Programme Description

Desire Lines is a three and a half day annual arts & ecology symposium that includes presentations from speakers such as author and physicist F. David Peat, poet Alice Oswald, Dr. Michael Hrebeniak and artist, photographer and writer Beth Carruthers as well as participant-led sessions and open space discussion.

The event also includes an artistic programme with a live performance of The Lacuna Voyages from Propellor, a company who have developed a strong reputation for creating innovative performances that engage in debates surrounding perception, orientation and ecology, as well as exhibitions and film screenings of Ten Canoes and Werner Herzog’s The Wild Blue Yonder.

Programme Schedule

Platform: Arts & Ecology MA

The MA in Arts & Ecology provides a new and challenging academic vehicle by which emergent arts practices can develop in the context of contemporary approaches to ECOLOGY, INTERDISCIPLINARITY AND PLACE. It is innovative in terms of mode of delivery, its range of subject horizons, its development of fieldwork methodology in the context of contemporary arts practice, and its eventual approach to collective inquiry.

Dartington College of Arts and its sister institution, Schumacher College, have parallel and overlapping interests in these terms, and the course develops the potential for greater engagement, within arts practice, in the highly contested ground of contemporary ecological thinking. This quality of emergence is central to the MA, in terms both of creative practice and of the dynamic change in contemporary approaches to social, urban and environmental ecology, or ecologies of mind.

This year a pioneering group of students have completed the course. In doing so they have not only come to the end of a year of educational challenges and learning experiences, but they have also been intrinsic to the development of this emerging field of study and practice at Dartington.

Desire Lines provides a platform for the MA students’ range of work, including exhibitions, installations, films and live performance with guided orientation to the work on Thursday afternoon and an official opening event on Friday evening from 5pm-6.30pm.

Keynote: F. David Peat

"One of the liveliest, most wide-ranging, depth-probing minds I've ever encountered. Peat's thoughts on physics, philosophy and the arts, put forward in a genial, gracious writing style read like a can't-put-down mystery novel” Joseph Eger, Conductor, Symphony for United Nations and author of Einstein's Violin: A Conductor's Notes on Music, Physics and Social Change

Author and physicist David Peat has had a long and varied career as a researcher, academic, writer, consultant and speaker. Born in Liverpool in 1938, he has held posts at the National Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Institute of Physics, the World Academy of Art and Science and as a consultant at the Fetzer Institute and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. He is the author of Seven Life Lessons of Chaos and Science, Order and Creativity, as well as literally hundreds of other publications including essays, research papers, short stories, novels and plays.

Film: Wild Blue Yonder

Director: Werner Herzog, Cast: Brad Dourif, France /Germany 2005 / Colour / 1hr 17m

Please note this is not a public screening therefore only Desire Lines delegates have access to the film at this time (9am). Public screenings can be attended on Thursday 20th September 8pm or Friday 21st September 5pm

A lyrical, haunting and often amusing trip through outer and inner space, with Herzog assembling found footage, subverting previously unseen NASA footage and recontextualising beautiful underwater photography from Antarctic divers to tell the twin stories of alien migration from the Andromeda system to Earth and humanity’s own attempt to find a hospitable alternative home. Herzog gives this far-out fantasy a Grizzly Man documentary feel – having it narrated on-screen by a wild-eyed Brad Dourif – making the idea of worlds beyond our own feel tantalisingly tangible. It is also mesmerisingly accentuated by a soundtrack of chanting and cello.

Presentation: Michael Hrebeniak – Ecopoesis

This talk explores the possibility of the language act as it pulls away from Plato’s Theory of Forms and its contemporary pathologies (i.e. the discourse of managerialism), and pushes for replacement openings for biological-intellective energies: the beginnings of a new relation with nature.

Beyond the appreciative, descriptive quality of nature writing, an ontological exploration of relationships between language and experience is as vital as any claim for epistemological ‘truth’ in developing the cognitive foundations for our understanding of the biosphere. This is implicitly recognised in Heidegger’s term ‘dwelling,’ and his association of ecology with etymology in that search for a model of non-destructive ‘being’ on earth through poetry. Whitehead's philosophy of organism and its implication that person and environment are continuous, further suggests that if every thing has an aesthetic dimension, then so does every experience of every thing. An aesthetic response is then already a material engagement and is common to all sensory processing. And yet the fundamental question of language and form through which humans shape the world, remains commonly ignored in how we interpret such emergencies as climate change, species loss and habitat destruction.

