Your Mating Call is Important to Us

Speculative Fiction & Sonic Storytelling

Watch and listen on Theatrum Mundi

As Rachel Carson’s book, “Silent Spring,” first noted, the decrease in sonic activity of an ecosystem may point to larger health issues at play. For example, due to human noise pollution, birds and insects often have to adjust the sound frequency of their calls just to be heard by one another. If soundscape ecology uses sound to monitor the health of ecosystems, what if sonic prescriptions could heal them? In this fictional history, we glimpse rival factions debating this question, including The Resounders, whose Sonic Apothecary emits elixirs for the given ills of the natural urban environment.

Unfortunately, these clashing perspectives drown out the voices of synanthropes, or species that coexist with humans in city spaces - that is, until the Great Cacophony tips urban denizens towards a wider field of attention.

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This project was featured in Theatrum Mundi’s 2021 Colloquium “Crafting a Sonic Urbanism: Listening to Non-Human Life” and received the New School’s Tishman Grant for Student Excellence.

one eye on the exit sign

Digital Animation & Sonic Storytelling

Watch on Vimeo

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This project was featured in Denver Digerati’s Supernova Digital Animation Festival in September 2021. 

Post-Work Relationshifts

Auto-Ethnography & Multimedia Storytelling

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pw:postwork

View the virtual gallery

Inspired by feminist post-work theorists like Kathi Weeks and Helen Hester, my collaborators and I sought to imagine multifaceted futures in which wage labor was abolished and care work became a communal responsibility. We asked, how would people sustain themselves and their kin? How would conceptions of time and leisure shift?

Using a combination of design and auto-ethnographic methods, this project imagines fragmentary futures in which wage labour no longer exists. Each speculation explores a different facet of life affected by capitalist work culture, such as living structures, linguistic hierarchies, kinship, and time. Rather than propose large-scale changes to the economy, the speculations turn a critical eye toward our own relationships to work and one another, suggesting the everyday shifts needed to move toward desired futures. Thus, we argue that futures design is inextricable from the designers’ experiences and situated knowledges, offering an imaginative process for surfacing and unsettling those entrenched beliefs.

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This project was featured in the Antropology x Design Exhibition in April 2021.

Read the Zine

In what ways do inequities of urban spatial justice intersect with funerary customs in densely populated cities?

In urban contexts around the globe, space is a contested and valuable resource; how can we make space for the dead when the living are already struggling for housing justice and mobility?

Novel ways of treating the dead have emerged in major cities, which both reflect inequalities inherent in the world of the living and bring into question what becomes of long established death rituals in densely populated areas.

Distilling insights from this research inquiry, I wrote and designed “The Seance Sessions” – a fictional interview zine about spatial justice in urban deathscapes^*.

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Image: CNN.com

*Deathscapes are “defined as ‘the material expression in the landscape of practices relating to death’ – can encompass durable markings of the landscape (e.g. cemeteries) as well as more ephemeral manifestations and artefacts such as the scattering of ashes. Importantly, deathscapes are not only spaces associated with the dead and dying, but also are constituted by the meanings which are attributed to such spaces by the living.” (Alistair Hunter, 2015)