alterLife: interBeing
Immersive fabulations of what the forest remembers 

"The forest is queer. Everything in it is very much more alive, more aware of what is going on." J.R.R. Tolkien

We approach the boreal forest (taiga) as both a personal and planetary space, an intimate place of belonging and a biome vital to Earth’s climate and biodiversity. We do not see the forest as a backdrop but as a collaborator: a living network of trees, fungi, lichens, and mosses entangled in cycles of survival and transformation. 

 

Our fieldwork is an interdisciplinary process. It involves gathering bio-data from fungi and vegetation, ambisonic field recordings, 3D scans, digital microscopy, and photogrammetry through time spent in boreal forests throughout Finland and Eastern Canada. We use custom biodata boards to capture microfluctuations in conductivity, which we then sonify and visualize, revealing the forest’s hidden activity.

 

Alongside our field work, we will cultivate a form of “critical fabulation,” weaving a speculative science fiction narrative that refracts contemporary ecological crises through more-than-human perspectives, inspired by Donna Haraway’s call to “make kin” with the multispecies muddle and Michelle Murphy’s concept of alterlife. Offering an anti-anthropocentric view, a more-than-human entanglement. Reviewing how anthropocentrism is not holistic, extractivistic methods for the economy need to change.

 

The result will be an immersive experience unfolding in real time. As microorganisms and audiences interact, the work becomes a collective journey of decomposition and recomposition, a boreal-hybrid organism. 

 

Through open studios, workshops, and deep-time listening walks, we invite participants to attune to forest bio-signals, shift from looking to listening, and imagine futures grounded in the vitality of the taiga.