So here’s the field: an exploration of language forms that enact in their own realms the psychological and physiological forces that structure the natural world, and thereby afford the study of ourselves inside the whole environment. Or the creative act that, in poet Michael McClure’s words, allows us ‘to move in it and step outside of the disaster that we have wreaked upon the environment and upon our phylogenetic selves.’

BIO: Michael Hrebeniak is Lecturer in English at Magdalene College, University of Cambridge. His first book, Action Writing: Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form, was published in 2006 by Southern Illinois University Press, and he co-organised the Passionate Natures: Ecology and the Imagination Conference in 2007 on behalf of the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences & Humanities. He has produced educational arts documentaries for Channel 4 TV, and was formerly Visiting Fellow at The Praxis Centre at Cranfield School of Management, where he developed programmes in creativity and sustainability. He was also Lecturer in Humanities at the Royal Academy of Music for nine years. His journalism has appeared in the Guardian, the Independent, Jazz – The Magazine, and on BBC Radio 3, and he is Editor of the journal, Radical Poetics. He is currently working on two new books: Stirbitch, a mythographic novel about the medieval Stourbridge Fair, and a critical text about the green continuum in 20th Century American writing.

There’s no place like home by MARY LOVEDAY-EDWARDS

There may be singing.
There may be red shoes.
There may be trouble ahead.
But there's no place like home.

A show with chocolate and penguins.

Mary Loveday Edwards is a writer, performer and researcher working in experimental theatre and live art. She makes work as a solo artist and collaborator and questions boundaries, binaries, connections and differences in work which seeks to nurture and to unsettle. In the past Mary has worked with tea trolleys and six foot ducks, with exploding pillows and fish tanks, with grubby angels and piles of shoes. She likes to feed people.

Presentation: Alyson Hallett - The Migration Habits of Stones

For the past six years I have been working upon a project that explores the migration habits of stones. Inspired by a dream and an erratic that I encountered on the slopes of the mountain Cader Idris, I have written poems and created public works of art relating to the movement of a material that is usually considered to be fixed and solid.

I am intrigued by the ways in which stones experience movement, the slowness of their stride, the inaudible sounds that they are perhaps making. In their various migrations – whether it is as ballast in an empty ship or a pebble picked up by someone on a beach – stones are not inhibited by boundaries and border control. This freedom articulates an intelligence of mobility that is at once startling and reassuring.

My work with stones is a not only a way of examining the natural world but also a means of looking tangentially at the human experience of migration. Nearly everyone I meet and speak with has a story to tell about a stone that they have picked up or have been given at some point in their lives. Why are stones so significant and what are we able to learn from them and the way in which they move?

In this paper I will look at the particular challenges of using poetry to explore these issues and the way in which imagination allows us access to a deeper understanding of the dynamic space so easily occupied by nature. As the poet Jack Gilbert writes,

“..Poetry fishes us to find a world part by part, as the photograph interrupts the flux to give us time to see each thing separate and enough.”

Imagination invites us to relinquish our hold on what we know and dive into that pocket of time that is timeless. This is where language comes to life, where the engine of words and the motivating force of nature can work upon us. It is, for the most part, a journey without a map, one that requires us to wholly engage with the mystery of movement and to observe the nature of things as they are.

In his famous testament, Chief Seattle stated that “the earth does not belong to people, people belong to the earth”. This upside-downing of dominant thinking invites us to reconceive the natural world and the ways in which we relate to it. In this paper I will explore the migration habits of stones and the naturally inspired relationship between language and the environment.

BIO: For the past three years I have been writer in residence at The Small School in Hartland. During this time I have also taught poetry with the Arvon Foundation and been involved with several public art projects. My collection of poems, The Stone Library, is due out with Peterloo Poets at the end of July, and my website www.thestonelibrary.com offers a more comprehensive insight into my research and work.

I am currently studying for a practice-based PhD at St. Mary’s College, London, with a primary focus on poetry and the environment. Since completing an M.A. in Creative Writing in the early nineties I have undertaken various writer-in-residence posts including one at the University of the West of England and one for South West Arts during the Year of the Artist. I have published a book of short stories and written drama for Radio 4 and have a poem carved into Milsom Street pavement in Bath.

I have recently completed a novel, Lines of Desire, which my agent is now seeking to place with a publisher. Previous conference papers include The Immeasurable House of Being, an exploration of writing and imagination, Crossing The Velvet Bridge, an investigation into running writing workshops in community settings and Legacy, a paper looking at the complexities of private and public practice for a poet.

My practice as a poet and novelist is always informed by the geography of where I am living. At present I am in North Devon, but I have also lived in the Inner Hebrides, Glasgow, Bristol, Paris – a nomadic writer whose roots on the Somerset Levels are interwoven with the various other landscapes where I make my home.

