current state of the art, and the need for future development in relations between creative practice and research
Following a literature review of the research turn within creative arts practices and the creative turn within research practices, we are exploring shared intersections and critical vocabularies for creative practice and research, including themes around new research mediums and research aesthetics.
3)The identification and fieldwork on case studies which use combinations of research and practice to respond to challenges of knowing the subsurface.
Case study work has begun, key foci include:
Subsurface urban futures: Work in Singapore and Phnom Penh exploring questions of subsurface infrastructures and subsurface urban futures.
Geoconservation: Working with app and VR/AR developers that develops innovative heritage and conservation efforts around the subsurface and with geoheritage sites in North England to develop embodied encounters with the caves.
Geoscience: Working in sites in Italy, New Zealand, the UK and Europe experimenting with new forms of art that engage with geoscience and geophysical processes.
Subsurface lives and livelihoods: Including work on the small scale and artisanal mining industry in Cambodia, as well as work on Mongolian shamanic beliefs is exploring the practices of lives lived in the subsurface.
Outputs include: book chapters and journal articles, key notes, workshops, conference sessions, new bodies of installation and site-specific earth art, exhibitions and residencies, including participating in the major exhibition Hollow Earth (2022-3).
