Kykrdale_Animate Valley_Project Overview

ELFED ALEXANDER SAMUEL _ADS4

_ANIMATE VALLEY

y K krDale

_PROJECT OVERVIEW

An animated work of climate fiction, Kykrdale explores the use of digital ecosystem modelling as a platform to project restorative modes of posthuman architecture, cultivating new ways of seeing, engaging and understanding natural systems.

ELFED SAMUEL _ADS4

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Saga_CONTEXT

In the shadow of a rapidly degrading biosphere, restructuring our relationship to the natural world, in recognition of our ignorance to its systems of agency, temporal rhythms and the evolutionary lineage we share within it, is critical.

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Saga_CONTEXT

The division of subject and object is becoming increasingly blurred, with our tools and surroundings taking on greater digital and mechanical animacy every day. This places the study of system and agent behaviour at the heart of how we interact with the world.

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Anthropomorphism is a symptom of our cognitive systems of physical empathy that seek to understand aspects of the world as either physical (object) or social (subject), neurologically processing them through “two differentiated and extended systems that are specialized in each of these domains...mutually suppressed when either of them is active” - ‘The Mind behind Anthropomorphic Thinking’, p.169 .

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Animating the trophic actions of animals now absent from UK ecosystems, such as the rumination of the wild boar; provides a point of recognition and study into how we can foster similar actions through designed interventions in the landscape.

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“By rooting and grubbing in the forest floor, by creating little ponds and miniature wetlands in their wallows, boar create habitats for a host of different plants and animals, a shifting mosaic of tiny ecological niches, opening and closing as the sounders pass through.”1

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Monbiot, George, Feral (London, UK: Penguin Books, 2013), p. 94

Saga_CONTEXT

The recognition that anthropomorphism and physical empathy are triggered predominantly by movement and animation highlights their potential to elicit greater understanding of non-human agents such as plants and machines that operate on timescales divergent from those we recognise as animate.

ELFED SAMUEL _ADS4

_ANIMATE VALLEY

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“When dealing with subjects, the best predictive strategy is to use the ‘intentional stance’ that is implemented by a host of cognitive mechanisms subsumed by the socalled social network. This might explain why the spontaneous attribution of mind to nonhuman animals is literally unavoidable.”2 2

Urquiza-Haas, et al., ‘The Mind behind Anthropomorphic Thinking’, p. 173

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Saga_CONTEXT

Enhancing the vitality of our natural world presents not only a robust method of carbon capture, but also provides the opportunity for an expanded field of applied ecological research; studying, mapping and projecting the restorative processes we still know very little about as a holistic system.

ELFED SAMUEL _ADS4

“Elephants’ habit of snapping or uprooting trees could explain why species such as oak, ash, beech, lime, sycamore, field maple, sweet chestnut, hazel, alder and willow can regrow from the point at which the stem is broken…Trees that can survive the attention of elephants often come to dominate the places in which the animals live: the ability to coppice confers powerful selective advantages.”3 Monbiot, George, Feral (London, UK: Penguin Books, 2013), p. 91

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Saga_CONTEXT 01_02_

Animating, temporally overlapping and collapsing the actions of ecosystem agents provides an alternative method of tracing their movements and impacts over time.

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Saga_CONTEXT

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This deepened engagement challenges our societal position to conservation, agricultural practice and the insular culture present in landscapes, which have been rendered completely anthropogenic, and near lifeless.

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Saga_CONTEXT

Once a thriving 10,000 year wildwood of Oak, Birch, Elm and Alder; the Yorkshire Dales have been bereft of their ecological vitality by many millennia of anthropogenic damage; frozen in their pastoral guise by a legacy of intensive grazing, enclosure’s cultural erasures, and the picturesque tendencies at the heart of landscape conservation, national park status and mass tourism.

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Saga_CONTEXT

Swaledale, an isolated valley on the Park’s northern edge, provides a case study, at a moment of reflection on this picturesque, homogenous, frozen landscape.

