However, central to the working of the seminar was the group-work undertaken by participants. Two of the contributions here present the outcomes of group-work, in the form of instructions for exercises that use movement to extend the senses. “Exploring Space” by Jonathan Cohrs, Samuel Hertz, Angela Rawlings, Justin Westgate, Pablo Suarez, and Jenni Nurmenniemi presents an exercise in collaborative movement designed to pull consciousness back into the body through movement and interaction by moving with others. The exercise uses a dialectic between movement and discussion to enable reflection about what it is to move in an “empty” space with others, and how emergent properties can arise out of the slightest divergence. In “Sensing/Knowing,” reported on by media-art historian Max Symuleski, the emphasis is more on the sensory exploration of the external, material world. In his reflection, Symuleski draws on Whitehead’s bifurcation between experiential and abstract knowledge, and on that of Michel de Certeau to reflect on the power of extending our habitual modes of moving around the landscape. He suggests ways of using all five senses to draw attention to—and record—the specific character of sensory encounters with the things around us. This group imagined a “global network of urban explorers exploiting these ubiquitous devices to other ends, sharing their sensory logs via geocaches, and navigating the urban landscape by one another’s made-up plans.”

The contributions from Navjot Altaf Mohamedi and François Bucher are very different, drawing on their own long experience with indigenous communities in India and Colombia respectively, and refracting these through the questions and discussions in the seminar. In “Bastar Diary,” Mohamedi draws on her experience as both an artist and a researcher working with the Adivasi of Chhattisgarh in Central India, who have to contend with increasing exploitation by mining and power companies disrupting their traditional relationships with the land. She focuses on the Kokerenge (“cock-like walk”), an artistic and ritual performance played between midnight and dawn, in which dancers coordinate using bells attached to their belts. In “The Girl’s Dream,” Bucher provides new ways of thinking about the “global warning” of the Kogi of Northern Colombia in relation to the Western-originated technosphere, using the language of holograms and quantum entanglement and coherence to capture the complex set of relations at play. For Bucher, the fate of the high Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta connotes the fate of the world, not as a kind of technical indicator, but because it and all sierras contain the world as a whole. The landscapes of the Kogi’s coastal origins are “entangled” with their current mountain abode, and it is this relation of coherence that must be maintained. The tumas—artifacts used in Kogi rituals—are linked to their doubles placed in the mountain and its subsystems. Bucher thus presents the sacred mountain as a “poetic technosphere” that has to be maintained through ritual.

The final two contributions are personal reflections on floating, prompted by the seminar. “Floating and Anthropos” by historian Masahiro Terada is a lyrical reflection on the Aerocene, as Terada is wafted aloft by a stream of ideas. If in the Aerocene things will not fly but float, what are flying and floating as modes of being? When we close our eyes, are we floating? Can heavier-than-air things, of different sizes, fly without wings or motors? Since we are viviparous beings, who spend the beginning of our life in the womb of our mother, are we essentially floating beings? Does the image float, feet upwards, in the eye, reminding us of our atavistic buoyancy? Would inhabiting the Aerocene involve a great moment of anamnesis, a recovery of a forgotten species’ memory of floating? Finally, in “The Floating Ear,” sound composer Samuel Hertz discusses Maryanne Amacher’s otoacoustic compositions that generate sounds internally within the body, and Gascia Ouzounian’s idea of hearing as an environmental mapping between inside and outside. Hertz suggests that both imply “a conceptualization of the body and the space of perception itself as fluid and porous” (see also the accompanying interview by Caroline Picard). Inspired by such thinking, Hertz issues five “invitations,” suggesting ways in which the internal topologies and unpredictable trajectories of Saraceno’s Aerosolar sculptures would make it possible to turn them into “floating ears” that disrupt conventional boundaries between the hearer and the heard.