The idea behind this project was to creatively use interviews conducted by Alison with a number of UK military aviators as a starting point from which we could question the nature of UK airspaces. One of the aims of these interviews was to uncover the hidden geographies of these spaces. This centred upon discussions on how these users perceive and imagine the complex geometries of the spaces through which they fly. Most significantly, these interviews illustrated the extent to which airspaces are enacted through the movement of aircraft through them. In this project we are interested in exploring how this renders airspace as performed, with the mechanical and human elements of aviation enacting individual airspaces. These ideas developed into the foci of this project, which are about making these invisible airspaces visible to a broad audience, enabling this expert knowledge to be more widely accessible to non-experts, and illustrating the performances that enact airspaces.



Photos by Nick Ballon

Enacting the Invisible

This project seeks to make the spaces through which aircraft fly visible. It achieves this through the construction of a vertical object that empowers us to enact control of these spaces.
During the early years of aviation aircraft flew at relatively low altitudes. However, laws existed that gave landowners ownership of the entirety of the vertical space above the footprint of their house, including the air. This led to a myriad of problems for aviators and landowners who became locked in legal battles over payment for access to these spaces.

More recently, wind farms have become a contentious issue. Environmentalists seemingly either protest their building in areas of natural beauty, or cry out for their erection to reduce our dependence of fossil fuels and nuclear power. The aviation community, however, dislikes wind farms because their production of radar white noise creates ‘no fly-zones’ in the air.

This project synthesises these ideas, to propose an activism approach that focuses upon the idea of being able to generate and activate your own airspace though the deployment of a personalised wind farm. The project involves the creation of both the wind farm and an audio locator. The locator amplifies the sound of an aircraft engine, which enables the wind farm owner to hear an aircraft at a distance and erect the wind farm in time to prevent the aircraft flying overhead. This creates a form of mechanical imperialism by enabling the control of an individual airspace.

Can airspaces be owned and activated by the public? What is the size of the airspace you can own? How can we employ wind farms in a way that disrupts conventional understandings of their use?

Carnival was imported from Spain with the conquest of the Andes and was juxtaposed over existing indigenous rituals marking the start of the potato harvest. One can still discern different cultural backgrounds present, as seen in the ritual burning of offerings, or the oath to the Virgin of Candlemas that Carnival dancers make for the parade.
Spanish authorities founded the town of Oruro in 1606 after the ‘discovery’ of silver deposits near a mountain range sacralised by local people. The city’s growth was fuelled by the mining trade. During Carnival, enslaved indigenous miners danced as a way to thank Andean deities and the Virgin Mary for the mineral.

Today, Carnival is no longer fuelled by mining practices after the traders that used to supply the mine with goods – meat, candles and coca leaves – renewed the tradition and gave it a new life. The social composition of its actors has changed radically, including the upper and middle classes, who, since the 1940s, have practically appropriated the celebration, displacing miners and others of lower means.

From this complex cultural landscape, Ximena and Rob decided to focus on making an object to serve a practical purpose. We wanted to acknowledge Carnival’s history and make something for the precarious conditions of the mine.

The concept of ‘light’ was our instigator: dancers refer to faith in the Virgin as a ‘light’ that guides them.

“Dancers look at the Virgin to get strength. On the one hand she has a candle, on the other she has God.” (Priest of Oruro)
Also, a miner’s light is paramount to their safety.
“We have spent unscheduled nights inside the mine’s total darkness.”
(Hector, professional miner)
A guiding light became a miner’s light.




Photo by Nick Ballon

Complex Cultural Issue on a Utilitarian Level

Most silver seams require underground mining. The mine inside San José mountain (Oruro) comprises old pillars and structures, creating passages. The only source of light, the primary source of work and safety, is an attachment on miners’ helmets. The technology available at the Cooperativa Multiactiva Corazón de Jesús was neither long-lasting nor reliable.

Miners descend on a lift which has a tendency to break down and frequently have to spend up to 24 hours underground in a dangerous environment, where dynamite is often used.
As a response to this context, Ximena and Rob developed two proposals for the polar opposites. The first proposal is for Bolivian silver miners, who rely on illumination for work, life and health. The mine provides financial support for the community so efficiency, safety, independence of tools and refurbishment are paramount. Conversations with Cooperativa Multiactiva Corazón de Jesús directed the detailing and function of the object. There are three important design constraints: it must operate in total darkness, be inexpensive to make and repair and give long-lasting illumination.

An illuminating object is conventionally developed to be turned on in an isolated dark environment. User considerations dictate this to be reversed; during any failure or miscomprehension, the object should remain on, illuminating this environment. The mechanical functions are enlarged for gloved workers; an internal switch also allows illuminated battery replacement. The product has been considered to allow self-repair and the notion of remote on-site manufacture has informed the detail, aesthetic and components.

The second proposal is aimed at mass production, the idea of a torch that, when disturbed, will automatically turn on, illuminating the immediate area. Taking the miners’ concept and re-appropriating it for the everyday. The language of the objects has addressed basic need with sensibilities toward orientation, functionality, product language and tactile detail. The representation of the objects reflects details that users tend to take for granted … objects that function, even in failure.

While we have both previously conducted research that feeds into this current project, we have focused here on ethnographic data collected by Cathrine when she worked with British gardeners. This research sought to contextualise British debates over genetically modified food by asking about grounded knowledge: how do people with everyday knowledge about plants and about growing food make sense of genetic modification?

Initial stages of this research led to a host of related questions: How do gardeners conceptualise and understand the plants they work with? How is this expertise built, developed, and shared? How can we explain the ways in which gardening practice insists on reciprocal parallels between human bodies and intentionality and those of plants? While gardeners do not equate humans with plants, plants are incorporated into a worldview that is not straightforwardly dividable into ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Indeed, this research revealed a number of mutually implicating parallels between plants and people in both the English language and in gardening practice and knowledge. The research demonstrated the highly social and autobiographical aspects of gardening and plants, encompassing a writing of social relations, memory, experience, and personal history onto individual plants and gardens. Consequently, the relationships evoked between humans and plants in gardening practice, knowledge and technique surpass a simple ‘human-other’ divide of Western ontology.

Seeding Knowledge

Plant Life is comprised of two related design objects: Let’s Grow a Plant Together and Optostirps. Both projects were created to involve people in the natural world via gardening but in ways new to them. Both projects also draw on vernacular ideas about plants and gardening in British culture that emerged from the research described above, and employ them as foundational principles.

Let’s Grow a Plant Together is a collaborative plant growing and learning experience for beginner gardeners. Gardening is deeply social: gardeners learn through trial and error, but also through sharing success stories and problems with each other. Beginner gardeners however often have difficulty accessing this knowledge. To solve this problem, this project created three teams of beginner gardeners in London and Newcastle and invited them to grow a plant from seed together. Each team has a blog where members post pictures and comment daily on the plant. Team members were provided with each other’s contact details, a pot, soil, seeds, and no other information. The project has brought individual team members and the three teams into a network as they can observe each other’s progress, dilemmas, and solutions.

Optostirps is a project working with established gardeners. It offers the chance to open up discussions on the potential futures of gardening and plants by asking gardeners to imagine what sorts of wishes could be expressed via plants. Optostirps plays on the classification conventions of plants in the Western world whereby all known plants have two Latin names. The radish is, for example, Raphanus sativus. Raphanus is the plant’s genus name and sativus is its species name. Optostirps, or “I wish plant”, is the genus name for this collection of future plants. Each plant also has a corresponding species name that reflects the issues raised by the gardener consulted.