Performance: Propeller – The Lacuna Voyages

Propeller are delighted to premiere our new show at Desire Lines 2007, The Lacuna Voyages

Join us on a journey through the stories we’ve forgotten.

The Lacuna Voyages is a performance dedicated to the landscape; to the high seas, to the snow-peaked mountains, to the icy tundras, to the desert sands and to the forest floors. To the world just outside these doors. This is two performers telling you true stories that’ll lead you home and stay with you. This is our homage to the life all around us; the swimming folk, the tree swingers, the flappy people and the hairy guys.

Propeller have developed a strong reputation for creating innovative performances, workshops and lectures that engage in debates surrounding perception, orientation and ecology. Out collaborative ethos is essential in allowing us to experiment, to discover, and to further our practical research into performance. Our continuing collaboration with Desire Lines enables our work to interact with those that are shaping the field of arts and ecology.

Propeller are Emma Bush, Neil Callaghan, Augusto Corrieri, Pete Harrison and Tim Vize-Martin.

Presentation: Beth Carruthers - Dreaming Human, Being Animal

“One of the most often cited differences between the animal and the human is language. There are many interpretations of what constitutes language, and I am interested in the sensory and affective elements of language, including movement and gesture”

Beth will present on Dreaming Human, Being Animal, an examination of the argument of spoken language as proof of humans' "otherness", an exploratory voyage into the territory of embodied and un-worded language and of language as more-than-human, complex, diverse and as interconnected as an ecosystem community.

BIO: Beth Carruthers is a philosopher, artist and writer whose work for more than 20 years has explored nature/culture relations. Current research includes the cultural construction of the human as "Other" - other than animal, other than nature.

Her visual artworks have been exhibited internationally and she is the author of a major research report - commissioned by UNESCO, the Canada Council for the Arts and the RSA - on EcoART collaborative practices. As Founding Co-Director of the SongBird project and the Society for Arts & Ecology in Practice (1997 through 2002), she co-developed one of the first comprehensive science/arts collaborative organisations in Canada, with a focus on arts and sustainability in urban communities. A graduate of the Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design, Beth also holds an MA in Values and Environment from the Institute for Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy at Lancaster University in the UK.

Beth's experience as a teacher, visiting lecturer and artist includes presentations on ecophenomenology, environmental ethics and embodied aesthetics in contemporary EcoART practices. She works as a consultant, and collaborates with scientists, architects and environmental and social issues groups.

Presentation: Tracey Warr - Measuring Beauty

Western culture and language are based on taxonomy – definition, separation, labelling and hierarchical categories. This allows us to manipulate concepts and things in language and to engage in complex communication. It is necessary and it is reductive. Because we are a logocentric culture we forget that our linguistic labels are fictional approximations and not the equivalences of things and experiences. Our definitions are often dependent on a strategy of polarisation – defining something by what it is not. Spurious oppositional and fixed categories such as body/mind, body/world, social/metaphysical, country/city, distort our understanding of ourselves and our world.

I will outline alternative and liberating re-deployments of language proposed by James Joyce, Georges Bataille and Mary Douglas. I will discuss meteorology – the language of the study of weather, with reference to philosopher, Elaine Scarry’s defence of beauty and her argument that beauty and social justice are not opposites but mutually dependent.

BIO: Tracey Warr is an art writer based in Devon. The central focus of her work is the embodied consciousness immersed in and dynamically co-creative with its environment. She is particularly interested in the interface between contemporary art and philosophy. She is the editor of The Artist’s Body (Phaidon, 2000) and has written on a wide range of international artists with publications including NVA, Half-Life (NVA, 2007), Panic Attack!: Art in the Punk Years (Barbican, 2007), Marcus Coates, The Dawn Chorus (Picture This DVD Publications, 2007), London Fieldworks, Little Earth (London Fieldworks 2005), Elemental Insights (Met Office, 2004), Art, Lies & Videotape (Tate, 2004), London Fieldworks, Syzygy/Polaria (Black Dog, 2002) and Heather Ackroyd & Dan Harvey, Afterlife (Beaconsfield/Arts Admin, 2002).

Presentation: Tim Stephens: Sensory Illiteracy – submitted paper

This paper follows from the simple notion that there is a political bias in social relations in favour of those from a literate culture with a cultured use of language. The implications of this culture bias or inequity is then drawn out using examples from the two primary areas of my practitioner expertise, working in the adult literacy field and working with non-verbal students (with disabilities). The conclusion that I come to is that there is, not only a marginalisation of the experiences (and contributions) of those with different skill modalities but furthermore, a concomitant impoverishment of mainstream culture, and majority embodied experience, that neglects the widest range of sensory perception.

