Posthuman landscapes

Abstract

Cultural geography has a long tradition of embracing video as both an observational method and a form of public engagement with research findings. In this article, we describe the making of Posthuman Landscapes, a silent film composed of moving panoramic images depicting the landscapes of three regional Australian towns (Griffith, Port Hedland, and Port Lincoln), along with creative writing that responded to the material qualities of those places in the form of ‘tweets’. Created as part of Boyd’s 3-year project called ‘Engaging Youth in Regional Australia’, the film formed part of a touring exhibition designed to disseminate research findings to communities within these towns. As artist-geographers, we approached the making of the video from a posthuman perspective in which the human and non-human are entangled. Our conceptual guide for working creatively with the landscapes was the posthuman concept of enchantment, which considers how the extraordinary can appear within the everyday to shake and disrupt ordinary affects. The concept of enchantment inspired us to juxtapose the inevitable familiarity and unfamiliarity that the audiences in these three towns would encounter through the film as it traveled from place to place. Here, we discuss how this juxtaposition of the familiar and unfamiliar was layered through both our film-making and writing practices, how this juxtaposition attempted to promote a posthuman orientation to landscape, and how such creative engagements contribute to knowledge translation in cultural geographical research.