ELFED SAMUEL _ADS4

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ELFED SAMUEL _ADS4

sættbǫð_VILLAGE FETE

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In recognition of the landscape’s dramatic potential for cultural and ecological upheaval; the Muker village fete becomes a forum for the discussion, practice and implementation of restorative ecological ideas, debating the future of dale and heath, scree and scar, such that a growing vitality of landscape, is matched by the emergence of a regenerative Dales culture.

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sættbǫð_VILLAGE FETE

The 60th anniversary of the Fete takes place beneath a diverse floral canopy of Swaledale wildflowers, including eyebrights, hedgenettles and woodcranes bills; harvested from the balks and ruderal edges of the low plains of the dale, the perennial cycles of different species providing variation in the canopy’s hue each year.

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sættbǫð_VILLAGE FETE

The familiar tropes of agricultural fairs that sought to showcase aspects of ecology, bested and manipulated by man are absent from this gathering. Shoebox garden classes showcase actions that nurture biodiverse ecosystems, the reintroduction of apex predators being one such example.

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ELFED SAMUEL _ADS4

sættbǫð_VILLAGE FETE

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The second, more-permanent areas of the fete’s structure lie within the timbrel vaulted cairns; formed from the long-defunct drystone walls that once spread through the area. The cairns act as a semi-conditioned exhibition and gathering space during the fete.

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sættbǫð_VILLAGE FETE

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sættbǫð_VILLAGE FETE

Artefacts of a culture celebrating regenerative growth over resource extraction are reflected in the fete’s baking and mycelial classes.

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sættbǫð_VILLAGE FETE

The interior of the fete’s cairns offer an exhibition of sculptures that seek to depict the missing actions of keystone species and megafauna long hunted to extinction in the UK; wild boar, straight tusked elephant and goshawks pictured.

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KykrDale_ANIMATE VALLEY

Recognising the degrading health of their Dale’s ecosystem and their declining viability as a productive rural community, the people of Muker foster a working group of farmers, ecologists and gardeners seeking to implement emerging agroecological methods, reconciling the importance of greater biodiversity levels with the need for a more robust, regenerative food supply, as well as developing new ways of valuing, recognising and engaging with the surrounding ecosystem.

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A derelict skelbuse, north of the village is taken as their site of collusion, providing the origin from which they plan their interventions in the landscape.

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KykrDale_ANIMATE VALLEY

Under the staunch landscape conservation of the National Park Authority, the group begin confined to speculating through a new method of digital ecosystem modelling, a platform to test, analyse and project the outcomes of different cultivation practices.

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_ANIMATEVALLEY _ANIMATE VALLEY

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This ecosystem twin, provides an interface allowing local community members to understand, evaluate and postulate alternate futures for their Dale.

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KykrDale_ANIMATE VALLEY

The digital realm is known locally as Kykrdale, a speculative mirror for the many potential futures of the surrounding landscape.

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skǣrvegur_SHORTCUT SPACE

The group’s digital ecosystem platform allows the exploration of many potential cultivation futures; between these, lucid conditions of space emerge as shortcuts between each outcome, thresholds to each biome leaving traces within this interstitial territory.

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KykrDale_ANIMATE VALLEY

The dale is conceived through this mirror as a voxel based territory, understood not through furlongs and hectares but through kykrbits, a unit not of area but of volume across time, recognising the ever-shifting nature of complex ecosystems.

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KykrDale_ANIMATE VALLEY

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Kykrdale’s speculative landscape allows the study, analysis and emulation of diverse, productive ecosystems; recognising the interdependency of the natural agents within them, those fixing nitrogen into the soil, accumulating and sharing deep-rooted nutrients, providing specialist nectaries, and shelter, shade and danger to other agents.

_Comparing farming practices for compound biodiversity. _Diagram from ‘Redefining the field to mobilize three-dimensional diversity and ecosystem services on the arable farm’

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Studies following the paradigm of pixel farming, which fosters mutually beneficial relationships between different plants by varying their adjaceny and resolution neighbours, their density and the timelines of cultivation provide an early mode of thinking on how to regeneratively cultivate areas of landscape.