The first part of this presentation is a more or less straightforward account of the emergence of literacy and its political authority, from the Egyptian privileged to the early scribes and orthodox Christian religious uses of language.

However, it becomes increasingly problematic to separate the skills teaching agenda from the supposed liberal values of an education of the person. Having worked with many adult literacy students and studied the theorising of this ‘problem’-since the rise of this ‘Basic Skills’ movement in the seventies and eighties- it has become clear that Dyslexia is used to account for the majority of profound difficulties that people experience. Looking at the theoretical underpinning of this concept of ‘dyslexia’, provides an insight into a literary and literal demarcation of certain skills as less valued and valuable in western societies. Multi-sensory teaching methods will be highlighted here as part of the clue to the true nature of this ‘phantom syndrome’.

Similarly, those that use non-verbal communication methods will be referred to next as further examples demonstrating the inherent tensions and paradoxes of a solely literary omniscience. My work with those with profound learning difficulties, autism, and the Deaf and some research in these fields provides evidential material of a rich counter-culture with much to contribute to human life and understanding.

Lastly, using examples from the arts to illustrate my argument, I will propose that realising an enlivening, awakening embodied experience and renewed theoretical impetus is possible through paying attention to those sensory modalities that are segregated and/or marginalised from our own embodied experience. Those sense mechanisms exactly reflected in the conditions which the dominant culture has historically ‘problematised’ and stigmatised through inadequate theory.

BIO: I am an experienced artist with many years’ experience of designing and delivering multi-media art projects. I am also a specialist teacher, trainer and education consultant with 20 years experience working with a range of people with disabilities across education sectors. Now working as an advisor in arts-education for the public and private sectors I have a particular interest in sound sculpture and sensory installations. Currently digital media artist for the National Trust-Bateman’s and Heathfield College creative partnership, Disability Advisor to an architecture practice building a special school and Arts Advisor/Artist to an acoustic architecture practice on a sound sculpture project. I also teach arts and humanities undergraduates with ‘Specific Learning Difficulties’ at Brighton and Sussex Universities.

Presentation: Ansuman Biswas

Ansuman will be informally responding to the questions disseminated in association with the conference and talking about his new work.

BIO: Ansuman Biswas (born 1965, Calcutta, India) lives in London. He practice is informed by a number of disciplines including music, dance, theatre, visual art and writing. He has worked with MTV, National Theatre, Royal Opera House and the National Institute of Medical Research among many others and, as a percussionist, with Courtney Pine, The Specials, Asian Dub Foundation, Talvin Singh, Nitin Sawhney, Björk, Oasis, and The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. His solo performances have been presented at the Edinburgh Festival, ICA, National Review of Live Art and the Sonic Arts Network. He has exhibited work at Tate Modern, The South London Gallery, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Yerba Buena Centre, San Francisco, and even in zero gravity. He main interest is in hybridity and interdisciplinarity and especially in the fertile borderland between ancient Indian philosophy and modern Western science.

Film: Ten Canoes

Director: Rolf de Heer, Peter Djigirr. Cast: Jamie Gulpilil, Crusoe Kurddal. Australia 2006 / Colour, B&W / 1hr 30m

‘A story like you’ve never heard before’, claims the offscreen narrator, and this deeply enjoyable fable fully delivers on his promise. Ten Canoes was developed in collaboration with the indigenous community of Ramingining, and evolved into a stylishly told ancient tale, with a refreshingly modern feel.

Presentation: John Wynne - Sound Art & Language Ecology in the McWorld

This presentation will primarily look at my work with recordings made in the Kalahari Desert: I worked with a linguist from the University of Botswana to record speakers of 5 different Khoisan ‘click languages’, and the resulting materials were used for an award-winning composed documentary for BBC Radio 3 and for a photographic sound installation which was exhibited in Botswana, Namibia and London. As well as the issue of language endangerment, I will address some of the difficulties raised by cross-cultural work and the potential of sound art to encourage greater awareness of the value of the human/cultural elements of the acoustic environment.

