Scientists, botanists and biologists like Charles Darwin have always written and drawn field notes to capture their observations about a site or specimen. These notes provide important information, but many things are left out of this type of narration.

What is a field note?

Within this writing workshop, we will collectively expand on the idea of what a field note is. Who for example is the audience of the field note? Can a field note be directed towards nature itself? Is it possible to create field notes based on a more equal dialogue, that blurs the dichotomy between the human observer and objectified nature? We would like to widen the scope as to what a field note can be, as part of an artistic and explorative practice.

How-to-field-note

We’ll start by being with and among non-human entities such as microbes, plants or animals in the Amsterdam Science Park. From these encounters, we’ll start to conjure how the entanglement of human and non-human entities might imagine this location to be.

Artists Esmee Geerken and Adriana Knouf will provide inspiration for writing though site-specific explorations and prompts. We will supply small writing tasks and in the end, you’re invited to combine your efforts for a communal field note of our visit.

This writing workshop is free - please send a short motivation to rosalie@waag.org before Wednesday the 7th of July.

We’ll provide

- Writing tools and tasks

- Inspirational perspectives

- Clipboards, paper and pens

- Coffee, tea and cookies

Please bring

- An open and curious mind

- Your own lunch

- Rainproof clothes

About the artists

Esmee Geerken (NL) is an artist and earth scientist, combining both disciplines in her artistic research and design practice, in which she questions our experience of the material environment. Esmee graduated from Gerrit Rietveld academy and looked at the microscopic shells of unicellular marine organisms for her PhD in geochemistry at the Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ). At Waag, she organised the symposium Being as Building as part of the T-Factor project.

Adriana Knouf (US) works as a xenologist, artist, scientist, writer, designer and engineer. Adriana has a PhD in Information Science from Cornell University, an SM in Media Arts and Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a BS in Engineering and Applied Science from the California Institute of Technology. At Waag, Adriana Knouf works in the ART4MED project, which aims at connecting the arts and the medical sector.