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KykrDale_ANIMATE VALLEY

The concealed nature of many of the processes essential to ecosystem health are revealed through vignettes highlighting different agents’ roles and actions; such that the conditions within which these processes thrive can be replicated and enriched through human action.

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Highlighting the unseen actions of polycultural agents, pink dynamic accumulators and blue nitrogen fixers.

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Highlighting the divergence of specialist and generalist nectaries, directly impacting the capacity for pollinator diversity and effectiveness.

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KykrDale_ANIMATE VALLEY

Recognising trophic processes and the gaps within them, be that from extinct predators, a lack of mature habitat or absent microclimatic conditions provides a motive and rationale for human intervention in the ecosystem, the making of allogenic structures providing a shift in the position of the human agents from heuristic solutioneers to open-ended stewards, favouring overall health over a single optimised output.

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Myrksteikja_OVERSTORY MAST

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Emboldened by the Environment Act’s mandate for net biodiversity gains, the working group develop their first 3 structures of allogenic emulation. The overstory mast reflects the observation of the role mature trees play in the provision of shade and shelter from harsh wind and rain to smaller fruitbearing trees, which develop faster, in time nurturing further saplings of their understorey.

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Myrksteikja_OVERSTORY MAST

In the absence of the mature woodland necessary to culture this productive cycle, the masts play a surrogate role, tempering microclimatic conditions through the height, spread and pitch of their leaves.

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Myrksteikja_OVERSTORY MAST

As the microclimatic conditions provided by the masts are restored through a mature, fruit-bearing canopy, the masts can then be migrated to their next potential site.

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DraumrGarðr_SERVER GARDEN

Reconciling the contradiction of the ecosystem’s digital abstraction, a highly energy-intensive process, in order to understand and enhance its vitality becomes the focus of the group’s second intervention; creating a space to host their necessary digital infrastructure whilst leveraging the ambient heat of the Kykrdale servers to achieve a productive microclimate.

This allows a mix of less-hardy varieties of herbaceous perennials to thrive, both on the ground around the structure and within the building’s passive heat sink pool, which supports varieties of edible lilies and water spinach.

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DraumrGarðr_SERVER GARDEN

The servers’ presence forms a new sheltered gathering space for both human and non-human occupants, a structure hosting and hosted by the landscape.

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DraumrGarðr_SERVER GARDEN

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Ætabrygg_ALLOGENIC BRIDGE

The group’s third intervention capitalises on the river Swale’s capacity to foster greater areas of wetlands habitat through an allogenic bridge, emulating the effects of a beaver’s dam.

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Ætabrygg_ALLOGENIC BRIDGE

The bridge’s sinuous path maximises the structure’s surface area in plan, in the relief of its walls and in the undulating topography of the surrounding landscape, sheltering new ponds, inlets and islands; all serving to enhance the diversity of microclimates around the structure.

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Ætabrygg_ALLOGENIC BRIDGE

The structures’s ponds support a breadth of edible aquacultural plants such as bulrushes, cresses, saxifrage and sweetgrass.

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Ætabrygg_ALLOGENIC BRIDGE

The bridge does not serve as a new crossing for humans but offers sheltered spaces around and beneath it as well as an emerging circular raised walkway, permitting new views to the surrounding wetland habitat.

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Ætabrygg_ALLOGENIC BRIDGE

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KykrDale_ANIMATE VALLEY

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As the interventions of the Kykrdale working group become more established and widely known, their ecological platform begins to transcend its native dale, providing new methods of ecosystemic empathy to areas that suffer most from food insecurity and the absence of greenspace, an open-source platform for ecological enrichment.

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Transient Kykrdale indicators outline the ecosystemic vitality of different modes of cultivation.

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As the community’s rapport with the platform develops, the line between analytical abstractions and realism are increasingly blurred.

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01_Recognising the unseen actions within cultivated territory; the transfer of nutrients, the accumulation of subsoil life, becomes a nocturnal collective activity of the Swaledale community, congregating after dusk within their digital ecosystem to discuss the potentials of their landscape.

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02_Members discard their human modes of being upon entry, adopting parallel identities as agents directly engaged in the natural world.

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