"Through his research and practise in Botswana, ...Wynne constructs an experience that flickers on the boundaries between speech and sound, and the various levels of meaning that can be derived from human communications. Simultaneously, the work alerts the perceiver to the beauty of language and its potential as a plastic medium, to specifics and generalities, to political and economic realities, and to the troubled, yet fruitful connections that can be nurtured in spite of an intimidating geographical, linguistic, cultural, and technological divide." David Toop

BIO: John Wynne has a PhD in sound art from Goldsmiths College, University of London. He was recently artist-in-residence for one year at Harefield Hospital, one of the world’s leading heart and lung transplant centres, a project with outcomes including a commissioned radio piece, a surround sound video shown at Tate Britain and a gallery installation which will show in 2008. His work with endangered click-languages in the Kalahari Desert in Botswana resulted in an award-winning ‘composed documentary’ for BBC Radio 3 as well as a photographic sound installation which showed in Botswana, Namibia and London. Works based on his recordings in Kenya have been heard in concert halls and on the radio worldwide.

Wynne has created large-scale multi-speaker installations in public squares in Copenhagen and Toronto using auditory warnings of his own design: the first was banned by the City Council of Copenhagen for allegedly “frightening and confusing the public” and the latter described as “an ambient, ghost-like presence”. He has created installations from discarded but working hi-fi speakers in Berlin (Fallender ton für 207 lautsprecher boxen) and Hull (230 Unwanted Speakers): according to one writer, the Berlin piece “sounded like Heaven …and Hell”.

In addition to numerous other installations and compositions, John has created soundtracks for films selected for the London Film Festival, the BBC Short Film Festival, the Whitechapel Open, the European Media Art Festival and the Rotterdam International Film Festival.

Reading: Alice Oswald

Alice will read selected excerpts from her works.

BIO: Alice trained as a classicist and was the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award in 1994. Her first collection of poetry, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), includes poems reflecting her love of gardening and the entertaining long poem, 'The Men of Gotham'. This collection won a Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) in 1996, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1997.

Her second collection is Dart (2002), a long work that combines verse and prose, and tells the story of the River Dart in Devon. To write this poem, she spent three years collecting information about the river and talking to people who use the river in their daily lives. The result is a highly original dream-like poem told from a variety of perspectives. Jeanette Winterson called it a '… moving, changing poem, as fast-flowing as the river and as deep … a celebration of difference' (The Times, 27 July 2002). Dart won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002.

In 2004, Alice Oswald was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's 'Next Generation' poets. Her latest collection, Woods etc., was published in 2005, and was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the T. S. Eliot Prize.

“One of the most unusual new poets of recent years, both of her collections being prizewinners, and among her influential admirers are Michael Longley and Carol Ann Dufiy” Dr Jules Smith, 2003

Performance: Leonard – Grass

The first show ever totally devoted to grass, because if there is one thing in life that would be good to get to know a little more before we die, it’s grass.

The show takes on the form of a gig. It is comprised of songs that are sometimes obviously like songs and other times more like something else. Tonight the three people on stage in front of you are mediums for a thousand years of writing about grass and three days of sitting outside on Wimbledon common trying to understand it. We have listened to what it has to say. For two years in Copenhagen, Brighton and Rome we have been researching grass. Tonight, journalists, script writer’s, poets, farmers, pole vaulters, historians, someone’s grandparents, scientists, the homeless, the kite flyers and dogs all meet through the bodies and voices of these women. Tonight they are your guides. They are equally right and wrong, they tell the truth and they lie and they cheat and you know it.

We listen to wherever the gig is shown. We go out and hunt and gather stories from the site and stir them back into the show. This takes time. By making workshops and shows we get to know a place a bit more and hope that the people who join in do too.

"beautiful and surreal" Ronan McNern Producer | "The grass is singing" Doris Lessing | "I can hear the grass grow" The Move

BIO: Bryony Henderson, Inge Agnete Tarpgaard and Katharina Trabert are live performance and devised theatre practitioners who met on the Masters programme at Dartington College of Arts. Bryony is a theatre director and live art practitioner who regularly performs in and facilitates events in the U.K and in Europe. Her work is characterised by a close attention to relationships between performer and audience and by extensive interdisciplinary collaborations. Inge Agnete works as a performance dramaturg and arts manager. She is currently working with a number of Copenhagen-based arts organisations. Katharina has a background as a devised theatre performer and maker. She has worked with several European theatre companies and now works between the U.K and Italy as curator and artistic director for an Italian art centre. Katharina works with performance as a means of facilitating intercultural exchanges.

In the work that we do together as leonard, we are exploring the use of performance to make environmental issues less abstract, less daunting and more human. We do this by mixing science and politics together with popular culture and local places and events in a theatrical performance. This makes for a performance event that has a warm intimacy to it, that involves the community participating in the event, and that engages meaningfully with issues that are of the utmost importance to us and to our planet. “

Previous Years

Click here to see the Desire Lines 2006 programme schedule.

Click here to view a list of confirmed speakers for 2006.

Read feedback from presenters and participants - Desire Lines, September 2005